As you know, everything is about “me” in these times. The world revolves around “me”. In praxis, there are in fact over 8 billion tiny worlds, withing one another’s orbit, the compose “the world.”

So, let’s jump in. JD Vance recently said:

we’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

He’s making a new identity group: childless cat ladies. How do I know this?

Now, you can “belong” to the childless cat lady identity. And this, then, completes your political identity:

The T-shirt factor is essential to identity politics: since these are not really your beliefs – you never thought of this until some “hillbilly” (see my JD Vance defense articles) GAVE YOU an identity, you have to wear a shirt. Let me explain: when your identity contains, say, schizophrenia, you don’t buy a t-shirt. It’s REALLY a part of your identity. Maybe easier, but much more controversial, to talk about sex. Years ago, you looked down and saw your penis, and you did not really think about whether it was a part of your identity, or not. On the other side of the argument, it WAS a big part of your identity, but you were just ignorant of that – but other people, less white, less male, surely felt that – they had to bear the “anti-identity” – that’s the one where all Jews had to wear a yellow armband, but non-Jewish? Well, nothing for you folks to worry about.

But then the trend started to become more and more refined: starting in the late 60’s, we actually had new identities, that were NOT biologically linked in some cases: hippies, for example. But then, even the biological ones, which weren’t really identities prior, became identities: Black, spelled with a capital “B” . I remember a time, in the RECENT past, when the standard was black with lower-case. Look at AP style from 2020, which clearly shows inequity of standards, with predicative reasoning – and this started in June of 2020!:

Also in the 70’s, Women became an identity – again, not saying that it wasn’t valid previously, at least as a personal identification. But was not t-shirt worthy until it became a political factor.

These days, I would say that the degree of stratification and surge in identification “labels” has spiraled out of control. Ok, let me change “out of control” – better to say its meaning is getting lost or crowded out, or, certainly, diffused. If you walk into a store with a t-shirt with one identity, your hair is dyed rainbow, you have a septum ring, etc. – I’m not sure there is an effective word for who you are.

And well, it’s all kind of old stuff: the Buddhists and Hindus have told us for thousands of years NOT to “identify” with a persona. Freud told us that we would, despite the Buddhists and Hindus, anyway. In case you didn’t read Freud in German, or the Yoga Sutras in Sanksrit, it says that these identifications may ultimately confuse you, in your search for a “real” identity, and may cause you to, say, do rash, irretractable actions, which may haunt you (literally, like a ghost). These identities are, sorry to say, transient, and, to follow a transient thing will lead you to a place which may disappear on you, one fine day.