This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Welcome to a topic that is the root of serious depression for a minority of people, the inspiration of hate and violence for some, a really sore or touchy or confusing subject for many, and a nebulous and frequently changing state for most.

Yep, like I said, I is for Identity.

The concept of identity – or how we are defined as a person – has been part of the human timeline for millennia. But it isn’t until recently that it has taken on a significance that borders on the clinically obsessive. It really didn’t used to be that way – heavy and gooey and taking up way too much mental real estate. In the beginning, it was used to be simple, rooted in basic biological and situational facts. It used to centre on standing in society and for men, the ownership of women, children, animals and things. And for women, identity was exclusively wrapped up in who owned them.

Along with “Why am I here?”, “Who am I?” has likely been asked by people all over the world since humans were capable of complex thought. But possibly, believing that everything in one’s life was fixed and little could be changed, as well as a tendency towards superstitious and magical thinking, the questions didn’t really go anywhere or inspire angst or tumultuous life changes in those to whom the questions presented themselves. I mean, what could they do? Considering complex ideas and behaving outside the norm could be very dangerous and get you ostracized from society or even get you killed.

For most of human existence, identity has only served a few simple, explicit, and practical purposes. Being able to recognize friends or foes and human property (women) through physical or symbolic markers; maintaining a memory or history of one’s tribe; and creating a sense of purpose and belonging as a community have been a few of the more important reasons for establishing formal means of defining identity. I am not going to focus on the historical development of identity here – it is, as usual, a massive topic. Rather, I want to look at the mess that is identity today because it has unfortunately become politicized, and has increased to include constructed affiliations that have been greatly inflated in importance, but that have fuelled all sorts of hate, violence and general unfairness. And the mess I’m talking about is social or personal identity.

It was likely only within the last 100 years that social or personal identity became something that started weighing heavily on people’s minds, taking up precious time and energy. It was probably partially thanks to our comparative economic and lifestyle freedom coupled with the machinations of modern social psychologists in their need to create, I mean study social problems, that really pushed the human brain into overdrive and into a focus on things that are probably so much less important than we think they are. Now, we have what some would sarcastically call ‘First World problems” – a shit ton of psychological and social issues that wouldn’t exist if we were still forced to focus on day-to-day survival. I don’t want to pooh-pooh psychological problems – they are real to those who suffer from them and cause an immense amount of harm both to sufferers and to society in many ways – I’m just saying that these problems have been constructed and don’t actually need to exist.

Biological Essentialism, Relatively Static States, and Social Constructionism

These days, identity can come from a variety of sources, and I think that socially constructed identity is mostly designed to create division and provide a rationale for oppression and male violence. A few aspects of how we are defined are based solely in biology. Sex is one of those identity markers that is irrefutably biological, despite what trans activists have tried to make us believe in the last couple of decades. It puts all humans into two defining categories that haven’t changed over time or across cultures: predators and prey, or simply, males and females. The fact that this doesn’t vary is proof enough that sex is biological. Gender, on the other hand, is one of those factors that is 100% constructed. And confusing sex and gender has been the agenda of post-modernists and trans activists and other misogynists as backlash to feminism. If you can make people believe that women are biologically wired to be subservient and salivate over being raped, you can justify anything men do to them and keep them from achieving any kind of liberation. I do hold an essentialist view, based on copious data, that males are wired for violence. And remember that oppressors call the shots and so it is males, not females, who are allowed to act naturally. But I also believe that males are allowed to hold onto that violence because they socially constructed gender and the various systems that reward men for their violence and punish women for rebelling.

Plenty of other factors in modern conceptions of identity are socially constructed. National borders, the stuff upon which national identity is based and the stuff aspiring dictators and crafty politicians use to fuel war machines and unwarranted xenophobia, is constructed and unnecessary. Religion is completely socially constructed, based on fear and ignorance, the need to control groups of people and to justify the hatred of women. Gender, like I said, is completely constructed and is used to justify the oppression of women. Sexuality is mostly constructed, and the institution or system of heterosexuality was created to oppress women and create armies used to maintain violent male agendas. Race is biological, but a socially constructed element was added to artifically create more differences between racial groups than actually exist and to fuel woman hate and satisfy male war-lust. Culture is socially constructed, by definition, and like religion, has become protected, given undeserved respect and is thus, untouchable, despite the fact that culture is just how the oppression of women manifests in a given time and place.

There are also what I call factually-based or static-state contributors to identity. They are not things we are necessarily born into, and they don’t form the basis of activism or oppression. But they develop as we grow up, don’t change a great deal, and for many, become crucial to our identities. These can be professional identities, hobbies and the like. I can speak for myself when I say that my work is crucial to how I define myself, and how I perform or contribute has great impact on my psychological health and my sense of purpose. I also derive some sense of identity from my great love of bees. These are things that I wasn’t born with, although they may be a result of my personality and thus are a part of me that likely won’t change much over the course of my life.

How Did Social Constructionism Gain So Much Power?

I think social constructionism is a logical outcome of a modern, decadent and frivolous world where the majority of people lack meaningful purpose and are suffering as a result. I’m going to give social psychologists the very slightest of benefits of doubt in that they were probably trying to help people deal with their modern world problems and associated emptiness, but as with everything men do, they ended up creating more problems than they solved. The whole identity crisis problem likely started very small, then snowballed and has finally ended up turning the last few generations into oversensitive, fragile, narcissistic, specialness-seeking, trigger-warning-needing, FOMO-prone, selective social justice warriors. There is a need to feel special and validated like at no time before in history, and the creation of new and more insane identities has become both an obsession and even an occupation for many.

What I can’t figure out is whether all of this is the result of the need to escape or avoid a lot of large and very real crises and inequalities by creating a host of non-problems and oppressions to focus on, or whether having a highly distracted and emotional population is exactly what is needed in our current business and political climate. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I’ll say that there is probably a bit of both elements going on. And then like the proverbial out-of-control snowball rolling down the hill, identity politicking has taken on a life of its own, infiltrating every aspect of our lives, including the political, and feeding itself via the internet.

Identity Becomes Brand

To a certain extent, ‘brand’ has always existed although not in the way that we understand it today. Women have always been owned with no choice about being a thing to be sold, and thus their identities have always been constructed by those who own them. But we’re at a point where it has become an honest to goodness goal for young and amibitious people to deliberately turn who they are – their very identities – into a saleable product or service. And the name of the game is inauthenticity with a slick veneer of hope. With the rise of social media, this has become big business. Personally, I find it strange and repulsive, although because of my interest in propaganda, brainwashing, and ethics, I also find this unfortunate development morbidly fascinating. In the history of business, marketing has never been about truth. I tend to think that if something needs to be marketed, you don’t actually need it, and the purpose of marketing is to convince you that you need the unnecessary. So of course, capitalism, the system of selling for profit, depends heavily on marketing, and is therefore a system built upon lies, and its brothers, dehumanization and inequality. Capitalism’s appeal is in its ability to sell, not just every product you could possible dream of, but also the promises of and hope for wealth, happiness, a better life, social approval and the like. All lies and illusions.

So, as I said, we’re at the point where people are constructing identities and selling them for profit. They have manifested as cult leaders, gurus, and most recently, influencers. It seems that the greater the focus we place on identity, the further away from being real we become. Real people don’t really make for a good ‘package deal’ as their true identities tend to look messy or unmanicured or just plain old boring. People want to buy or buy into identities that look good on the surface, that can cover up both internal and external messiness (aka reality), that will distract from boredom, and that will buy them social credit in an increasingly inauthentic world.

Conclusion

I’m a pretty hard core minimalist in most areas of my life, and my philosophy is that less is more, except perhaps when it comes to learning. Then, I think you can never get enough. But in the topic today, I really think a serious paring down is required to avoid becoming consumed by what you think you’re supposed to be. How do you do this? First, get off the internet! And yes, I see the irony in what I’m saying. Okay, well at least limit your plugged in time. The internet is a mind-fuck if you veer off the path of educational sites and into social media and other time-wasters. Next, focus on learning, and develop your meaningful purpose. I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t go into detail here. These are places to start. Keep it simple and you’ll find less nonsense finding its way into your quest to define yourself.

So, I’ll end with this question: who are you?

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