The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'painting of freedom.'
I've been thinking lately about identity. Specifically, I've been thinking about how identity has increasingly been weaponized in recent years. Racial identity. Gender identity. Sexual identity. These things have become the exclusive focus of the blue bloc, which seeks simultaneously to elevate individuals with the correct identities into positions of power and to punish those with incorrect identities for their perceived misdeeds against those with the more desirable identities.
Within the blue bloc, this new formulation of identity has replaced more traditional formulations of identity, which were mostly based on religion, vocation, and geography. This replacement of the basis for identity seems very disempowering. Instead of defining people by what they do, it defines them by things they have no control over. These involuntary identities are then used to prescribe political and social action.
Who to vote for. Who to cancel. What to talk about and what to avoid talking about. If you accept identity politics, there's no real choice involved in any of this. Not only is it dehumanizing to regard people as machines articulating involuntary identities, it's a preposterous oversimplification of what makes us us. And one of the things that's flowed from it is a massive attempt to prescribe speech for absolutely everyone.
There are several aspects of my identity that I didn't choose. And some of these, like chronic illness, have definitely worked against me, making me less in the eyes of others. But it never made sense to allow these qualities of my person to define me. It never made sense to identify with them.
The control regime loves identity politics. They're an excellent compliment to the reactionary politics it supports in the red bloc. This combination of identity politics and reactionary politics guarantees perpetual public drama without a chance of something substantive ever being considered. On the extremes, woke totalitarians and the alt right both advocate the reduction of freedom by various names.
At this point, freedom is a dirty word to the blues. It's a red word, and that's unfortunate. It should be an American word. A human word. A word we can all use to describe our natural state of being, or at least an ideal we're working towards.
I'm not sure what could improve the identity politics situation. There are just so many people so lost in it, embedded within social realities that won't let them change. And media echo chambers endlessly reinforce the involuntary identities paradigm. There appears to be no space in public discourse for anything better, which is probably the point.
What we really need, in my opinion, are more and better grassroots communication networks. We also need 10x more decent independent media outlets. Ultimately, I'd like to see an entire online world free from the influence of the control regime. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here on Hive.
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