Justice for the self: identifying ourselves (why understanding and describing ourselves in specific terms is a profound disservice)

Abstract

Unless we are able to communicate the idea of who we are, in our own words, we are never going to have control on how we are known. If we are known in a way that does not fulfil our own sense of who we are and what we are doing, we can be disillusioned. This disillusionment is not of a trivial variety — it is fundamental and existential.

Text

Once upon a time, there was an individual who was able to live as he was. He did not practice any deceit. He held himself in an exalted state of transparency. Some things became more simple and some things became more difficult. For instance, the pursuit of happiness became a triviality and the desire to relish his own experience became an impossibility. Happiness is a state of equivalence between one’s social and one’s internal reality. When there is no conflict anymore and no tussle between the beauty of the bubble of anonymity and the pain of the injustice of being misunderstood, happiness is not far. So when he decided to live as he was, he was always happy but he was also oblivious to his own experience.

We cannot live without a little bit of disappointment in life. Even if we achieve a relatively high state of equivalence between our social and our internal reality, there still would be some difference between what we know of ourselves and what we can tell others about who we are. This is because language cannot contain our essence fully. No, neither can we understand who we are and how we would describe ourselves nor do we have enough words and sounds to contain the range of what we feel.

Of course this fact is exploited and taken advantage of as much as possible but only because we secretly still nurture a hope to not just know but also articulate who we are. For a magic moment if we are able to use language expansively and poetically and communicate ourselves accurately, what might happen?

When we hope for being able to clarify our story, we betray ourselves. The thing is that we are stuck in a balance and we ought to recognise that in order to be able to change the state. The system does not like to be stuck. It likes to be in a decisive state. Actually it prefers to be decisive rather than be morally correct. It does not care for the figurative high road. After a point, every road you are going to take is going to be low but the system goes on because it must. The urge in the system to go on is similar to the way in which sometimes we walk in order to remain standing at all. Being still is only a choice if we are open to falling down.

We cannot state ourselves clearly and at the same time we must not state ourselves clearly.

Suspended within this film of ambiguity and unknowing, is the ideal level of self-awareness.

Spirituality is exaggerated. It might well be convenient to know the indicators of spiritual progress but to flatter ourselves that we have actually made this progress is just pretentiousness.

We do not decry the value of pretensions. Pretensions are very helpful learning tools. Think of pretensions like what it means to try on a new dress. We try on attitudes and perspectives by faking them.

If we only feel and embody states that we can back up with evidence, we would be like zombies — unfeeling, stony and thick skinned. We are staggered accidents and the most significant reason for not even attempting to state who we are is because when the cycle of staggered accidents is continual, the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

Doing nothing doesn’t mean resisting the urge to act, but rather it means to understand actions and behaviours as part of a checker-board occupied by actors who are just pegs on the landscape.

One way to navigate this puzzle is by traversing our own story only minimally. We need to form the habit of working with the approach of discovery and surprise as far as as our personal material is concerned. We cannot know ourselves with any degree of certainty because we do not represent any static set of material. By defining ourselves and by stating it based only on our past interests or activities is a limiting act that binds our desires within a narrative.

We resist attempts of projecting a pattern on our behaviour but when we ourselves do it, we embrace the effort like an inevitability.

Embracing behavioural patterns and manipulating what we seem to be can be an easy way out in the pursuit of being understood but it fundamentally sabotages any potential that we might have held, it is an easy way to nullify any value that our existence might have had.

As far as the experience of mental well-being is concerned, although the state of blurred self-perception causes some discomfort, this discomfort cannot even be compared to the pain of conforming to our own ideas of who we might be.

It is generally beneficial to not even engage with the identifying process. Situations and scenarios offer us the easy option of identifying as something or the other. At this point we should remember that identifying as someone is easier than attempting to wriggle out of this identity.

Once we have been identified, the thickness of the plot demands that we play our part and live up to whatever the role demands. If we do the job as expected then there is no problem but if we are not able to do so then there is a discord between us. We get conflicted.

In this conflicted state, there is a resistance towards playing the assigned part and there is only a kind of appreciation of the fact that if we really made an effort, acting the part might actually be an enjoyable process.

Why should we feel attracted to the means of our own enslavement? Funnily enough we get attracted to the means of our enslavement as a possible means of liberation. The emancipatory potential of acting is generally the principle which motivates the actor to get immersed in the first place.

Some actors do not manage to connect to the parts that they have to play. They perform reluctantly and immersion never emerges for them to experience any lucid moment in which they feel liberated. So, eventually they are able to snap out of the appeal of identification and enjoy floating in the anonymous, unidentified scope of human culture.

In this cultural sphere, there is a great deal of allowance that is given for the kind of pose that individual actors strike. Doing something and acting as someone does not mean actually being someone. The role of long term memory is minimised with the result that nobody actually remembers concepts over time. In the long run, everyone is just a runner. Nobody has any special role to play because who is anyone to begin with?