On Identity.
If you see yourself as living in a world-without-meaning, a world void of order or goodness, then your identity will be set upon a ground of disappointment, and the structure you build it upon it will be one of self-centeredness and pleasure seeking. In a world-without-meaning, addiction fills the void.
There is nothing more painful than not being noticed. And because specialness needs to be earned, when the path to its earning is made unclear, specialness inverts and is earned to the negative. So, when a person has no contribution to make, their identity will drift toward self-centeredness. They will break the rules, transgress cultural norms, wander the forbidden halls of taboo and self-destruction, and will even surgically rearrange their own body parts all as a desperate cry for attention.
This is not their fault, but the consequences will be theirs and will be ours too. The destiny of any culture who births this worldview, is a culture destined for slavery, tyranny, and ruin.
Our cultural conflict over the meaning of the word identity, boils down to worldview. Two worldviews. The first, as mentioned, takes shape from desperation and deprivation.
Here’s the second:
If you see yourself as living in a world-worth-loving, where everything in it serves an ecosystem that gives and sustains life, then you will identify with your role in upholding that system. If you love and respect life’s system, then that system becomes your beacon of beauty, while you become that system’s beacon of utility. There is no need to seek beauty if beauty itself is the basis of all that is real.
A person’s identity is given a word. Words matter. Matter… means real and of importance. And words are the mind’s container for matter. We share words because between us is something real. Fantasy is personal. Our survival does not require fantasy being spoken. What use is a word if words themselves are divorced from their object’s utility? Where the word and the object meet is at a place called usefulness. If you love life and love the ground upon which existence stands, if you respect reality and respect the effort required in holding reality together, then you identify with your useful role.
If we allow the meaning of words to decay, if we allow matter to be drained from the word, then what are we left with?
A people who take life’s utility for granted. A people who will take the food, the water, the soil, the rules, the language, and the cultural trust-building customs, all for granted. They will feel entitled to the essentials-of-life while ignoring their responsibilities in upholding those essentials. They will believe that everything in the world exists only to serve their own pleasure preferences. For those whom pleasure’s obsession fills the entirety of their minds, life’s precious meaning is absent. Utility, sacrifice, God, gratitude, and love, all absent, thus one’s humanness has been thereby eviscerated.
When identity shifts away from the bonds that hold life’s meaning together, what remains is a black hole, a hole that longs to fill itself with both sensory pleasure and negatively earned specialness, it is a volcanic hole from which anger and resentment will soon erupt. This bitterness fuels the most evil of acts disguised under a banner of so-called “justice.” We see it displayed in today’s endless virtue signaling and phony activism.
In a desperate attempt to be recognized with the good, those who are emotionally homeless will scheme, as to appear of the good. They show up empty-handed but with a deceptive story as to “why.” They spin yarns of oppressor versus oppressed narrative, as this tactic helps them earn their victim card, and with it, permits them all level of violence and corruption. After attacking and defeating their scapegoat, they cheer like jackals.
Defeating imaginary evil always places the victor on the side of the imaginary good. Such is the Justice Warrior. They set their city aflame, then emerge unmasked, wielding water and hose, attacking the fire they secretly set, all in hopes of earning false admiration. This is reparation for their having been disincentivized during childhood. If a child is not useful, then whatever dignity they gather, will be as empty as their inevitable virtue signaling. These are telltale signs of a people who feel alone and unwanted, a people whose rage and infinite alienation hides beneath the seemingly benevolent smile of the masked arsonist.
Justice may be blind, but justice is not blindness. Ignorance is blindness. No matter where blindness meanders, it never finds any end to its own justifications for theft, murder, cheating, and bullying, and it always wears a self-congratulating smile of false virtue.
Communities are held together by people who work together. Those unwilling to do the work will wave flags -not their own- while screaming for, “justice.” So too, cancer makes demands of its host. It’s a parasite believing itself owed its fair share yet contributes nothing of value to anything but itself. Cancer needs a body, the body doesn’t need cancer.
If one’s identity is disconnected from a community’s REAL NEEDS, then that person has lost connection to the meaning of the word, meaning. They roam aimlessly, desperate to find something worth believing in. They don’t “live” life, they merely cope.
In their vast sea of meaninglessness, they cling to driftwood; they shape a lifestyle out of fragments. They join lifestyle clubs defined by sexual preference and trauma bonding, all a race to the bottom, each person displaying their badge of personal victim fiction. They assume that this shallow form of fashionable belonging is the best that life has to offer. And beneath this obsession, is the anger addict, who under the guise of “peace, love, justice, unity, equity, and inclusion” will join with others like cells of a tumor. The “Justice Warrior,” is of no use whatsoever to any underserved community and offers no benefit to the actual communities in which they live. Again, it’s not their fault for their having been mentally displaced.
Justice is real. Responsibility is real. But, the identity of the “Justice Warrior” is a fraud. What is the consequence?
Totalitarians and authoritarians take hold of a culture when that culture forfeits meaning andreplaces it with sensory pleasure. Pleasure-based identities, or better said, coping-based identities, are the symptom, they are not the problem. We should look no further than ourselves for the problem. We did this to ourselves when we outsourced education, storytelling, health, and leadership, to those who wish to exploit us.
Parents who have forgotten how to deliver meaning, are by default creating addicts and nihilists, these children are modernity’s future slaves. Poor parenting is causing this current cultural plague upon all that holds the human and the good together.
Our humanness is not within us individually, but within the bonds between us, the bonds between those with whom we collaborate and survive. Feeding those bonds is what it means to live like a human. If the bonds dissolve, life’s meaning dissolves, and when meaning dissolves, only fear, addiction, victimhood, and alienation remain. Every mindless leftist revolution starts here because it’s easy for tyrants to rally a herd of unhappy people. Little do these people know that those who have systematically seeded this unhappiness are the tyrants to whom the herd has given their allegiance. This successful tactic is where the term, “useful idiot” comes from.
If you are a mother or a father, and wish to save our nation from tyranny, then become a liberty-based parent, a parent who delivers meaning, instead of meaninglessness, usefulness instead of amusement. Help your community preserve that which is most essential to our humanness. How? As parents you must deliver a message of usefulness. You must help nourish that which is already beautiful, functional, and good, thus you must inspire your children to serve the world that already exists.
If a child loves a world that exists, then they won’t search for a world that doesn’t, they won’t get duped into seeking fake utopian worlds fabricated by tyrants who exploit those who dwell in meaninglessness. Your job as parent is to reveal a world that’s real and worth participating in.
Your message of usefulness can be delivered through stories, through deliberate action, and through the activities that help your children feel both needed and valued for their useful contributions. Identity has all to do with the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Those who want to enslave us wish us to tell ourselves a story about helplessness, a story about life’s pain, such that pleasure and revenge become the highest respite. When pleasure is valued higher than liberty, dignity, and self-reliance, then by default, we’ve placed ourselves in the tyrant’s hands, into the hands of those who falsely promise to grant us pleasure’s access, using slogans like, “HOPE.”
Liberty starts in the home, humanness starts in the home, collaboration starts in the home, and community starts in the home. As parents, we must create homes that’s live up to the word, home. We must live up to that standard which supports liberty’s nonnegotiable responsibilities. We must become the parents that liberty’s children need us to be.
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