The Redistribution of Identity
Some thoughts on finding ourselves in the fog of late capitalism
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Abstraction vs. Reality: Identity Within Perception
One of the inescapable difficulties of life is that our perception of the world around us is imperfect. If it wasn’t, we’d all believe the same things, right? The problem is, we’re not that highly evolved when our ability to perceive the world around us is compared to the level of complexity we know it contains. So to make even the most rudimentary sense of it so we can get on with our lives, we look at the world through the prism of abstraction.
By way of example: if I draw a circle, I recognize that unless I had an inhuman ability to draw perfectly, I will not have actually drawn a circle. There will always be some flaw in the curvature, an elongation or a concavity, that will make the circle I draw on the page not quite a perfect circle like the one I can easily conjure in my mind. But I will still think of it as a circle, and so will most people who look at it. This is the act of abstraction- when we perceive the reality of something and knowingly or unknowingly imagine it to be something else, a symbolic representation close enough to the “real thing” that we can apply reason to the symbolic representation and in that process learn something applicable to the reality being symbolized.
For example, if I take two apples, which are doubtless slightly different weights, shapes, flavors, colors etc. and I abstract them into identical numerical values (1 apple, 1 apple) and add them together (1 apple + 1 apple) I come away with a truth applicable to the apples as they exist in reality (1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples). My abstraction does away with excess information and shows me what I want to know, which is that if I put them into a basket, I will have a basket with two apples in it. Instead of sitting there and having a nervous breakdown about my inability to reconcile the difference between the abstraction of apples in my mind with the ones in the real world, I can manipulate the symbolic representations in my head to discover a real world truth, one I can discover about the apples without ever even seeing them in real life. This is abstraction fulfilling its purpose.
But the fact that I can’t help but perceive the world through abstraction also presents a terrifying problem. For example: stop reading this for a moment and look down at your hands, and try not to think of them as your hands. That’s an abstraction. In your mind, hand is a category into which every single hand on the planet can be sorted, but that category does not exist except in the mind. So what are hands, exactly? Almost everyone on earth has two of them, and you can tell them apart from most anything that isn’t a hand, despite the fact that absolutely none of them are identical to each other. There is nothing about the hand that makes it a hand. We call them that because our minds find it convenient to categorize them in that way, but that’s not what they actually are independent of human observation. If you die, the things you call your hands still exist. Once your body decays or is incinerated, all the energy and every atom of matter they contain remains in the universe even though your consciousness is (as best we can tell) gone. So, what are they really? Are they a collection of atoms organized into bones, tendons, cartilage, muscle fiber, nerves and skin in a way predetermined by my genetics and attached to my nervous system? Yes, they’re that too, but every single one of these terms is also an abstraction, and while all of them are useful as shorthand for the actual things they describe, we don’t necessarily recognize the difference- a child doesn’t think that a hand isn’t a hand, but an infinitely complex thing who’s true nature so beggars description that we’re better off just referring to it by the very inadequate symbol of the hand. No, a child thinks that their concept of the hand is the hand, with no further explanation necessary. And so do most adults, including myself, who can recognize the concept of abstraction, but forget about it most of the time. We operate through a prism of abstraction, but we rarely actually recognize it as such.
Even though I see them typing this essay in my peripheral vision, can feel them pounding the keys as my brain communicates instructions to them I could never consciously articulate, and even though I’ve seen and felt and used my hands every single day of my life, I don’t truly know what they are. That is, I cannot describe what they are in totality, what every bone and muscle and nerve inside them is called, what it looks like or does. If I were to try to describe the phrase “I raise my hand to my face” in a completely truthful, unabstracted manner which didn’t leave a single detail to imagination, I would literally have to write a book that accounted for every aspect of that action. And even THAT wouldn’t suffice, because written language itself is an abstraction which cannot encompass every nuance of whatever it describes. In fact, the totality of the senses are inadequate- our eyes are only privy to a small portion of the full light spectrum, we have relatively limited hearing, we only perceive time in a linear fashion, among a million other shortcomings of our perception. I don’t have the words, indeed the words couldn’t exist, to honestly relate the phrase “I raise my hand to my face” without an immense degree of abstraction. So I don’t know what hands are, what my face is or what “raising my hand to my face” actually means, even though I can do that quite easily. And I never will know, and neither will anybody else.
So, if this extremely straightforward problem is so intractable, how on earth do we approach an extremely complex problem like “what is my identity?”
Well, we use abstractions. I can say “I am a man, cisgender, heterosexual, six feet tall, of caucasian (primarily Irish) descent. I’m born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States of America. I work as a vegetable farmer. I like to read, write, cook, debate, drink, watch artsy indie movies and King of the Hill, and listen to music. I hate authority viscerally, and have a distaste for eggs, competition, small talk, most sports, and attending church. I don’t believe in god, but I consider this an irrational article of faith and don’t think it any more reasonable than religious belief. I find I am happiest on a slightly cool fall afternoon, walking in a park with a good friend or romantic partner, or in the midst of a passionate philosophical or political discussion. I identify as an anarchist who wishes to see capitalism replaced with a society of free association and the maximum possible freedom for individuals to live their lives and pursue whatever passions drive them.”
I know how far this is from a full summation of my true identity, yet if you met me in person I would probably just say “Hi, I’m Adam,” which is so much farther from an adequate description of me that it’s essentially meaningless, and yet is also technically a true abstraction (the word “Adam” here serving as an abstraction for everything I used to describe myself above and a great deal else). And yet, I could probably give a dozen other versions of self-description which would all be equally true and by the same token equally not true. All would be based on abstraction.
And setting aside how impossible it is to describe our identity in any given moment, our identities change! All the time, in fact! So how can one ever truly know oneself, or explain oneself to others?
So sure. Identity may be an unstable, indescribable thing, but it is nonetheless deeply important to us, and our ideas about our own identity shape a great deal of how we behave in the world. If I identify as a hard worker, when there is something to be done, I am going to reflexively offer myself up to do it because that is consistent with my identity. If an outside force is capable of defining our identity to us, such a force would have a great deal of power over us. Abstractions like “You are a patriot,” “you are a conduit of god’s word,” “you are a strong man,” “you are a feminist,” “you like rap music and dislike country music,” or any number of other ideas one can become inculcated with, whether they are actually true or not, have the power to determine life and death, the capacity for cruelty and kindness, who one associates with, etc. They have the power to become the focal point from which one’s entire moral system and resultant behavior radiates. What sort of identities we embrace has a great deal of influence over what we do, and so anyone who tries to effect the way you identify is to some extent really trying to change your behavior. The difference between the middle manager and the CEO, the police officer and the drug dealer, the revolutionary and the civil guard, the consumer and the creator, the religious extremist and the scientist, are to a large extent differences of identity, the stories and axioms we believe about the world and our station in it.
Thus I think it’s critical that we be aware of this process by which our identities are being constructed, because a cursory look at marketing research, media, political rhetoric and religious doctrine will quickly demonstrate that the mental space in your head for the construction of identity is hotly contested ground between political, social and economic forces, with your own self-conception jumbled somewhere in that mixture. How much of yourself you’re able to lay claim to, I would argue, in a very real way defines the outer bounds of your ability to live a truly free life, and your ability and desire to be an active member in the sort of participatory democracy I would like to live in.
In John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Locke bases his theory of liberal civil government, the first formal argument for a republic and against monarchy, on an imagined pre-government state of nature in which all men are created equal (women and non-white people are excluded outright). But even in this state of nature, there is a sort of law (emphasis added):
But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s.
Locke was a fan of run-on sentences, but the point is simple: it is our capacity to reason from which we individually derive natural law. Locke glances past this observation because (like many philosophers) he assumes that any reasonable person will reach his conclusion, but it is a critical part of his entire theory which he repeatedly references, his basis for the belief that a government derives its legitimacy not from divine right but from the consent of the governed, who, if they estimate the government to have lost legitimacy, have a right to overthrow it. Regular people, he asserts, have the ability to reason for themselves. This is the basis of democracy- the fundamental belief that we, as individuals, have a reasoning capacity which we can apply to social problems with as much authority as anyone else. We hand this authority over to the state, he argues, in return for physical and material security, but it is nevertheless derived from us.
Of course, Locke did not follow this principle to its logical conclusion, and he did not even extend it to most of humanity. His views on slavery are hotly contested (and the debate is an interesting one), but it is a simple matter of historical fact that Locke was invested in the Royal African Company and directly profited from the Atlantic Slave Trade. Possessing reason, evidently, did not make one human enough to be beyond the reach of slavery.
And yet this conception of human nature, I believe, is a good one. It suggests that what is unique about human beings is our ability to be creative, to make choices, generate and discern between good and bad ideas, and reach conclusions to base actions off of. We are the animal that makes choices- everywhere we have ever lived we have needed clothing, fire, language, tools and complex cooperative systems to survive, and these are all the product of rational thought, beginning in individuals and accumulated into cultures. It is something we build, and we take pleasure in that creative act. It is, in large part, the source of our dignity and happiness. So what role does identity play in relation to this?
Ethnic Pluralism: The Post-McCarthy Model of Identity
In Touré Reed’s Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, Reed explains the history of movements for racial equity from the pre-New Deal black civil rights labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph, Lester Granger and Ralph Bunche, through to the postwar era of LBJ’s War on Poverty, the Black Power Movement, and eventually the culmination of two competing neoliberal prescriptions for racial equality exemplified by the post-racialism of Barack Obama to the racial essentialism of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the modern antiracist movement. There’s a lot to unpack there, so bear with me.
In that history, Reed outlines a New Deal era racial politics informed by a materialist analysis of class relations and the relationship between capitalism and racial discrimination, which saw racism as a tool for class exploitation which required a militant multiracial labor coalition working towards universal wealth redistribution.
Following the beginning of the Cold War and the McCarthy era, in which socialism and anticapitalist critique was explicitly purged and repressed in American life, Reed traces the development of a postwar racial politics based on a different model which went out of its way to ignore material class relations. This, he argues, was the ethnic pluralist model popularized by Oscar Handlin and used by US Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who fell back on the pluralist framework to describe the state of black America in the 1965 Moynihan Report, which was a major influence on LBJ’s War on Poverty.
But before we get ahead of ourselves: what is ethnic pluralism? From Toward Freedom (emphasis added):
Like many historians and social scientists following World War II, Handlin rejected race as an analytical category, asserting in Race and Nationality in American Life (1957) “that there is no evidence of any inborn differences of temperament, personality, character, or intelligence among the races.” Instead, he argued that ethnicity—population groupings based on shared values, norms and experiences rather than biology—was “the only meaningful basis on which one can compare social and cultural traits.”
Here we get into ideas of identity- following the war against fascism, the postwar consensus had formally rejected racism, recognizing that it was a pseudoscientific social construct. Nevertheless, the tendency to divide people according to biology hadn’t gone away. Ethnicity- race converted into culture- became a convenient alternative to the other, politically inconvenient alternative, the materialist framework which recognized political interest groups in terms of class.
The ethnic pluralist model instead squished broad swaths of people together into “ethnic groups”- which in practice has only ever seemed to mean racial groups, although the logic of ethnic pluralism has since extended to LGBTQ people, the disabled, and whomever else can be seen as having politically distinct interests based on something other than wealth- without any recognition for class differences within those communities. From this framework, a billionaire like Jay Z is said to have the same culture, and crucially the same political interests as the average black bus driver or schoolteacher. They have a shared identity- they are black, and thus, the logic goes, they are part of the same political interest group.
In fact, Reed argues that the ethnic pluralist model was part of a general program to replace the labor movement, the dominant popular political force among the working class at that time, with other types of political identity which eschewed class politics:
If Taft-Hartley and HUAC were “the big stick” that derailed labor militancy in the postwar era, liberal policymakers’ tightening embrace of growth politics as their preferred model of managing capitalism would ultimately produce “the carrot.” Indeed, the Housing Act of 1949 and the Highway Act of 1956—which expanded the market for state-subsidized homeownership into the suburbs—would do their part to demobilize the labor movement by encouraging members of a once-militant US union movement to identify as property holders and consumers.
Handlin’s conceptualization of the role of ethnic group culture in American life simultaneously challenged race-based and class-based assessments of inequality. In “Group Life within the American Pattern” (1949), for example, Handlin made clear that not only did he reject the concept of biological race, but he believed the ethnic group was the cornerstone of a “free society.” Specifically, Handlin argued that American democracy’s strength was owed largely to the plurality of associations that served its diverse citizenry. Institutions ranging from family to voluntary associations provided Americans with material support and psychological comfort, while affording individuals some insulation from the excesses of the state.
According to Handlin, ethnic culture—defined, again, as a population’s shared values and norms—influenced the form and strength of a given group’s institutional life. Contending that family, organized religion, and professional and benevolent associations ultimately influenced the temperaments, occupations and political behavior of individuals, Handlin would argue that the nation’s diverse ethnic groups had been indispensable to the creativity, ingenuity, and adventurous spirit that had made America a great democratic society.
Pluralism ultimately located the problems people faced in their lives in their supposed “group culture.” The pluralist interest group is always plagued by 1) oppression from outside forces and/or 2) cultural defects, both of which are the root of broad inequalities.
The idea that these broad groups existed was gradually adopted by the American public regardless of political affiliation, and by the 1970s everyone from Richard Nixon to the Black Power Movement agreed that the problems of black culture resulted from a lack of group solidarity among black people, and as a result, black solidarity was needed to match the white solidarity that was (logically, if you accepted Handlin’s framework), the root cause of the relative wealth and good outcomes of white people as a whole. The logical outcome of this, lacking any substantial critique of capitalism, was black entrepreneurship and a sort of soft segregation in which this racial solidarity could develop. Here’s a remarkable clip of Richard Nixon demonstrating the political common ground he and Black Power shared underneath all the revolutionary rhetoric.
The newer version of this soft segregation is expressed in Ibram Kendi’s 2019 book How To Be An Antiracist:
Whenever Black people voluntarily gather among themselves, integrationists do not see spaces of Black solidarity created to separate Black people from racism. They see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.
Black people, Kendi tells us, are under such a constant threat from white racism that they need a racially segregated space for survival. The reification of ethnic group identity has forced its way into the 21st century with a vengeance. What the psychological consequences of it are, and what sort of realizable political project it brings with it is unclear.
We see in modern left-wing activist culture a strong tendency to describe individual life experiences in terms of group identity along these broad ethnic lines. Following the recent shooting in Atlanta at multiple Asian massage parlors which left 8 people dead (6 of whom were Asian), the bulk of the public discussion of the incident seemed to be taken up by a debate over whether the shooter was motivated by racism. The shooter, a devout Southern Baptist who claimed to have a sex addiction which tortured him due to his religious attitudes towards sex, said race was not a factor. But the incident, which was fit into the broader phenomenon of skyrocketing anti-Asian hate crime incidents in the US, was firmly cast by many cultural commentators as an incident of racism regardless of the specific circumstances of the incident, and suggesting that this wasn’t totally clear based on the facts available was framed as “defending the shooter.”
Of course, it is entirely possible that the Atlanta shooting was at least in part racially motivated. Likely, even. But the idea that the shooter was somehow a worse person if he murdered people out of racial animus rather than ideologically-motivated sexual guilt (or a mixture of the two) demonstrates a concerning trend. It was not the events themselves that were the source of moral outrage- people are shot and killed every day without public outcry, after all- but the idea that they were done as an assault on a specific racial group. Had Robert Long’s victims been selected in a racially proportional manner reflecting American society as a whole, we are to believe the murders would have been somehow less bad.
Now it is certainly true, racists exist, people do engage in hate crimes against Asians as a result of racism, and the surge in these particular sorts of hate crimes is very real. But the public response to this incident reflects the reification of ethnic group identity taken to the extreme- anything that effects a particular group disproportionately becomes by definition an act of prejudice against that group; any other explanation is an affront to common decency. The individual pathologies and material circumstances of the victims or the perpetrator become obfuscated as interest groups vie to claim the incident as an assault on their identity. The resulting policy prescription is a piecemeal list of antidiscrimination measures, rather than any serious assault on the political economic conditions in which these types of incidents might be more deeply rooted, and the broad coalition needed to pass them is tenuous at best, and typically far from adequate.
Identity Within Capitalism
While the ethnic group identities were embraced, these community structures that were supposed to help them make advances diminished, to whatever extent they existed at all. Church attendance plummeted in the ensuing decades since the Moynihan Report, and labor union membership has had a slow, consistent decline.
What has grown in the same period has been the rise of consumerism and the growing relationship between identity, marketing, and self-definition through association with brands and media. As our group identities have become more and more splintered, we have become more and more unified around a subconscious group identity, that of the consumer, who, regardless of what they believe about themselves, substantiates this identity through choices made in the marketplace. There is a relationship that is formed between the consumer and the commodity, one which comes to stand as a substitute for relationships with other people and ultimately even with oneself. In his 2009 paper Advertising and Social Identity, Mark Bartholomew also affirms the existence of identity as a combination of group social identities.
Social identity theory says, according to Bartholomew (emphasis added):
that our identities develop by two separate processes: categorization and comparison. We categorize ourselves a part of a particular social group and then compare that group to other social groups in a favorable way. We are naturally attracted to definitions of self that involve group membership, and, by using the group to verify our identities, we build up reservoirs of self-worth. At times, these social identities become so strong that we not only see group membership as one component of ourselves, but we actually view our “self as part of the larger collective unit.” In other words, rather than perceiving ourselves as unique individuals, we come to see ourselves as “exemplars of the group.”
We come to identify traits in ourselves with a group, but over time, we come to identify moreso with the group than with ourselves.
Could advertising be playing a role in identity formation?
The average American is exposed to over three thousand advertisements per day. If humans naturally build their identities from the cultural materials available, the omnipresence of advertising must be influencing the formation of modern identities.
Indeed, there has been a strategic change in advertising over time, from a model of trying to identify with a broad shared identity of American-ness to targeting the specific groups with which people identify. Gay and lesbian Americans were heavily targeted as a niche market because of their relative wealth as a subgroup (at least, that’s what marketers believed at the time).
There were certain benefits to this: some of these ads were among the first encroachments of the normalization of homosexuality into the average American household. But Bartholomew notes an impact on gay culture:
Market researchers emphasize the need for gay niche advertisers to enter gay social networking sites. Gay bookstores are dying out as the technology that propels Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble allows for individualized servicing of the need for gay-themed communications. Instead of finding commercial-free public spaces to discuss gay issues, people can now turn to a gay television network that airs gay issues, but only with the willing compliance of national marketers. Rather than providing a “public space” for gay politics and coalition-building, gay publications, under the increasing influence of corporate advertisers, have become centered on consumerism, not civil rights. Many specifically gay businesses that provided a safe haven for community collaboration have had to shut down, as conglomerates now find it worthwhile to produce gay-themed merchandise thanks to niche marketing.
It is the nature of capital to ultimately own whatever it offers its resources to. While the corporate embrace of gay culture has in certain ways been beneficial to gay people, it has to a large extent captured and even dictated what the gay identity has become in the ensuing decades.
By depicting itself as an authority on the social group, the niche advertiser brings about changes in the viewer’s process of identification with the social group. Katherine Sender describes advertising agencies at an early stage of gay niche advertising conceptualizing the gay shopper as trendy and free-spending, long before there was any significant market data to back up this characterization.
Bartholomew offers a theory for the relationship between consumption and identity that I think is very telling (emphasis added):
Advertisers influence the comparison process by depicting particular consumer lifestyles as central to group identity. Lifestyle choices are crucial components of modern identity construction. They provide readily digestible structures to give our personal stories a coherent shape. As other traditional routes of identity formation have declined, identities have become more tightly linked to particular lifestyles. In urban societies, where most of our social interactions occur with complete strangers, individuals can express their identities to others and develop clear lines of comparison with other social groups by adopting and displaying the accoutrements of a particular lifestyle.
In a very real sense, the way we identify ourselves to others informs how we identify to ourselves. For better or worse, the way I see myself will to a large extent be shaped by how I see myself being seen by others. And in a depersonalized, atomized society where most of the people we interact with don’t really know us on a deep level, the way we shape people’s perception of us is heavily associated with our externally visible consumption habits (“lifestyle choices”.) What we buy shapes how people see us, and seeing ourselves through their eyes, it shapes how we see ourselves.
Really think about this. How much of your buying habits are based on certain ideas you wish to convey about yourself? I buy shirts and pants but never blouses or skirts as a signifier of my gender identity. I drive a fuel-efficient car rather than an SUV, because I like to think I’m frugal and care for the environment. I’ve spent more money on guitars than I’d like to admit, despite only ever maintaining a passing interest in playing them, one which inevitably passes after a year at the most. I like to buy books, for the most part because I like to read them- but then, I could just borrow them from the library more often than not, so do I just like having the object to sit on my bookshelf as testament to my intellectual prowess and sophistication?
Perhaps this feels like an obvious point, but what we buy, the objects we surround ourselves with and the media we consume, is to some degree a story we tell those around us and ourselves about who we are. But while any number of different identities can be conveyed through consumption, they all have one ultimate, unifying characteristic- the fact of identity communicated through and defined by the inheritance of culture from market enterprises.
So of course, the question arises- how much of my identity is in fact something I actively constructed, and how much of it was impressed upon me by someone trying to get me to buy something?
Consumer Suggestibility: The Misery Machine
This has been one of the most confounding essays I’ve ever written. It’s never been more clear to me that there is a problem to describe here, and yet harder to articulate its nature in a way I felt was honest and nuanced enough to merit presentation. The problem of identity and its role in capitalism is very much one of trying to describe what silence sounds like, or to define the word “irony”- you know there are qualities that you can describe, and yet you’re so accustomed to them that they are practically invisible, and things you experience every day of your life become incredibly elusive. We are at all times immersed in our own identity, through which we experience capitalism.
One of the things that really helped this idea click for me was the following interview clip with David Foster Wallace in 2003. I don’t think I’ve ever related to seeing a man wince at the effort of trying to describe a cultural phenomenon more in my life:
Wallace describes a sort of a cycle wherein people’s identities are built around consumption, which leads inevitably to depression, which is then in turn addressed with further consumption.
There is some evidence that depressed people are more easily influenced, that sadness produces an intensified desire for immediate gratification, and that compulsive buyers are more likely to have low self-esteem and to buy something for the immediate psychological gratification of buying. But of course, one can produce research to defend almost any belief. The more important question is, do you believe this is relevant to you, or people you know? I’ll be honest, I know for a fact that I am more likely to waste money when I’m unhappy. Like going grocery shopping when you’re hungry, a sad person finds the promise of happiness offered by consumer goods far harder to brush aside than they would if they were happy to begin with.
I have taken a sort of unhealthy interest in the online guru industry. Youtube in particular is awash in people selling courses and programs to mostly lonely young men, telling them how to get rich, how to get laid, and how to get fit. To me, there could be no more perfect illustration of the weaponization of misery and insecurity in marketing. For instance, this video from the fitness company Kinobody:
This is probably my single favorite representation of post-neoliberal capitalist douche-baggery. How do you top this? The creepy, sociopathic narcissism (literally presenting himself as Patrick Bateman in a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of the opening sequence of American Psycho), the almost scientific effort to target the insecurities of any straight young man- beautiful women, fancy cars, a mansion, and a jacked dude who has all of it pumping iron at the gym while you watch him on your cracked phone screen in sweatpants, waiting for your last check to clear so you can pay your landlord to spend another month in your shitty apartment, alone.
Kinobody’s trajectory is particularly fascinating, as Greg further explored his company’s niche marketing strategy, moving from preying on the insecurities of his audience, to frankly inviting them to join his personality cult:
Greg’s followers are a breed apart, stronger, sexier, happier than normal people. By exercising with his program, he tells us, we will become part of his group, we will be surrounded by beautiful women who fawn over us, we will (apparently) become wealthy enough to afford banquets at fancy restaurants and VIP tables at high end nightclubs. Whereas we are weak, sexually unsuccessful and poor, he offers us an identity that is powerful (patriarchal, even), sexually dominant and intrinsically linked to material wealth. What is the identity proposed by Kinobody?
WE ARE BETTER THAN YOU.
SHED YOURSELF, BECOME US, AND FINALLY BE HAPPY.
In a society that has so thoroughly distorted our sense of self, it’s not hard to see why he’s been so successful.
I see people like O’Gallagher, and the rest of the Youtube guru sphere who share his model, as sort of the bottom feeders of identity marketing. They find people who have already had their identities deeply distorted by the broader marketing zeitgeist, analyze the wreckage and scavenge it, exploiting whatever scraps the really dominant market forces didn’t quite chew to the bone.
But of course the truth will be for their customers what it will be for all the others: consumption will not free you of your insecurities, because the forces offering you things to consume will never profit from your self-satisfaction. Fully-formed, individualized identities simply aren’t good business. They will leave you hollow, uncertain, a bottomless void into which more products can be dumped, until you die.
Finally, An Alternative
In this essay, we have established that identity is a series of imperfect abstractions about ourselves, which political and social forces have turned into a series of social-group descriptors that serve to explain ourselves to the world, and in turn, give the world a way to explain us to ourselves. Recognizing this framework, companies operating within postwar capitalism have turned to niche marketing strategies, first reaffirming our identities, then denying and reshaping them in a more profitable image, creating identities that are terminally unsatisfied, insecure, and driven to buy. The consequences to our ability to form a coherent political vision to address the litany of problems plaguing our society, along with the consequences on our individual mental health, have in large part driven the disparate ideological movements on both the right and the left, leading to a political landscape as fragmented and confused as our own minds.
Well, it is one thing to describe a complex problem, and I don’t know if I’ve done a very good job even at that. It is a far harder thing to describe a solution. I have no comprehensive program to dig our way out of our personal and societal identity crises. I can only hint at observations from my own life that seem to offer some hope for a path out, a more liberating and healthy process of identity construction that may serve to at least somewhat fill the psychological void we can’t seem to fill in the marketplace.
It is very easy to idealize the recent past before the internet, the explosions of countercultures in the industrial revolution or in the 1960s, or the preindustrial era, or even the neolithic era before the dawn of agriculture. But I don’t think that’s fair. Defenders of capitalism are right when they argue that much about the past was awful, that despite the new problems it has brought with it technological progress has made our lives longer, freer from disease and starvation, and has opened us up to greater possibilities of education, expression and relationships. We are less prejudiced than generations that came before, more tolerant of unconventional relationships and lifestyles, at the very least no less empathetic towards each other and the natural world and probably in fact a great deal more so. Even the void of identity which capitalism has failed to fill could be argued to be the void left by John Locke, insisting that we cannot accept rule ordained by god but must accept or reject it based on our own reason. With all due respect to my religious friends, I will happily accept an identity crisis in favor of superstition.
No; what we should seek to do, I think, is something that recognizes the successes and the failures of earlier forms of self-conception, and seeks to construct something new, something with little historical precedent and perhaps ultimately none at all. If we reject the church, and we reject the marketplace, what are we left with but ourselves, each other, and perhaps even the natural world itself?
I suppose I would advocate the construction of identities conceived of as cells in a body of democratic participation. To return to Locke’s model of man in the state of nature, I would argue that reason is in fact our process of decision-making, the essential mental faculty for creation. We choose to cut down this tree or that tree, to hew it in this shape or that, to shape it in any number of styles as we decide is best, until we are left with some artifact- a chair, a table, a digging stick, a fire. We take the materials present in the world around us, we apply our own unique reasoning to them until we are emotionally satisfied, and we create something new. It is those creations, I believe, which we ought to identify with- our actions, ideas, stories, relationships, analyses, jokes and whatever else it is that we have plucked out of nature and refined through the application of our minds and bodies.
It is this body of creations which we bring into the social sphere and which constitute our contribution, not merely what we decide to buy (though it is true, we must buy) but what we create. It is not the fact that you bought the book which shapes your identity, but your analysis of it, that constructive process taken to the thing, whether it comes from the marketplace or from nature, which makes it uniquely a part of who you are. Through this conception of self we can enter into honest, intimate dialogue with one another, one facilitated by a greater sense of dignity and mutual respect, an excitement that comes with sharing something one has labored to create out of genuine passion, and in that dialogue birth a new culture, one open to a broader expanse of human possibilities beyond simple wealth accumulation. I know this is to at least some extent actually possible because I can observe it in any good conversation, a good handwritten letter, or good art, which to me has only ever been the frank and genuine expression and simultaneous construction of the artist’s identity as an individual and as a dignified participant in a culture, and perhaps even a political structure.
If we can do that, I suspect we may be able to construct a path out of our present crises, both in the personal and societal realm.
I haven't finished reading and find it all very interesting up until now, but I can't help to see a problem in the Ethnic Pluralist section. Although I'm not so sure as yourself seem to be about soft-segregation, I can certainly understand one's uneasiness towards such concepts; it is, after all, these things that start a never-ending cycle of group identity.
Either way, the thing that catches my attention, though, is the example about anti-Asian hate, where you recognize it may very well be racially motivated but then conflates this with morals insinuating people say he's a worse person because of it or that the act itself is more outrageous due to its racial bias.
I think there are actually two problems there, or even perhaps a single one manifesting itself dually: firstly you say "certainly racists exist" which falls into the pitfall that only "a racist" can commit racism (only someone who consciously thinks some race is inferior can commit crimes that target that specific demographic), which is clearly a moralizing approach that depicts racism as being due to "a few bad actors", which is actually funny since the text is about identity and having labels put onto oneself and then goes on to label people as fundamentally racist or non-racist.
The second part is the affirmation that it functions as "reification of ethnic group identity taken to the extreme- anything that effects a particular group disproportionately becomes by definition an act of prejudice against that group; any other explanation is an affront to common decency." which is a misrepresentation of the argument that starts of at the fact that if a particular group is disproportionately affected, we should at least look into it.
Many have pointed out that the parlors he went to do the killings were miles away from his house and that, on the way there, there were numerous brothels and such, which one would expect such an attack would also be aimed at if it was purely due to "sexual guilt" and that, within those establishments, there still was a disproportionate killing of Asian women over the non-asian ones.
They also point out how "the West" has a long history of sexualizing Asian women (even more than Caucasian ones) with a "exotic" rhetoric, claiming their lack of "decency" (like having a massage) is "enticing".
In the end what I'm trying to point out is while I agree the roots of these problems go well beyond "simply" racism and involve harder-to-topple power structures like capitalism and religion, and therefore discrimination rhetoric can be used to disarm otherwise revolutionary movements, we can't deny such systems have only ever been able to exist through the continuous subjugation and assimilation of other cultures and the pushing of "the Western identity" (which is completely made up) as the norm - this homogenization that dictates anything that slightly deviates from it is wrong (such as massage parlors for not partaking on the "western" notion of "decency") - and recognizing this "ethnic" groups not as "objective" characteristics that every individual pertaining to that group share but exactly the identity which is put unto them by those in power based on social signifiers such as racial appearance.
Therefore the objective of such movements is not to disarm revolutionary action by diverting the causes, but add inter-sectionalism which recognizes all these structures (capitalism, religion, colonialism, ethnocentrism) are connected and none of them can actually be toppled without toppling the other ones.