No Identity and No Meaning
To define identity, one might look at what they like, their surroundings, events in their life, to conceptualize who they are. Without knowing who you are, you are left to be formed purely by those who control you. Much like a child, whose early life is supposed to be what molds and shapes identity, so that they are prepared for the cold, harsh responsibility they are bound to take on, if they are to ever achieve any sense of purpose. However, the basic parts to life, that take form in stages, and set a cycle that is organic and raw, have been robbed from us by the modern world.
The shape of identity, no longer formed in the timely events of one’s own growth, where they go from being cared for in infant years, slowly amass the basic abilities of taking care of oneself, and becoming an adult through the responsibilities handed to them, normally at their own reluctance, is what made the basic formalities of human civilization so functional and meaningful. Without these stages of life, a child does not grow. Instead, they are left grasping for events and responsibility in hopes of achieving a sense of worth, and therefore, a real identity.
The modern world has robbed this from the average person, especially men, and in place has given them a broken sense of legitimacy as a real human. They either face the rate race, saddle up with debt, and get hooked into the bullshit jobs economy, or waste away as a loser. Even within loser jobs, of low status, the rate-race continues, as the goal for becoming manager, then getting an office job, then maybe sitting on at a conference table telling someone what to do, is where many men will feel like they achieved something.
For women, still, the search for reason has become so jaded. They essentially have the managerial identity forced upon them at a young age, where they are expected to become girl bosses, and assert themselves as real leaders, rather than follow their natural orientation towards finding love and creating children.
This is phenomenon, a crisis of identity, is how modern people are easily made malleable by their rulers. Having a sturdy understanding of who they are is robbed from them at a young age, and they take on individualism as a means of establishing a digestible description of who they are to other people. Unfortunately, their understanding of identity, and the pride they take in it, is like a science experiment gone wrong, rather than a beautifully-guided shaped tree:
The Inability To Form Identity
In all cultures, throughout time, all the way up until about the time of the globalized economy (and consumer culture), the stages of life where very clearly set. Whether French, Igbo, Zapotec, or Acehnese, there was no diluteness of the life cycle, and it was taken mighty seriously. For many cultures, the transition to adulthood for men was done at a ceremony, where they would show some level of endurance and hardiness, and prove their worth as a man. Even in childhood, many young boys weren’t coddled and cooped up in government facilities all day. They were doing laborious work, learning their father’s trade. For nobles, the same was true, for a young man wasn’t left to his own devices, but expected to prove his intelligence, endurance, and statesmanship as he inherited or acquired the responsibilities of a Duke or Count.
Into teenage years, in most cultures this was virtually an adult, young men would generally have some apprenticeship position or would be helping their parents take care of their property or land rented from a lord. In no time has there ever been such a large chunk of the male population, worldwide, who not only never made this transition to manhood in any organic way, but who harbor absolutely no gumption, life skills, self-control, respect for their fellow man, basic manners, and yet think the world owes them something. The modern man is flabby and weak, untrained and unskilled, unmannered and uncouth, but most of all - soft and inexperienced with the basic trials of suffering that life used to foist upon them in great amounts.
Even the military, bureaucratized, depatriotized, and feminized, no longer offers any sense of that childhood-to-adulthood transition that a man needs. Rather than being calmed down in his preteens, and foisted upon a plethora of responsibility that he is supposed to reap meaning from, men instead extend their childhood into their early thirties, via the infinite black hole of college and university. At this same time, many young men of any industry and self-control in times yore, they’d already be building a family, tenure at a solid, worthwhile job, and saving for retirement.
The robber barons of man’s identity then turn around and repatriate young men with a sense of obligation to the state, to the media, to social trends, and to the rat race. When the economy can no longer be beaten like a piñata, have the plebiscite turn on itself. Identity formed through events of life, natural to culture and the very nature of life itself are robbed from modern man.
For modern women, the case is even worse. Not only is there a massive level of subtlety added to their existence, where they would be protected and treated as the fragile creatures that they are in times gone, they don’t even have a voice for their femininity they once had. All voices, from all corners of the media, churches, political sides, and school, they are molded into girlbosses. They are barked and yammered at until they mold themselves to the new social trends set by propaganda and social media, their femininity is robbed of its spirituality and usefulness and turned into a sexual ornament, and they are made into directionless, asocial, overlysexualized beings who, due to their agreeable and neurotic nature, are saddled up with the baggage of trying to live up to an image they don’t have the heart for. The image-consciousness doesn’t just end at their superego’s obligation to feigning success, but extends to their compulsive focus on their ability to be sexually appealing to no end other than to fulfill the process of empowerment. Empowerment, a cornerstone of dialectical materialism, and pleasing the self.
Because the idea of identity itself has been bastardized into an idea of autonomy-worship, sexual objectification of oneself (self-worship), and the feeling that one has not reached any level of actual being until they have established themselves as self-pleased, “happy” person who has incessant, nothing goals. A sense of obligation has been absolutely abandoned, and the indebtedness to one’s self has taken root as the absolute source for all meaning.
Identity =/= Individuality
Placement, and the sense of owing one’s community and people, no longer is even the first step one makes into being a member of a community. The sense of being owed is gifted to children, in the form of toys, dopamine-inducing processed foods (sugar and caffeine), and the modern democratic (small d) lie that all they need to do is pay their taxes, vote, don’t be a squeaky wheel, get college debt, and get a bullshit job. The formation of happiness is established at a young age, as what a child sees as their goal to achieving a sense of meaning is shown to them in the love of their parents, their father’s will to protect them, their mother’s urge to love and care for them, the community they are brought up in to teach them, and the wise and accomplished men and women of their tribe to bestow them a sense of duty and responsibility.
A young boy in a primitive tribe will look up to the strong warriors, skilled workers, and agile hunters, as men worth emulating. They see the years packed on in these masculine souls, understanding that they know more, that they have seen more, and that they have the power to teach. The power to understand one’s duty to their ancestors, can be seen in how honored and immortalized many societies’ families made their own ancestors. Where speaking of the dead was seen as faux-pas, unless done in good faith, where a sense of reverence for one’s own tribe and people was so recognized through watching one’s own bad language and manners, where the duty to embracing a duty of a job or position in the battlefield was eagerly taken, modern boys and young men have no ancestors immortalized, no adoration for any nation or community where they respect the mystical and spiritual thereof, nor do they possess any duty to embracing a masculine position. They are made weak and flabby, and only know weak and flabby.
For young girls and women, the spiritual suffering is worse yet. Rather than learning to respect their femininity as the WMD that it is, they are taught (often by their own mothers, at the bereavement of their fathers) to be spoiled and sexualized. The natural urge within a parent is to take care of their daughter from the wolves of humanity, but the empowerment narrative, pushed in schools, is how women form their personality, and again due to their agreeable nature, they feel an obligation to follow the social trends of sluttiness and sexual empowerment. Often times mothers take pity on their daughters, and want them to fit in, so they will buy them yoga pants, a smart phone, and makeup to make her feel whole. Where the traditional society values its women, and instills modesty in them, and young girls look up to wise, modest women who bore many children, and cared for their husband always, the modern woman is forced to see weakness and react to this ideal with disgust. They are taught to reject their very nature. It is much worse for women, I would argue, because men are naturally not as neurotic, and can carry on with plenty of losses, blows to their ego, and don’t really have to worry what other people think. However, for the harm avoidant compulsion of the female gender, there is no ability for them to grasp an ounce of femininity without sexualizing it. Even when they try to produce a genuine traditional effect, all that they end up accomplishing is seeming like self-obsessed trad-thots seeking out the male gaze of a different demographic.
Scientism and State-Worship’s Impact on the Self
So it is that the identities of modern people have been robbed from them by material wealth, and we just so happen to be at the crossroads where the wealth has run out, and the need for spiritual rejuvenation is key, or man must face the worst effects of collapse he has ever seen.
The happiness the accomplishments of economy and career no longer illustrate a grand future like his parents and grandparents enjoyed, and yet society itself, clearly on the brink, still yells at him orders of more and more to be etched from his soul. What he knows as true, is no longer true, unless verified and stamped by some organization. His sense of sureness is always in a state of psychosis, as he looks towards pundits and politicians for a solution. Where he draws an understanding of the infinite of the universe, his own meaning within it, and how special he is to a God above - one that would die for his sins no less - it is all brought to an anti-climactic close by all-knowing scientists who constantly offer esoteric, nothing answers to the mysteries of life. Where he experienced the natural pains and sufferings of life, he is “treated” by a doctor, with drugs and nonsense aspiritual solution where he doesn’t have to change the unhealthy parts of his life, but face bureaucratic hall of mirrors that is modern medicinal industrial complex.
He experiences no trials to discovering his place, and so without an answer ever, is left a malleable putty for psychotic managerial comptrollers to warp and knead at their discretion. With no beginning, middle or end, but one long stretch of adolescence, the modern man’s blip of a life isn’t what he was meant for. To keep the voices of his ancestors drowning out his delicate sensibilities, though, he continues his endless self-discovery through increasingly fruitless art, mind-altering substances, and leaning on managerial professionals to produce an acknowledgement.
Modern Man Might Find His Identity Again
The transitions of life have been robbed, the natural proclivities of man towards masculinity and woman towards femininity have been suppressed, and the wholeness of communal and spiritual endeavors have been made passé by modern state and science-worship.
So how does this get fixed?
The natural state of existence isn’t a tumultuous battle for power, like many will have you think. Rather, it is a spiritual battle, one being waged in a world that we cannot see, but has tremendous effect on how we act, speak, feel, and understand. Cultures of yore, had basic ground rules for how to act, on what day, to whom they were speaking with, et cetera. Many manners and beliefs were formed from man’s knowing there is something greater than him that must be recognized and worshipped, and that must be revered. This was the foundation for high-trust societies. Stories that formed our understandings of the dos and do nots were creations of the spiritual realm’s effect on the material one, and in the process of rejecting such miracles, we have lost our ability to understand the impact that faith has, that owning up to the rules and regulations God laid out for us, and most notably, realizing He would give his life for us.
What we lost in destroying the foundation myth, and what our rulers seem to be doing now which is forming a very patchwork, bastardized new one, is where man has gone awry, but what is wonderful is how what we are experiencing now will only end in the formation of a new foundation myth, a reestablishment of understanding God’s placement for us, and a reminder that community can only be found in His name.
Furthermore, this return to understanding will only organically lead to the formation of societies separate from the noise and trouble of modern times, and will at least offer some foundation for what will be the reintroduction of identity to the modern man.
“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
Carl Jung