An identity seems a precarious thing. If you don’t have one, you’re at the will of every brush of outside power. The lemming ready and willing to jump off the cliff. If you do have one, you have to be prepared to keep replenishing and defending your ideas about it. You grow up in a rough-and-tumble world, you won’t feel like you’re doing things right if you don’t exhibit the fight in you. Worse than that, if circumstances manage to undermine your ideas about yourself, it can obliterate your will to live.
I think a lot about identity when I see arguments happen online. You don’t get someone else’s tone to know they’re being sarcastic or making a joke. You don’t hear their conviction or sadness or hesitation that would round-out how you approach the discussion. I think this exacerbates the jaded-sarcasm and/or dismissive name-calling. You can’t tell I’d be about to hit you, but you know what I’m after in calling you a bitch.
Not having an identity feels more straightforward, to me. I simply imagine a child. Surely you’re born primed certain ways, some are quiet and others hellions, but perhaps you’re adept at pointing out things they say as they grow up that you absolutely know came from their parents’ opinions and no place else. Perhaps someone can only exist in the form of references to TV or videogames. Perhaps they are referred to as “perfect” for one-track tasks handed down through an authority.
And maybe I’m already being unfair to these people. No less, for the sake of trying to speak to a distinction, that’s the best I have so far on one side of the line.
To have an identity requires a little or a lot more work. The little is simply making a claim about yourself. “I like Daria.” More work comes in if someone bothers to ask why. You can choose to entwine your identity towards it further, or it can remain a simple cartoon that once made you think you liked it. Another layer of work can appear if you take her monologues or attitudes and mock them up against your life and experiences. You could run a comparative analysis and ask if you like how you handled something or if you might want to be more like her. It’s here you begin to look down on the person who got a Daria tattoo who’s seen 3 episodes and got caught up in the hype of their friend group in high school.
But that’s something easy like TV. Identity politics know no borders. Art can speak to you. Your family and ideas about them may be where the bulk of “you” resides. People are inflamed by politics, not of course because so much is literally about to kill them, but dammit if part of them doesn’t feel under attack.
The word that comes to mind is “insecurity.” It seems as large a guiding principle of many people's actions as anything else. You can take cliches about insecure manhood and getting a big truck or a gun. You can talk emotional manipulation from distrust towards a spouse. Insecure access to healthcare and food have consequences in emotional control and cognitive abilities. This is of course the stark reality for lesser-developed nations that we pretend we haven’t only recently escaped from, and certainly not uniformly.
A distinction I’d like to make though, is less about your time spent mocking yourself up against cultural influences, and more about an attitude and habit. I think across debatable topics and despite your age group, you can see those who’ve molded an identity and those who play into the drama of never having figured theirs out.
One metric of this difference is openness versus closed. Let’s take something fun, like gay sex. I’m not gay. I can no less say gay sex and make jokes and clearly see my mouth wrapped around a cock while writing this, and it doesn’t somehow turn me gay. My mind is open. I can explore the “taboo” or “different” or what I know I would not enjoy, and it doesn’t threaten how I conceive of myself. By contrast, there are people who can’t read this paragraph without making faces, getting angry, or bustling with excitement to hit the comment section with commentary about being closeted or actually gay or what have you.
This speaks to the next difference. There’s a compulsive reflex in the insecure. They need to make you feel bad and tear down your identity. They need to dismiss you, belittle you, and put you into a box that you never volunteered for and likely never identified with. This is pretty baseline animal brain shortcutting, but in humans with a malicious agenda, it’s stoked and invoked to do extra dehumanizing work to put your disgusting or confusing self “over there” as an “evil one of them.”
Which moves us into another difference, anger. Surely, I’ve felt myself on the reasonable side of an issue and when discussing something, maybe guns, have felt angry that I can’t get through or get a question answered. This is not the anger I mean. The insecure need to cleanse the planet of what upsets them.They default to violent matter-of-fact rhetoric. Sometimes, it’s couched in more banal sentiments or conflated with several issues at once, but the end goal is fairly clear; burn it all down. The term “flame war” comes to mind as well the irony of the “conservative” blog titled “The Blaze.”
It’s just so easy to tear things down. It’s so easy to get angry. If you’re confused, make it the other person’s fault. If you’re afraid, turn them into the aggressor. (Any black people here who’ve been coached to never look like an “angry black male?”) Exponentiate the problem by giving the insecure voice anonymity via text. Let them find fellow playground politikers to pile on with damming sentiments and inane pronouncements. They need you to be as jaded and lazy of a cliche. Be damned if you don’t feel as battered around by the limp-wristed punches that plague them.
And if you’re an adult with an identity, it’s usually just annoying. If you’re provoked or engulfed in your insecurities, it’s hard to calculate the potential fallout. I think of bankrupted Wall Street people who’ve thrown themselves off of buildings and the rise in old white male suicides.
My wish is for you to think about things reflectively. When you don’t understand, don’t make a judgment that exposes your ignorance, ask a question that gives you and your combatant a chance to be better understood. This habit will help build an inquisitive and respectful identity. You may think you don’t want that, but then, I’m prompted to wonder what someone without an identity really wants anyway. Their mommy?
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