A bit of an editorializing title, I know. And I’m a little drunk, I might read this tomorrow and see it form another angle and question myself into oblivion.
But I was reflecting, Is the categorization of sexuality, ideological beliefs, hobbies (I’m a cinephile, I’m a gamer, I’m ‘x’ thing that defines my whole identity), a result of the dominance of the liberal world we live in?
We are taught to think about the world from a young age in terms of good and evil, wrong and right, marvel villains vs marvel heroes… Binary, simple, childish thought, but as the contradictions of our world get more extreme, we’re forced to expand our understanding the world and form a wider perspective of what makes up our reality (or simply bury our heads into a sandpit), be it by simply creating more categories to fit onto our narrow worldview or by accepting the immortal science of dialectical materialism (based).
Thoughts?
i mean, we all have identities related to our experiences: with production, with consumption, and with interacting with other humans. i think there are two primary ways that liberalism mangles the concept of identity:
liberalism encourages identities to be primarily based on consumption at the expense of production. think someone whose entire identity is disney, but their job is office work. the latter is not glamorized, and is in fact encouraged by liberalism to be seen as some sort of failure, in contrast to the apparent success of the bourgeoisie under capitalism. consumption is often used an escape from the bulk of people’s lives, they productive work. this is one way that class consciousness is discouraged
in the instances where liberalism embraces identity, it does so at the expense of the material conditions that led to the identity in the first place. in fact, it sometimes proposes that identity is not only dominant over material conditions, but is self-reinforcing, pretending that there is not a fundamental relationship between the two. think how right-wing liberals claim that being trans is “just in your head,” but when left liberals are asked to define gender the word “patriarchy” will never even occur to them. this is another way that class consciousness is discouraged
in each dialectic, productive identities are primary over consumptive ones, and material conditions are primary over the identities that they foster. neglect of this fact results in deep, deep alienation.