Your Immutable Characteristics Do Not Get To Define You — Your Ideas Do
I won’t judge you as an individual if you believe in ideas that are predicated on the immutable traits that you have — you do not have and never will have any control over them. I won’t judge you because you are of a different race or gender than me. I won’t judge you because you choose to be religious or you see life from a different perspective.
You do not have to feel like you should have to hold ideas that people who share your identity hold. You do not have to see the world in terms of identity groups.
Separate yourself from your ideas. You can separate your identity from your ideas.
You can think differently from the people who share your identity. You don’t have to feel like you have to hate someone just because the group decided to hate them. You can be the judge for yourself.
You don’t have to hold the same opinions that your identity group holds. You can think for yourself. You can search for all the information yourself and, based on your own findings, come to a conclusion by yourself. Don’t let others tell you what you should think or what you must think.
People used to have to live our entire lives to find out who we were as individuals. People would study and seek new ideas, experiences, and perspectives of life in the hopes of finding out a little bit more about ourselves.
Instead of searching, building, and earning our individual identities through our walks of life, many of us have embraced the all-in-one identity package that is neatly gifted to us with identity politics.
Identity politics permit us to easily identify ourselves in our distinct groups and allow ourselves to think that the ideas we hold about the world were conceptualized on our own.
What we actually become, however, are marionettes. We believe we are the originator of brilliant ideas and possess the mouths which speak the truth when we are simply mouthpieces for the person (of the identity group you are in) who was able to develop the ideas. You are perpetuating your party’s propaganda — you are simply a cog in a wheel.
Have you thought your position through? Have you thought about the position of the other side and examined it thoroughly? Have you put yourself in the other person’s shoes and tried to imagine why someone would think differently from you instead of coming to conclusions based solely on their immutable traits?
Why do we get angry when our ideas are criticized? People used to be able to separate the ideas they held and the identities they carried. They would criticize each other’s ideas, but would still respect the other person as an individual after the discussion or argument was over.
Now, it’s a matter of having the moral high ground. Now, if people see that you hold a different idea than them, they can consider you evil as an individual. If you and your ideas are evil, they don’t even want to, let alone HAVE TO, discuss your ideas. They can easily write you and your ideas off based on their premise that you are an evil person. All for carrying different ideas
People who engage in identity politics are unable to separate their identities from their ideas. Makes sense. Their ideas are based on their identities. They’re infused together, so criticizing a person’s ideas is now equivalent to criticizing a person’s identity.
It hurts to have your identity attacked. You believe that is who you are and, in some cases, you believe there are traits which you cannot change.
It hurts to have your ideas attacked. People fear of being wrong, looking stupid and feeling uncertain.
Now imagine the pain one would feel if these two were simultaneously challenged. Imagine the pain of admitting that they’re wrong, that a part of their identity isn’t what they believe it is, that their lens of the world could be flawed and incomplete.
You can see why it’s not an easy thing to escape this mindset. You will suffer physically and mentally. You will feel like a walking paradox, a hypocrite. You will feel like parts of you are dying, or in extreme cases, your entire being.
But instead of feeling beaten from this existential angst, you can find comfort in those moments. This is the struggle that you should be looking for, the struggle that is painful now but will award you greatly in the future, the struggle that signifies change and growth.
You are witnessing and feeling your old self dying, and it will hurt. But with pain comes strength, with death comes life, and with suffering comes meaning. The person you believed you were has to die in order for your new being to come to life.
You can think of this process as necessary. Associate this process with the birth and death of the Phoenix: it self-immolates and burns to death, but a new Phoenix will reincarnate from the ashes of its predecessor.
You can live out the process of the birth and death of the Phoenix in your life. Lucky for you, you don’t have to set yourself on fire and hope to revive from your own ashes.
You can, instead, experience a death of your identity, or at least a part of it, in order to bring forth your new self into your life. You can stop thinking about the world in your old ways, learn from your past mistakes, and move forward just a little wiser than before.
Don’t let your identity define your ideas and who you are as a person. Don’t accept the notion that you are to identify with an identity group and live your life based on its ideologies. Don’t accept ideas that are simply given to you without you having to earn it. Don’t follow a group blindly and don’t be afraid to think as an individual should — independently.
Don’t feel personally attacked or offended because of someone’s opposing views. Question everything and start developing your own ideas, your own ideals, and your own principles. Remove your identity from your ideas and treat them separately. Give your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt — listen to them and empathize with their worldview.
Many of us have a lot of dying to do. But it is a necessary death that must happen for us to grow and flourish as individuals and as a society.
Out of our ashes will come forth greater people and a greater world — ones that could not have transpired had there been no death.
