Two Kinds of Identity
11th December 2017
I don’t actually have an awful lot to say about bonding identity, not beyond what’s already been said by others. Overall I’m not a fan — insofar as you can meaningfully say that you’re “not a fan” of a core feature of human psychology — in a terminal-values kind of way. The end-point of pumping up your bonding identity is becoming a eusocial hive insect, caring less about your own fate and more about the fate of the group with which you identify, and while that’s a viable form of eudaimonia I tend to react to it with disgust. It’s also true that one of the major functions of bonding identity is facilitating group action and shared grievance, and that (like revolutionary fervor) this is a crisis technology that becomes less useful and more dangerous as you move towards utopia and things get better. Also, of course, people who invest strongly in bonding identity are especially prone to ignore concrete truths about themselves, since it’s so easy to play mental sleight-of-hand games that shuffle “traits I possess” and “traits possessed by the average member of My Group” and “traits possessed by the most heroically extraordinary members of My Group.”