It’s not a loss of identity that so many are struggling against. It’s a doubt in the fundamental explanation and construction of who you are.
“Identity is a relation between our cognitions of a thing, not between things themselves.”
It’s not a loss of identity but a loss of belief in identity as a satisfactory way to view or operate as one’s self. It’s a fundamental disagreement about there being any noteworthy agreement on who or what one is. It’s a rejection of our self being defined by everyone and everything else. It’s the righteous indignation in the face of the shackles that want to “know” us – always and everywhere. A rejection of the definitions foisted upon our self.
It’s a struggle against the nonconsensual participatory construction of our being that starts before we talk and continues after we end. We got no say, never have any say, and get no say in our identity. So we’ll just go with none. I identify my self by myself and reject definition which is outside of me. To relinquish my power over my self-definition is to relinquish my power entirely.
It probably isn’t too difficult to see how this position could be used for ill by grifters, abusers, bad actors, self-proclaimed “stoics”, and other various armchair iNtElLeCtUal dudebros.
The rejection of identity is not inherently liberatory. It is not an ideology, a movement, or a pathology. Perhaps it is simply human. A universal human experience, an emotion, that manifests in a variety of ways – like any other emotion in us. Which is why the manifestation of this rejection of identity simultaneously includes things like the dissolution of gender and the increasing formlessness of modern bigotry. An acceptance and rejection of the death of identity.
Domination seeks obscurity within and without its self – in its nature and its actions. Domination inherently rejects identity as a subjugation of its self to the reality of others. Domination takes a “for thee not for me” approach to identity (hence the bemoaning of things like “identity politics” while also heavily leaning on exactly that).
Freedom seeks neither obscurity nor identity, at least not specifically. Freedom just seeks. Freedom is at a disadvantage against domination since it inherently avoids concerning itself with being “against” anything.
But in practice freedom struggles, domination doesn’t. Perhaps this is because domination naturally telegraphs its methods from an act to an ideology. We can easily conceive of how a domineering parent can translate his methods and rules to a polity – how an abusive asshole can be a “strong leader”. Patriarchy makes domination easy because domination is patriarchy. Whereas creating an ideology of freedom from the practice of it is one of the most argued topics by groups of people who seemingly all want the same thing.
Modern struggles for domination are acknowledging the dying of identity. And they are acknowledging the accompanying confusion and frustration felt by many. They are peddling the nonsensical, but apparently satisfying, lie that identity is good on you, evil on others, but regardless is moral – not neutral.
The lie isn’t in the content of the message as much as it is in the implication that identity needs to exist for the sake of morality, therefore it needs to exist at all. A type of sleight-of-hand, self-referential gaslighting that could be mistaken for cleverness if not for its malicious laziness.
“Identity? What identity? We’re just people. We reject labels thank you very much. The only ‘identity’ that exists are the discordant malicious identities we fabricate for the sake of cultivating and promoting confusion, fear, and ultimately, antagonism.”
It’s difficult for modern struggles for freedom to incorporate the collective rejection of identity when they have to constantly fight against the content of domination’s lie about identity rather than the fundamental assumptions of the lie itself.
This is a problem that is easy to solve on the small-scale and hard to solve in a self-perpetuating ideological way. It requires nuance which is the enemy of domination and communication. How do you reject the existence of borders while simultaneously championing dignity and basic rights for those that crossed your country’s borders? Is their pain real if that which inflicted the pain isn’t? It’s not complicated, at least not on the personal level. You aid real people while you advocate for positions that delegitimize that which caused their suffering.
The suffering that arbitrary power inflicts is not arbitrary itself. Words aren’t real, they can’t hurt me, until they do and then they are. That realization is seen as terrifying because it can mean, “That which I have believed in and trusted only exists because its identity is formed from the suffering of others.”
So people reject suffering that does not abide by identity. They treat suffering as something that requires cognitive consensus to even exist rather than something that exists and is legitimized simply by one’s experience of it. The requirement for suffering to be objective maligns it as a point of litigation.
The modern struggle for freedom has to argue for the legitimacy of suffering while arguing against the legitimacy of identity while arguing for the maliciously “identified”. Freedom requires the continual affirmation of people’s own realities, people’s individual truths, and all of their collective and combinatorial realities and truths. Whereas domination simply requires the negation of reality and the negation of truth.
I think the answer is counter-intuitive. Small-scale freedom is freedom. The repetition and propagation of small-scale freedom eventually ceases to be small. Freedom can’t rely on the mechanisms of domination. Freedom operates on the level of personal realities whereas domination tries to reject all realities but its own. So shouldn’t struggles for freedom operate on the level of the fathomable too?
I may not require an identity but it is possible that freedom does. The right to both be and not be something probably isn’t a bad way to define freedom.