Friday 4 May 2012

Against identity politics

MANIFESTO
Both right-wing and left-wing forms of identity politics involve maintaining identities by means of psychological projection.   Both compel people to comply with limiting and often pathological ideas, expressed as certainties about the nature of the world and who they are in it.

Conservatives draw their boundaries of identities along nationalist lines, whereas liberals often mistakenly maintain that historical scores can be settled by attributing fixed identities to groups of people who have been the unfortunate victims of historical oppression.   Their historical "oppressors"are also compelled to wear an eternal and fixed identity as evil-doers.

The principles of intellectual shamanism run counter to this contemporary ideology that rules the world.  Intellectual shamanism urges that a robust sense of identity is only possible when one does not to attach any meaning or value to claims about whom one is essentially.

Intellectual shamanism considers "identity" to spring from the natural world.  It is therefore subject to change in exactly the same way natural environments change over time. Therefore there can never be a nature or an essence that can eternally define one's identity.   One was born to move naturally, instead, within an open environment.

Positioned in stark contrast with shamanistic notions of freedom are those who use guilt and shame in order to manipulate others.   They use identity politics to shift their disgust with themselves onto those whom they deem to be less worthy -- often onto they deem to be moral inferiors for not playing their game.   Everyone must pay a price for the short term psychological benefits identity politicians gain by making others pay for their historical inadequacies.  Making matters worse, despite proclamations to the contrary, historical injustices are not reddressed by means of these machinations.
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*  Sometimes the apparent evil-doers are not at all oppressors, but people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity