Photo by Ethan Hein.
Identity, the ultimate meme: a meme for life.
Soldier, parent, iconoclast, Muslim, blue collar, gay, drunk, smart, madman. Whatever you ‘are’, don’t forget: you’re also much more.
As a meme wraps up an idea seductively, a small reductive packaging-up of a piece of ostensible life, so too might a person attach Identity to the complexity that is himself and all that his life might be, to give himself purpose and priority by which he may act in a coherent way, consistent with the concept… (Whether or not he is successful in living consistently with it is less interesting to me than his desire to be drawn in by the idea) Identity and its components and implications may displace the person himself in a way, in all his confused and limitless potential, as driver.
Subordinating You to an abstraction in this way, curtailing yourself to define yourself, is a common enough tendency. It’s not to be confused with knowing yourself though, and wrapping yourself in comforting simplification is not the first step toward taking control and changing/improving your life.
It’s not that a Canadian, for example, isn’t a Canadian: But I’m wondering how much about someone is necessarily true if his passport is Canadian. What would that biodetail necessarily dictate? How much about you would you let it define with certainty, good or bad? Would you dare to step outside of what ‘Canadian’, or ‘blue collar’ or ‘not so great at math’ means to you? Are you declining possible life-enrichment if you are not comfortable with doing so? Are there benefits to maintaining a flexible relationship to some of the ways that you think of yourself, so as not to limit your development all through your life?
What strikes me is that the person himself is rarely the creator of these concepts, these Identities; be adopts them rather than creating them. In this way or to the extent that he does, can he call his life ‘his own’?
Well, if they are just hats he wears, and he resists confusing them with Himself, and moreover makes the choice himself to wear them, then does he maintains himself as ‘driver’?
There seems to be a point, again, where he gives himself over to the premise of Identity, and in so doing risks avoiding examination of the premises he has adopted for/as himself…. A hat might ‘add character’ but it can never be confused with the contents of the head upon which it rests, and anyway, did you ever wear one of which you didn’t tire eventually?
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