[burritas]

It seems to be the thing nowadays to be preoccupied with the notion of your own identity, and I can't help but feel like it's just navel gazing. Maybe it's social media and the culture of self promotion, but I find it pretty hollow and uninteresting.

I have a young kid in my family that's fixated with gender and sexuality and they said one day "I just want to get diagnosed so I know what I am," to which I said "It's not what you are that's important, it's what you want to do." That seemed to be an epiphany for them.

[lo_zamoyski]

Poor kid. He's been subjected to what amounts to child abuse. Sadly, that is the norm.

Some say that we have an identity crisis in part because of our liberal, existentialist, non-committal notions of "freedom". It's also what drives much of the opportunism of FOMO and ADHD. The very notions of sacrifice, commitment, suffering for a good, and devotion repel us (whatever "commitments" we do have are merely emotional phantasms, changing as the wind blows). We reject our familial, communal, ethnic, national, religious commitments -- even commitment to the truth as such -- which we have come to detest as "restrictive" or "oppressive" in favor of a misguided notion of "autonomy"...except that this "autonomy" is achieved precisely by rejecting all that helps us understand who we are from different angles and at varying depths. We become socially alienated and cut off from tradition as such, saddled now with the responsibility of figuring it all out ourselves. What a Herculean task!

Of course, nature abhors a vacuum. The irony is that the abolition of authority and tradition only predisposes us to the tyranny of power. (Incidentally, that's how "community organizing" works: it foments animosity against legitimate authority and its legitimate exercise and then uses it to unseat that authority, whether personal or in the form of tradition, not to "free" people from the real or imagined tyranny of that authority, but to remove what is an obstacle to the power of the dictator who outstrips any of the abuses of his predecessors.) Nobody is easier to control than an ignorant, irrational, atomized human being enslaved to his emotions and to his desires, in a state of fear, disorientation, and disregulation. A man has as many masters as he has vices, spake Augustine.

It is little wonder that, given this crippled and desiccated state, we look for our "identities" in superstition and petty nonsense and in what remains, what is base, as if we were trying to divine the future from tea leaves. We think that the kernel of the "true self" lies hidden in what is base, not in human nature as a whole and what it is ordered toward. Reason is a liar. The orgasm is our beatific vision. Consumption is our creed. Emotion is our revelation.

[vore]

"Child abuse"? Please, give me a break. This is no different to any kid muddling through adolescence and trying to make sense of their emotions as they grow up. Just because it's about gender and sexuality doesn't make it child abuse.