having ideas vs being ideas

why low identity humans are easy prey for doctrines of structural oppression

i was having a quick DM conversation with longtime reader “tri torch” the other day. he was asking if it was OK to repost some content elsewhere. (it is, go nuts reposting, sharing, or citing articles. the more the merrier. no need to ask. just give a kitty a shout out.)

but of the whole discussion, this was the bit that wound up striking me and so (with permission) it’s reproduced here.

it's actually one of my favorite things about the bad cattitude community.

it's a big tent and many of us do not agree about a number of things and yet (gasp) are still managing to have constructive and civil discussions about it and remain friends.

the same people in the comments one day saying “the cat has clearly lost his marbles on this one” are back the next and we’re all still on the same basic side: the side of inquiry.

team toxo has grown into a collection of people who have ideas and are willing to assess and modify them as opposed to the cadres of people who ARE their ideas and thus take any disagreement as an assault upon their personal identity.

and that is a very important distinction.

and “people who are their ideas” has become far too prevalent a pathology in the US these days.

low identity folks raised on a steady diet of oppression and self-hatred narrative and lacking any objective morality or logic cling to seek out extremal validators of dogma and tribe to generate a sense of self and this makes them impossible to engage with.

how do you discuss an idea with someone when, for them, changing their mind is experienced as self-erasure and self-abnegation?

this renders the doctrines of "woke" and "structural isms" a subjectively self-fulfilling prophesy whereby every time anyone disagrees with you, you perceive it as just the sort of attack on your very personhood that the post modern struggle session gang told you to expect. "see, they really are trying to erase you!" it's a really nasty self-replicating self-reinforcing meme once it gets it hooked into a low identity human.

if you are your ideology, then to your mind no one who fails to accept your ideology can accept you. they are other, they are enemy, and you perceive them as attacking the very core of your being and your identity. there can be no compromise, no accord and it rapidly (of necessity) rarifies you into an echo chamber where only those who constantly reaffirm you can be your friend and any deviation from orthodoxy is not just an attack on you, but proof that the orthodoxy (that everyone not consciously “woke” is structurally against you) was correct.

once inside, you’re trapped within a sphere of funhouse mirrors. nothing external can be seen. small wonder it’s so devilishly difficult to escape: it literally trains you to see dispute of its tenets as proof of its tenets.

full mental jacket

but how does this happen? it was not always like this. so how did we get to here?

my suspicion is that it boils down to identity and how secure and self-contained a human is in theirs. i’m sure some of this is innate, but much of it is learned. we practice being ourselves, knowing ourselves, becoming ourselves and the very act of action is what generates and waxes our confidence and identity. to a great extent, we ARE what we do.

a person with a strong internal sense of self is a person who can have ideas. such a person can meet and discourse with other people who have ideas and even when they disagree, still remain friends because changing or abandoning an idea still leaves the person behind. i like you, you like me, we disagree about colonial policy in rhodesia, and we can still be friends, engage in useful and mutually edifying debate, and it’s easy for us to encounter and explore viewpoints other than our own and it’s possible for us to change our minds without having to reorder our whole sense of who we are.

but a person without a strong internal sense of self tends to look outward for validation and identity. they do not “have” ideas they “are” ideas and trying these ideologies on supplants the role of “going out and learning to be a self” as the incomplete individual is subsumed by a collective that promises to give it meaning and to give it answers. but once you make your you a function of outside ideas, the line of ideology and self is effaced and no longer can one countenance criticism of ideas because it’s all now criticism of you. it’s all personal. it all feels like attack and it inverts perceptions in dangerous ways such that such people often pose significant hazard to themselves and to others around them. they wind up becoming precisely what they purport to revile.

in one of my all time favorite stacks (in praise of lawn darts) i explored the idea of challenge based growth into adulthood in some detail.

you want to know why we have so many low internal identity people these days? this is why. where did they get a chance to grow a self-contained self? what did they have to sharpen themselves upon that would lead to self-reliance, self-trust, and self love?

it was all structure and nerfing. no danger, no sharp parts, no need to “go figure it out yourself.” getting bullied sucks, but it also makes you strong. being bored sucks, but it makes you inventive. being scared sucks, but you get over it, through it, and learn to be capable and confident. you learn who you are. you become who you are and become confident in and committed to yourself.

that makes you you.

a you that can have ideas and change them.

but if you do not have this, you go desperately looking for some source of it and if you lack the resources and opportunities to generate this internally, especially if you are smothered under structure, you’ll look outside for it.

cults recruit for this.

i used to see the scientologists on the sidewalk in SF asking “do you ever feel sad for no reason?” as if this were some odd aberration in the human condition and preying upon those who said “yes” with tales of aliens in volcanos that cling to you and make you despondent unless you learn to fight them. (in no small irony, this is almost the exact pitch the CIA uses as well and they recruit heavily from other cults.)

these appeals do not sway high identity humans sure of self and secure in their value, but they are siren songs for those bereft of confidence and capability.

you join the cult to fill the empty space where your you should be.

but external identity is dependence. you are neither self-governing nor self-owning. you are not autonomous. such as you feel yourself to be is contingent upon external scaffolding, inflexible and limiting. worse, it can be taken away. therefore, to the extent that you rely upon it, its removal will topple you. so will exile from your tribe. you cannot stand alone. this is why this is the tool of tyrants and the prison of the put upon proletarian.

it does not need to be a cunning plan hatched by evil philosophers twirling their moustaches. like many kinds of evolution, it’s emergent. such dependency upon external identity begets a memetic arms race. it has nothing to do with truth or liberty or justice, it’s literally “which memes are most viral and can spread most rapidly while being most difficult to dislodge once ensconced in the mind.” there is no grand philosophical output or validation here. you might as well be doing musical gain of function on earworms.

and what would a successful memetic pathogen look like?

it would spread widely in populations that were common, especially if that population was increasing. populations like “the 45-50% of students going to college who all bought into the lake wobegon fallacy/cargo cult that they would all wind up top 10%ers.” they’re educated enough to get the doctrine, they are not getting the success they felt they were promised, and they were raised to expect trophies and blame their failure to appear upon someone else cheating or being a bad person. (it’s even easier if not all of it is wrong)

a winning memetic pathogen would also prevent you from recovery. this is where woke is so insidious. it wrecks and makes low function every organization it infects, then claims that any underperformance is proof of structural bias/discrimination and says “see, told you!” it’s as if the flu had found a way to pin your fever on chicken soup and once over this event horizon into a fully recursive pocket reality of collective hallucination, there’s no way out without abandoning your identity and sense of self and being excommunicated from the tribe of folks caught in the same snare that you are. and that’s a rough, cold turkey ride for those without other internal edifices of self.

it tends to make people militant, intolerant, and smug which is a really bad combination for those mired in self-contradiction as self-conception. it also drives groupthink and cult level allegiance because you’ve alienated everything else.

they wind up at war with everyhting up to and including rationality itself and then perceive the well earned mockery of the rest of the world declaring such sensibilities senseless as validation for their runaway righteous indignation.

and the more ridiculous they become, the more they are ridiculed but the more they are ridiculed, the more sure they become that they are right.

it’s an ideological singularity, a race to a bottom of infinite stupidity per unit volume.

this terrified tribe sees justification and substantiation in numbers, but this is hopelessly inapt. woke is not in any way validated by spread. prevalence serves only as validation of virulence.

from the outside, the nature of the trap is obvious. it’s only from the concave internal horizon that this cannot be seen. they are too trapped in “anything that is not just like me validates that everyhting is out to get me” ideology as identity spiral of their ever shrinking and radicalizing universe. anyone who fails to accede is proof that the world is biased against them in some fundamentally ingrained fashion.

it’s a powerful system of self-reinforcement and alienation.

so how does one break such a cycle?

past a point, it ain’t easy.

in mild doses, you can break it with “finding some bit of identity and building from it.” baby steps, small agreements, starting debates by seeking to see when you can agree rather than disagree, but past a point, there is just no reasoning with this level of evolved mind pathogen.

i’ve lost friends over it. i suspect many have. you disagree, as far as they’re concerned, you’re literally hitler now, and that’s the end of that.

i’m not sure exactly how to deprogram this cult but i do know how to stop the spread.

identity is herd immunity for woke. woke does not and cannot infect confident people with a sense of self. i’m seeing A LOT more of this around, in my friends’ kids, in the kids younger still. this age of being coddled and raised to be stripped of identify and dependent on external authority is ending. covid was a helluva wake up call for children about “trusting adults” and a lot of them internalized some serious lessons about giving in to experts and ideologies.

i have high hopes for gen Z and gen alpha behind them. their parents were not boomers like the millennials were, they were gen X, generation hose-water and neglect, and they are increasingly imparting the same ethos on their kids. the front half of gen alpha is gen X parented as well. there’s a smallish smattering of millennial parented gen Z/alpha but given how unmarried and childless the millennials are, that too is acting as a selector. i keep meeting 10 year olds that seem more like we were than the weird hothouse flowers i was seeing in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. the kids seem less lost and gormless, more engaged and independent. they lost their faith in “tribal loyalty” when the tribe masked them up and locked them down for years of formative time. they are walking away from online and back into IRL.

i have a friend with a house in ocean park in san juan. we were eating and drinking on this third floor roof deck. his boys (maybe 8 and 10) were roaming around feral and started hucking water balloons up at us from the back yard. so, i filled up a 3 gallon bucket of water, called them over, leaned over, then dumped it on their heads from 3 floors up. much hilarity ensued. dad: “so, what did you learn?” boys: “never trust gato!” dad: “good lesson.”

i think it was.

and these kids are starting to get some really useful selectors as they turn on the mollycoddles that seek to stunt them.

sense of self comes from struggle and the struggle against struggle sessions ingrains real self-reliance and confidence.

sense of self lets you be a person with ideas.

and a person with ideas can be friends with other people even if they have different ideas.

it’s the literal basis and predicate for the pluralistic society and civilization the safety scolds are wont to claim they desire yet never seem able to produce.

high identity society coalesces and finds commonality.

low identity society atomizes and devolves into incompatible ideological jihads.

the opposite of “woke” is “self contained” and the opposite of “identarianism” is “identity.”

and more and more of the kids are alright.

the time warp: let’s do it again