600 294925682 The Failures of Identity and Personality

The Failures of Identity and Personality

identity politics The Failures of Identity and Personality

Identity is everywhere these days. It’s at the heart of what every American is trying to accomplish. To build a convincing story with their resume; to create an image through their social media profiles; to do well at work so that it strengthens their reputation. Ultimately, it’s a culture of personality, not a culture of character — this state of mind is creating a number of problems in our society, from the workplace, to the way our government operates, to the way we treat one another in our personal lives.

The impact of this culture of identity is universal. In all instances, we’ve created a situation where everyone has implicit incentives to lie about themselves. On online dating profiles, people lie about what they want and who they are. At your workplace, you lie about your engagement level, interests and happiness. Politicians lie and pander to any group — and instead of holding them accountable for this, we have become more like them in our day to day existences. All of this in service to our own eggshell images.

Not only have we changed the way we present ourselves, we’ve changed the way that we judge others. Today, the people most advantaged in society are those who can appear charismatic, friendly and to have the ‘right’ views at a glance, who can slip into a group just long enough to reap rewards, and then slip out before their true self is ever discovered. When these people stick around we often find we have buyer’s remorse; luckily, in this day and age, where job-hopping is commonplace and the idea of lifelong friends, or a lifetime spent in the same town are deeply antiquated concepts, having a strong character which reveals itself over the long term has become a trait that people pay little attention to.

personality character The Failures of Identity and Personality

Honesty? A liability — give an honest critique to your boss, you’ll be fired; an honest review of your job applicant, you’ll be sued; an honest account of your government, you’ll be audited or worse. Loyalty? A liability — employee loyalty is met with layoffs and pension busting; as an employer it’s met with insubordination and increasingly incredulous demands. Integrity? A liability, as everyone is considered so replaceable that taking a stand of any kind is met with rejection in all kinds of relationships. Honor? The most dangerous liability of all — after all, could people of honor ever ascend to the top of a society that spies on its own people and lies about it, poisons its own drinking water for profit, or propagandizes the schemes of the powerful?

We’ve developed a society where we segment ourselves, in the most categorically appalling ways possible. In terms of politics and consumerism, we allowed ourselves to be defined in severely racist, classist voting and marketing blocs rather than as individuals. And it manifests in our day to day lives — we look at people and decide, in an instant, whether they’re on the same ‘team’ as us, whether a product is ‘for us’ or for the dreaded ‘them’.

Somehow, as a form of progress, we look at a person, and before we ever see their ideas, we see their race, gender, class, hometown, political leanings and any number of irrelevant things in order to try to intuit whether they’re ‘one of us’. If so, we embrace them despite any flaws we may find; if not we reject them wholly as a package, including any of their ideas we may like. As if a woman would never hurt another woman, or a liberal could never be a racist, or a rich person could never give help to a poor person without strings attached, or a white man could never help provide opportunity to minorities.

cultcharacter 1 The Failures of Identity and Personality

It’s manifested itself in our politics. Barack Obama of course received votes for and against him because of identity, and already with Hillary Clinton we’re seeing people teeing up to vote for the first woman president. All this before any mention of their ideas, their record or their background. Under Barack Obama, black household wealth and employment dropped dramatically, more quickly than any other segment of the population; and Hillary Clinton’s first stop for her super PAC fundraising was Wall Street, where she accepted $400,000 and promised to play nice with them, when the number one liberal issue is income inequality.

The issue here is not either one of these candidates specifically, but the example of the problem in practice: people are concerned with the image of others, easily painted on, rather than their substance. These examples showcase another problem with identity politics: people belong to so many groups, that when you align with them due to self-identifying as a member of a group they also inhabit, you ignore all the groups they inhabit which are your enemies.

It results, in effect, in a critical thought process wherein people try to play identity calculus in order to decide whether or not someone is with you or against you — i.e. “Well, I’m a woman, and she’s a woman, so that’s good, but I’m poor and she’s rich, so that’s bad.” Not only does this dis-empower people’s ability to think critically about the views and impact of famous figures they will never meet, it erodes the relationships that are actually attainable to you as you start pre-judging people and projecting views onto people before they’ve ever said a word.

All of this takes place, paradoxically, during a time where privacy is eroding more quickly than ever. Every day someone new is revealed to have made some sort of mistake which pins a label to them and comes to define their entire life. Take the racist NBA owner, Sterling — certainly his comments were racist, but what’s happened here is emblematic of a strange turn in society where the population is increasingly empowered to prosecute people in the court of public opinion, circumventing the law entirely, with no checks, balances, trials, due process, evidence, full view of a situation, or relation to an incident whatsoever.

Combined with society’s increasing reliance on shallow, immediate image to judge one another, this is a recipe for disaster. The next person to be ostracized from society may be a perfectly nice man or woman, put under the gun for no reason and robbed of their livelihood and reputation in a way that is irreversible. The fact is, as privacy lowers, we will see people’s private perversions and misguided beliefs or even their perfectly normal behaviors and perfectly justifiably beliefs that we simply disagree with. Rather than treat these people as human, with complex lives, feelings and histories, we will immediately label and indict them.

kinsey02 The Failures of Identity and Personality Analogously, this period is like the time when Kinsey recorded the sexual behaviors of the population. The first people to be exposed were thought to be perverts — and then slowly everyone realized that everyone was a pervert, those shouting down others at the top of the pile. We will realize as privacy further erodes that none of us are perfect, and we will lament that we lashed out so harshly at some simply because they were the first to be found.So what can be done? How do we turn back from our descent into the politics of identity and aim toward a politics of ideas and actions? How do we turn our back on the culture of personality and aim toward a culture of character?

The answer can’t be policed. It won’t be forced on you. The answer needs to come from within yourself.Each and every person in this country has a choice — do I trust this person based who he or she is or what he or she says and does? Do I decide to hire this person because I like them in one interview, or should I hire people on for a trial period and see how they actually perform? Do I reject this date because he or she doesn’t fit what I’ve created in my mind to be the person I’m seeking, or should I learn who they actually are?

We’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where we hire/vote for/reject/associate with images — not people themselves. The things we judge may not be real, but the people they affect are — including ourselves. It’s time for the culture to change. Not for it to be changed, by some company or some media blitz or some hashtag campaign. For it to change. For us to change. For us to try to see whole people — to try to close all this distance that’s been growing, even as technology forcibly connects us to people we’ll never actually meet or know.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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