Newsletter #87: Identity Is the Foundation of Everything

If you don't know who you are, you don't know what to do

Please read until the end for an important announcement about my monthly newsletter.

---

Your identity is the foundation and the heart of everything. Because if you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what to do.

One of the best examples of this is the Walt Disney animated film The Lion King (spoilers). The Lion King tells the story of a young lion named Simba. He’s the son of the king of the lions. His uncle is jealous of Simba and his father, and hatches a plot with the hyenas to kill them and take over the land. This plot succeeds, except for one thing: Simba himself escapes into the desert.

Simba is befriended by two stranger animals, who take him to live with them in an oasis. They pass on to him their philosophy of life, which is "hakuna matata,” Swahili for “no worries.”

Years go by and Simba grows into a young man. He’s still living a carefree life in his new home. He eats, he plays, he lounges around. Nobody can do anything to him because he’s a lion.

One of his father’s old advisors, a monkey named Rafiki, tracks Simba down and confronts him. He tells Simba, “You don’t even know who you are.”

Rafiki then tells Simba that his father is alive and promises to show him where, then runs off. Simba chases Rafiki to a river, where Rafiki tells him to look into the water. Seeing his own face in the water, Simba says, “That’s not my father. It’s just my reflection.” Rafiki tells him to look again.

Simba looks into the water and his reflection dissolves and he has a mystical encounter with the ghost of his father. After that, he realizes something he’d never known before. Wait a minute. I’m the lion king. I am the king of the lions.

Once he knows who he is, Simba knows he can’t keep living the life he’s been living. He has to go back and set things right, and restore peace and flourishing in the land.

Once Simba knew who he was, then he knew what to do.

My Personal Identity

What are our identities? I will share some of my own.

I’m a Christian. There’s a lot the Bible tells us about what that means, but I’ll share just two aspects of it. Ephesians 1:5 says, “God predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.”

Christianity teaches that we’ve been adopted as sons of God. Like Simba, we are now part of a royal family. If I truly believe that, wouldn’t it change how I act? That’s a high calling to live up to. It elevates our sights in terms of how we aspire to live. It’s a big responsibility. It comes with a work to do and a code of conduct by which to live. As Paul wrote, “Do you not know that we will judge angels?”

Christianity also teaches that we have received a secure inheritance. 1 Peter 1:4 says we have “obtained an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away.”

If I truly believe that I have a trust fund I can’t ever lose, wouldn’t that also change how I live? It means I can make full contact with life. I can put myself out there. I can take risks. I can lean into discomfort.

I’m also an American. This is my country. Americans are my people. I’m not a citizen of anywhere. I’m not a citizen of nowhere. I’m a citizen of this place. I have a responsibility to uphold and a legacy to extend for the United States.

I’m a husband to my wife Katy and a father to my son Alex. That means I have to think about them, not just about myself.

I am also a man, and that has implications too.

What I truly believe deep down about my identity shapes how I live my life, what I do.

Who are you? What is your identity?

All of us have multiple identities, not just one. In fact, it’s unhealthy to try to reduce everything to just one identity. If my identity is solely as a father, then if, God forbid, something were to happen to my son, I would also lose my identity.

Identity Is Dangerous

Identity is dangerous. When Simba realized who he was, all of a sudden he became a threat to the tyrannical usurpers that had taken over the land.

The people running our society also want to sever you from any connection to an identity that might threaten their hold on power.

Think about how they talk about America, for example. Listening to many of our official organs, you’d think America was nothing but a collection of historic injustices. It’s the 1619 Project view of America.

Why is this? Well, there are multiple things going into it, but one of them is that they want you to be ashamed to identify with America in anything other than a negative way. Because if you identify as an American who stands in a great and noble - if certainly far from perfect - tradition, then you are a potential threat to the way they might want to transform the country.

They also don’t want you to have a positive identity as a man. Seldom does the media say a good word about what it means to be a man. You’re much more likely to hear about “toxic masculinity.”

Even conservatives and the church have stripped masculinity of virtually all of its positive content, reducing it to a) a collection of bad character elements that need to be suppressed and b) an obligation to sacrifice everything in order to serve other people and their priorities.

Our society actively works to destroy our sense of identity. All given, ascribed, inherited identities are treated as illegitimate or even evil. They have to be destroyed, deconstructed in order for us to create our own identity, which arises from some mysterious place within.

But there’s more to it than a simple liberationist project. Stripping people of their identity keeps them weak, renders them inert. Only those identities which strengthen the system rather than threaten it are validated.

The reality is that a lot of people in top positions of our society act as if they want you living like Simba. They want porn available for you to watch. They want you betting on the big game on your phone. They want you focused on “experiences” and consumption, like hitting the latest hot travel destination or going to the new farm-to-table restaurant that just opened.

They want you to define yourself as an atomized individual without much of an identity beyond consumer.

You can’t let other people rob you of your identity, or substitute their preferred identities for your genuine ones.

Identity is powerful. Identity is foundational.

Who are you?

Changes to My Newsletter

As some of you know, for several years I published this newsletter just once per month, originally under the name The Masculinist. When I moved to Substack, I rebranded under my name, and now publish articles regularly.

I’ve still kept one issue per month that I refer to as my “newsletter,” but it’s a bit awkward with the way I produce content now.

So I’m rebranding my “newsletter” as “Deep Reads” and no longer publishing on a fixed schedule at mid-month. Instead, as I write long form or big think type essays, I will include them in the Deep Reads category here on Substack. You will still receive them by email.

To be clear, I’m not going to stop writing long form newsletters, I’m just calling them something different and not putting them on a fixed monthly schedule.

Thank you so much for your loyal readership over the years, and I hope for many years to come.

Coda

Finally, the politics of recognition is no more than what its name signifies, the reduction of identity to a political tool that elites may wield as they see fit. The increasingly tortured efforts to define group identity among multiculturalists always come back to the need to validate what is arbitrary. This arbitrariness operates in two ways. Identity, for Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, is a subjective choice, which brings a cultural dimension or entails an ideological stance (the two are not mutually exclusive). Identity is not something that defines a subject, but something the subject may assume for a particular reason at a particular point. Presumably, identity is a condition one may feel inclined to slough off as one’s position in life changes – or else as one ceases to feel victimized.

Identity as recognition, however, is something to be granted, which means (and the multiculturalists are politically right here) by those in power or by those who intend to seize it. The predicate does not have an ontological status that it adheres to, as it does in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or an evolutionary or more or less fixed character, as it does in the anthropology of classical conservatism.  Identity as understood here has a relational and confrontational content and is contingent for its own validation on those who bestow political acknowledgement. This last qualification is essential for understanding the connection of the new identitarian politics to the managerial state. Identity is something to be extended or withheld, depending on whether a person or collection of persons is beneficial to what the regime in question is undertaking.

- Paul Gottfield, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt