[Insert word] identity and the need/demand for affirmation

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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Foreword:

I thought about how to formulate this topic in a non offensive way, but… ultimately if someone wants to interpret something as bad faith there is nothing i can do about it, so i will just get this out of the way: None of what i say is meant as an offense or critique and i have no problems with any of the mentioned communities.
If anything, its a statement about my own inability to comprehend a certain “mindset”.

Where i am coming from:

Identity is a built in feature of self-awareness.
I think, therefore i am, and i am aware of myself so i can define myself.
I know who i am and who i am not.
I know what i am and what i am not.
No external feedback is required to tell me that i am.

The problem:

The first and foremost example of the issue would be the Trans community and all kinds of wild ideas about having to use their pronouns and affirm their self-constructed identity because if i do not do as such, then i commit murder and genocide against them, because not supporting their narratives puts them at risk of self-harm.

Basically ideologies like what the trans community communicates work in the reverse.
According to their logic, it does not depend on them whether or not they exist, but instead on everyone else.
”Others think of me, therefore i am”

Is this related to the inability to accept one’s self?
Or where does this absurdity come from? What is it based on?
Is it just an exercise in trying to control others via narrative? Some kind of narcissist/sociopath phenomena?

Cause i admit this is absurd to me on a level that i cannot process it.
If you want to believe that you are an otherkin, then you can do so. No external feedback is required.
If you want to believe that you are a different gender, then you can do so. No external feedback is required.
If you want to believe that you are jebus chribs reincarnated, then you can do so. No external feedback is required.

There is only one single reality inside that skull of yours, and that is the one you acknowledge to be real.
Every problem you have is self created, self inflicted and self affirmed.
You can own nothing and still be content and happy.
You can own everything and still feel like you have nothing.

Its one of the conclusions of the three truths problem.
The whole, all encompassing truth exists, but we as human beings will always without fail live in our subjective impression of reality. We live in a reality we perceive to be true. Not more, and most certainly not less.

So the notion that someone comes to me and tells me that i need to affirm them in anyway is just about as complete insanity as i can picture it.
What kind of mindset or complete lack of awareness and thought would make anyone say that their existence depends on someone else? Who am i? Your writer? Are you a fairytale demanding of me to be written?
What is this?

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Getting some radical individualism vibes from this post. Some libertine idealism, possibly a Randian objectivist or libertarian.

Which one are you?

:clown_face:

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None. Nor was this my question.
But if you insist, im going to happily listen to your breakdown of what kind of categories and boxes you can put me into based on what i asked.

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“I know what I know.”

I want to know too.

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@Nausamedu

Identity is a common thing of the human experience and not understanding identity might suggest you have none of your own.

Of course, I’ll agree with you that there are some crazy forms of identity out there that borders on mental illness.

What is your psychological or individual extrapolation from all of that?

:clown_face:

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Thats a confusing idea.
Propose i have an internalized idea and concept of myself even if it does not overlap with my physical characteristics. A trans person in example.
In one form or another, they have an identity. One could argue that they have multiple ones.

Still that does not answer the question why they’d need to demand others to affirm it.

I’d argue that self-awareness goes a bit deeper than simple knowledge.

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It demands honesty. And acceptance.

And knowledge is never simple.

And I think you already answered all of your questions by asking this one:

Yes.

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Can you expand on this? How you picture it?
Cause personally this line of thought is completely alien to me.
Everyone strives for acceptance and approval, but… everyone also carries a mask.
The very fact that we are never completely honest about our-self towards the group already proves that we automatically cradle and prioritize our own identities whether or not we accept it or dont.

I mean following this idea, even those who hate themselves have a more solid identity and picture of self than someone who’d demand of others to affirm their makeshift identity…
In a way i kinda start to drift towards this comment:

Whether you love yourself or hate yourself, you have an understanding of your own identity and in neither cases would you demand of others to affirm it.
But i guess if you had none…
How does a person function without an identity? What does that thought process even look like?

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I’ll try to explain it from the only perspective I know, which is my own perspective.

I got to a quiet point in my eventful life where I had time to take stock of who I am. I asked myself some serious questions, and tried to answer them as honestly as I possibly could. Because I’ve done many questionable things in my life, it made me wonder what kind of person I am—not who I was yesterday, or years ago, but who I am right now. I guess the big question was “on the whole, am I a good person, or am I evil?”. Sounds easy, right?

But the question runs much deeper, and branches off in many directions.

That moral compass I have, who’s it for? Is it for me, or is it for everyone else? Did I ever enjoy being bad? Was it a natural part of my nature, or was it alien to me? Did I get something meaningful out of the good things I did? Why did I do them? Out of altruism or was it a self-congratulatory need for recognition? Am I a hypocrite? Do I practice what I preach?

And at the end of it all I came to a conclusion. Niall, you’re an arsehole, but you’re not evil. Very selfish sometimes, yes. A waster of opportunity, definitely. Not always capable of showing the correct level of empathy and concern: check. I’ve had more golden tickets than anyone else I know, and I squandered them all. But that just makes me stupid, not morally degenerate.

Because that’s the trick, to view yourself with your own lens, not the external lens society provides, but the internal one you use to view everyone else with. It’s really not that easy, at all, and it doesn’t only expose all the flaws within yourself, it also exposes the flaws you have with the way you view others. All the double-standards melt away, they become ridiculous in the face of it.

So now that I did all that, many moons ago, and came through it to the other side, surely I must be more balanced, at peace, older and wiser? Am I fuck, just older. Wisdom is mostly something that happens to other people, but I can say I am at peace with who I am, and I accept what that is, and what I’ve done (or didn’t do).

So, the struggle for identity, for affirmation. I believe that it is related to the inability to accept one’s self, as you asked in the OP. It’s all about seeking external confirmation, or justification, when the only place that can truly come from, is inside. And when it does, then you don’t need to go looking anymore, you become pretty sure of what your values are, and you stop being a people pleaser and start being a you pleaser instead, at least as far as what you are willing to accept.

No, they don’t. Some people just reveal their ugly faces, warts and all, and don’t really care what (most) other people think. Now I feel like that myself, I’ve learned to spot it in others, and there are others. Honesty is by far the easiest way to live. The negative is immediately dealt with, nothing is saved for later to become a problem that’s going to be too big to deal with.

Well, that turned into an auto-biography, I might regret it in the morning, and I don’t even drink any more. How is that fair?

Hope that answers your question, if not, then I just wasted my time typing all that shit out, and I feel like a bit of a twat.

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@Nausamedu

More like they have multiple personalities into schizophrenia.

:clown_face:

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@Nausamedu

It sounds like this thread is about trannies. I don’t recognize their sexual identities and see them as deeply mentally confused individuals who act out of psychological trauma.

:clown_face:

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“Need to affirm” is bullying others into saying they identify yourself as how you identify yourself.

For example, if I was born in Australia, but my parents told me I was British, and most people from afar see me as Canadian, and just some as Dutch, then:

  • Australian is my identity
  • British is my self-identification
  • Canadian is my identifcation by others (the most usual one)
  • Dutch is another identification by others

In particular, forcing people to tell me I’m British won’t solve anything - I’ll still be Australian, and they’ll still identify me as British (even tho not saying so). If it was so that the point was to try to get all identifications closer to identity, that’d be an entirely different thing

Now, even worse is that there are people that change some aspect of them (hair, gender, amount of arms, etc). That means that they are in two situations where in one some feature is there, and on another it isn’t, but they are in both situations. That entails that such a feature is not part of them (if that was the case, they wouldn’t be in one of them, when the feature was not there, or was not changed). So, for the people that say that they can change gender that entails that gender is not part of identity - it’s not part of who they are, by their own views on it.

Don’t confuse identity and identification - they’re quite different

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Do you really “Know Thyself”?

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That’s a good point. Identity can’t be changed like a suit (IMO), it’s ingrained and a part of who we are, whereas identification is how we want others to see us, perhaps to try to control the first impression that they get?

If I go here:

Gender identity - Wikipedia

The very first line states:

Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender.[1]

So using the same logic, “National identity is the personal sense of one’s own Nationality.” Or even “Racial identity is the personal sense of one’s own race.”

I’d like to make a statement like that sometime, out of context, to see how it is received, and how well it holds up to the “Gender identity” definition provided there..

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Yep, there are things written wrong many times. That wikipedia article points out the usual word confusion between identity and identification - it is clearly the latter (since for the first you’d need proofs other than how that person identifies)

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Yeah but as you just explained yourself, you sorted it out internally. You asked yourself who you are.
At no point in your response have you as much as eluded to the idea that “you know what, i guess i will just FORCE other people to say that i am a good guy”.

I mean, i work similarly internally, as does probably the extreme majority of humanity.
We just “reflect” on who we are and what we do. Correct. No problem.
But even in the case of the people you reference who just “idgaf” reveal their face as is… not giving a sh-t is still light years from the idea above, that you just gonna tell others how to perceive you and thus affirm you.

And dont mind the auto-biography, its good.

Its not supposed to be focused on them, but they most certainly are the most prominent example of what i am talking about.
Personally i have absolutely no business in anyone’s head and how they define themselves or what they believe themselves to be, but… telling the rest of the world what to believe, that just seems like such a backwards concept that it begs belief.

Yeah, but you think rationally. And i agree. Thats my entire point as well.
Forcing people to tell me that im british would not solve anything.
So why’d i do it? Because very apparently there are a lot of people who think that it does accomplish SOMETHING. Im just incapable of understanding what.

Your mileage may vary, but the concept remains the same.
Every functioning human beings knows themselves to a certain extent as part of being aware of one’s self… but i admit i have no idea what would happen if one didnt.

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@Nausamedu

Here’s a “big picture” overview of the problem as I see it. We live in a complex world. There are many, like you, who have a simplistic view of the world. As such, they deny, if not reject, the world’s complexity. It’s a child-like view if you will. With that view, there is often an irrational fear, if not hatred, of anything that is contrary to their view.

Those with simplistic views of race are the racists; those with simplistic views of culture are xenophobes; those with simplistic views of sex and gender are homophobes, transphobes, misogynists, and so on.

Over the years there have been many who have been and continue to be victims of that hatred. Often a vicious, if not sadistic, hatred at that.

The problem is with perpetrators, not the victims. Even worse the perpetrators often perversely see themselves as the victims. As you seem to do.

For all intents and purposes, they want to live in a world rooted in reality and treated justly. Bringing those holding simplistic views into reality is the place to start.

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But most of us would get pissed off if people identified us incorrectly. Forget legislation, rules, losing your job and all the other hysterical levels misgendering or ‘misgendering’ can lead to. Let’s just look at what you are saying because it would, if true, go way beyond the trans issue.

Let’s say everyone assumed you were a teenager when you are an adult. They talked about ‘when you grow up’ ‘when you get your first job’ and asked you about high school. You’d probably find this irritating.

Does it mean you HAVE TO have their confirmation for your identity? Not necessarily at all. It’s pretty much a normal reaction.

If people reacted to you as if you were angry when you are not and this was regular, well, that’s make me angry.

If people kept reacting to me as if I was a woman, it would irritate me. Not because being a woman is bad.

Of if they assumed a race or religion I was not a member of. If this affected how they treated me.

I think this is just a natural reaction here.

It doesn’t mean I am weak or can’t trust my own sense of identity if I got pissed off in these situations (or sad or whatever).

My focus is not on the trans per se but the implication that we social beings have something wrong with us if we are affected by other people’s misinterpretations and assumptions about us.

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For example, it is simplistic to think your gender is just what you think it is.

A phobia is an irrational fear - to state that someone with simplistic ideas about something has a phobia (transphobia, for example) is simplistic itself. I think you didn’t mean phobia but hate there, tho.

The world is (quite amazingly!) non that complex, but maybe you were pointing out that the relationships between humans are many?. Picture that there are simple equations that account for the movements of planets quite properly. The planet has one turn ~24hs of the clock with a lot of consistency!

The world could be quite different - have all patterns so complex that we could never describe them with math or even conceptualize, and we’d live much like beings unaware of our surroundings and just existing, yet we are here pressing buttons to change lights in black rectangles through which we exchange ideas with others around the planet.

Yeah, because we cannot know from a person feeling being the victim that such person is the victim (because many people feel as victims when they aren’t), is that it’s very important to go to the facts of the matter and not rely on feelings, which is the problem in the first place - just research, apart from feeling, what is some basis on objective measurable stuff so that we can all agree on

@greenfuse

Well, I’d bet most of us have people identify us as something we aren’t, and accused of something we didn’t do and the like, at least from time to time… Not that we know when that happens, but sometimes we know. When the world shows itself as different from how we think of it, we can either get irritated or laugh… but maybe it’s better just not to expect

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Maybe. But it’s human, as a social creature, that what others treat us as, identify us as matters. Yes, we can be wrong about what we identify with. I think I am a great guy and someone criticizes my aggressive nature - an example. I can be wrong and have something to learn. But it is still natural to get angry. Anger doesn’t mean the other has to be erased (unless you are Stalin or extreme in certain specific ways). Anger can be part of a social process where either you learn something new about yourself or the other learns something new about you or themselves or you both learn things. My main objection to the OP is this idea that we should not get angry and not express it. I think it’s a pretty natural reaction when others react to us in ways that don’t fit our self-image and identity. Once the anger is expressed we can try to see where this leads. In a sense I am arguing against the norm of a stoic indifference to the way others view and treat one. I think that needs justification it doesn’t really have.

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