Identity
27th July 2020
Severian does a deep dive.
If you’ll indulge me for a moment: “Identity,” variously defined, has been one of humanity’s most vexing problems from the get-go.
Is the world we perceive, the world as it actually is? How reliable are our perceptions? For that matter, how reliable is the perceiver? If we can’t trust our senses when it comes to external objects — and we all know how shaky our senses can be — then how can we trust them when they report to “us” (whatever that is) on our internal states? Ever had what the docs call “referred pain“? The pain, at least, is real, though it doesn’t necessarily hurt at the site of the injury. Ever felt mad when what you really are is scared? Nothing, it seems, is reliable. Nothing is stable.
Most people don’t interact with reality directly, but second-hand. They craft an artificial persona composed of the characteristics that they would like to have, or at least like people to think they have, and then deal with reality, not as themselves, but as if they were this fake person. This is why a lot of people get the stunned-cow look on their faces when something in real life happens to them that isn’t in the script that they are attempting to act out. This is why mass shooters have such an easy time — their victims didn’t include such a thing in their scripts, so they have no clue as to what to do and therefore panic.
This “I am the star of my own movie” attitude is essentially narcissistic, because most people are what Any Rand called “second-handers”; their opinion of themselves is determined by what other people think of them … which means they need to get other people to think of them, hence the popularity of tattoos, piercings,unnatural hair colors, and the other components of hipster fashion. If you look cool, then you are cool, by definition, regardless of the barren wasteland that constitutes your soul.
This is why “self-esteem” and “identity” is such a Big Thing among the second-handers. They have no worth except the worth assigned to them by others, so they need to be insulated from adverse inputs from the outside.