Identity politics

[Cain]

People define themselves in terms of labels.  They use labels such as Communist, Muslim, businessman, woman or AIDS sufferer in order to define their own sense of being and place in the world, how they understand their relations with other people.

Usually, one of these identities is a Totality, that is to say, it is an idea which defines their entire relationship with everything they come into contact with, it defines their purpose and gives them a teleological view of reality.  They filter not only their own personality and identity through this label, but everyone else as well.  Some labels with built in teleological assumptions, like Christianity or Communism, are more conducive to this than others.

The problem is in challenging a person's label is not that you are challenging the label in and of itself.  People acquire labels rather easily, even passively.  Consumerism, as a meta-label, creates many labels from which an individual person can buy into with very little in the way of barriers, for example.  The problem comes with challenging the root assumption which shapes the way they think about the world.

If you do this, the person in question will get angry.  Not because the label, in and of itself, has any worth.  It has meaning, to be sure, but labels have meaning only in how they shape our perceptions of ourselves and others.  It is because it removes a model of reality that has been built up around the philosophical assumptions within that label.  By challenging a long held assumption or model, you are removing their understanding of reality.  In a very real sense, you are throwing them into the metaphysical chaos of reality, without any filters or safeguards to protect the defenceless mind.

The reaction therefore is one of denial, backed by an emotional response.  The best way to avoid dealing with the above situation is to deny the accusations of the person involved.  Because their attack is against the label that defines the world-view, so the logic goes, the attacker feels threatened by the label.  The desire to disprove the label is taken from within the world-view built on the basis of it, according to the person who holds it.  To them, it is impossible to move outside the system  because of its totality, and therefore any contrary evidence must be a plot by the enemies of that system to undermine it.  The system of identity politics therefore creates its own enemies.

The problem therefore comes in direct attack.  While very satisfying and, when done with a neutral audience, educational, it cannot deal with the problem of identity politics on its own.  As I see it, there are only three possible solutions

1  Actions instead of words.  Don't tell a person their world-view is wrong, show them.  Problems are Law of Fives/perception allowing the event to be built into their world-view, denial, rationalizations.
2  Create the conditions of metaphysical chaos in their entirety.  Bypass their denial and rationalizations by creating the mindset and conditions they wish to avoid in their external environment.
3  Consumerism.  Reduce their label to nothing more than another consumer choice within a marketplace of ideas and identities.

Thoughts and comments?

[Cramulus]

Good thoughts. You definitely identified some important bars in the Black Iron Prison.
I think this resonates well with the piece on Ego Sickness. I'll have to think on this more.

[Triple Zero]

very interesting.

a friend of mine (not so good a friend anymore, his shtick has become boring) totally adores Madonna, like a goddess, buys her CDs several times to give them away as presents because he wants them to get higher in the charts.
got himself a kabbalah red wrist string, is proud of the ridiculous amount of money he spent on a piece of string, fully knowing it's bullshit, etc etc etc. and is a "consumer-whore" in a lot of other aspects as well.

i confronted him with some of his more ridiculous (contradictory, even) behaviour a few times, at first he starts defending the lifestyle, like Cain described above, but after a while he can't keep the argument (he doesn't really get angry or walks away though) and just admits he's being irrational or hypocritical, but that he likes it that way.

in a certain sense, when you push him for it, he's applying a sort of meta-label to himself, he wants to play the "glamourish" ultra consumer role.
which could be funny, if it weren't that he's taking the surface-label completely serious all the time, and only admits the meta-label (also for himself it seems) for a few moments when you really engage him in argument about it.

[Verbal Mike]

I've been thinking along similar lines lately, but in a very different way. I found this piece highly illuminating.
I found the last big paragraph ("The reaction therefore...") slightly difficult to understand at first, but I may have just been preoccupied and distracted.

[Bu🤠ns]

i remember a time when i was having a rather surface metaphysical discussion with a fellow co-worker.  at some point i uttered about how the ego seems to be a mechanism that paints our relaity ...blahblahblah. ...  and all of a sudden his whole presence just changed.  he got rather reddish, eyes narrowed and i realized i hit a territory that could go very badly.  so i dropped it.  this thread describes this situation perfectly.  it also reminds me a bit of how some zen schools will get rid of any concept that the student can imagine. this of course creates a bit of anxiety.  often, as i understand it, the student gets to the point where the only thing keeping him from going batshitcrazy is the calm demeanor of the master.  i think this technique relates to the first two techniques.

perhaps another option which might be a variation of some of your 3 would be to somehow plant a seed within a person's consciousness that creates a subtle anxiety that sort of pushes them to investigate into themselves. the seed of doubt, if you will.    the bip booklet, even the 23 things to do while you wait would make for a good catylist.  then it's only a matter of effective placement. perhaps even that might be a bit overt though.

this thread reminds me of how i got into all this hootinanny: i was having anxiety attacks and felt that psilocybin mushrooms might teach me something. they sure as shit did but i was also very introsepctive at the time as opposed to just taking them for the giggles.  TMALSS, it worked...eventually.

i think the important part of the trip was the sense of chaos.  didn't tim leary even say something about that?  the first step toward getting someone to change their 'teleological view of reality'  is to create a state of chaos. and that of course could lead to imprinting. 

for someone to want to change themselves requires a predisposed wantingness to do so. is one RIPE? as far as getting someone to that point...i think that might be much more subtle.

perhaps there might be a way to make the exercises in Prometheus Rising more widely accessable.  maybe rewrite them so that people find themselves doing them without knowing they're doing them?  something along those lines.

[Cain]

I found the last big paragraph ("The reaction therefore...") slightly difficult to understand at first, but I may have just been preoccupied and distracted.

No, it was written badly.  I'll rewrite it, after coffee #3.

[Cramulus]

This essay supports our idea of the Self as the "Sticky Meme". The ego attracts other memes and holds on to them, perhaps because it wants to see some of the connotation of that meme reflected in itself.

I want to look at this using triple zero's "three layers of discordia" model. (000 suggests that Discordia's teachings are good for mindfucking oneself, others, and everybody, perhaps in that order) The piece above frames the discussion. The last bit, about the three ways to help someone clean off their ego without causing a conflict - fits the bill for mindfucking others. But how can you apply this to yourself? I guess it's part of the Jailbreak process - identifying the various memes that get "stuck" to your ego, and getting rid of the ones that don't belong there.

As a personal example, I do not think of myself as a fan of sports. Never really found sports interesting. I've watched about a dozen football games and been to a few baseball games, and they all bore me to tears. I guess I just don't have the team pride that motivates people to enjoy sporting events. It probably has to do with some "last picked" memory from fourth grade or some equally trivial hogwash. This season I'm trying to let myself get geared up for the superbowl. Both of my roommates seem to care this year, and it's an excuse to have a party, so why not let myself get worked up about it?

And then the other layer - mindfucking society. I'll have to think more on this too.

[Cramulus]

by the way, I think this is an appropriate image for this thread

[Bu🤠ns]

i was listening to a lecture on NLP today one of the main ideas is about how to get people to do what we want. the lecturer suggests that we appeal to the basic assumptions of one's belief system that governs the rules associated with the decisions that cause us to act.  he also touches on how often so called experts on any given subject often use incredibly complex reasoning pattern based on their belief structures. metaprograms. the lecturer suggests that in order to influence the expert toward changing his methods is not by referring to subject directly (afterall, he has a reputation to uphold), but by understanding his basic assumptions that make up his model.  once understood, one can be more subtle and effective toward change.

this makes more sense to me...although it might be exciting to try to mindfuck someone overtly it seems more practical to go behind the scenes for the results.

[Verbal Mike]

I've been thinking about that one, burns, and I think the problem lays in the fact that no matter how contrived the basic assumptions are, any world view that "survives" for any length of time must be coherent to a certain degree, and then mask its own incoherences, whatever they may be and no matter how numerous. So you're trapped into the same mistakes and fallacies the expert makes. And the whole complex protects itself. Your only hope lies in attacking the inconsistencies, and any robust complex of beliefs will inherently defend itself against just such an attack. In some religions this is particularly clear, with the "but you must have faith" line often overriding any logical examination of inconsistencies.
I find it often more effective to just drop all previous assumptions, shave down an issue so that you can present it as a clear choice between two or three options, then follow each of them logically to see which one is most agreeable (or sometimes follow them logically to reach the conclusion they are the same and do not contain a contradiction.)
I may be a little off here because I'm making ridiculously broad generalizations and I haven't even had lunch yet, but these are my five cents right now.