Internal and External in 2014

All normal people see something of value in their lives. It is our basic nature to want to share this. What we value, and how we share it, varies immensely from person to person, and I maintain that these variables are two of the key factors in creating what we call identity.

Because identity is so critical to our sense of self, something separate but related to identity, it needs to be validated. The desire for confirmation is separate from identity, which is why identity cannot be self. Some people require greater confirmation than others. When a person needs to confirm their identity, they may do so internally or externally. Internal confirmation of identity is difficult. Internal confirmation requires our perception that self and identity are close to each other. Self is unknowable and indescribable. By reflecting on ourselves, we change ourselves. Identity is often consciously, or semi consciously, created. Internal confirmation requires us to have a clear notion of self, if imperfect, and a clear notion for identity (or, barring that, an apathetic attitude towards identity). Having seen that these self and identity are approximately equal, the person moves on. However, there some people distort their self image enough that self is displaced and they have no real sense of self at all. Instead, identity takes over. If identity must be roughly equal to self, and if identity has supplanted self, there is little conscious difficulty because identity, naturally, equals identity. Having said that, the utter destruction of self beneath identity is incredibly difficult and has its own consequences.

Due to these problems, internal validation tends to be wonderful or terrible. The ability to find solace primarily, or solely, through internal validation means that a person is free from constraint. They can act without worrying about others or taking them into account. We see in history many instances of people who used this to do wonderful things, Fabius Maximus, Pericles, and George Washington come to mind. They were men who were able to rely on themselves, against overwhelming public opinion, and maintain a dignified calm due to their confidence in how right they were. On the other hand, we can see the negative side effects in history. The First French Empire, the Nazi Empire, and the Soviet Empire come to mind. Organizations built by single minded men who were able to ignore logic and reality in pursuit of their goals. A self reliant man is a dangerous one, which is perhaps why we're trained these days not to be.

However, for how interesting the self reliant are, they are few and far between. Instead, the vast majority of us are dependent on others to validate our identities. The most effective form of validation is production. If you are an artist, the ultimate validation of your identity as an artist is the adulation of your peers for what you create. The same for an artisan. In many ways, the same for a farmer, a gardener, a parent, or many others. Production is the most effective way to validate our identities and to increase our sense of self worth. A farmer can validate his existence by the quality of his food. A brick layer can validate his existence by the quality of his walls. Even if quality is not their focus, seeing what they have created being used by other people allows them to justify their existence and helps to solidity an identity.
The problem that now arises is that, for many, even those in productive fields, they are disassociated from the end result of the production. Henry Ford's workers had to be bribed $5 a day to do the same job day in and day out. To do the same job, and especially a job where one can never excel or be recognized for achievement, is dull. Why should it be? Can the pride of having attached a thousand wheels compare to the pride of having built one car? Rather than being productive, people found themselves a cog in a machine. However, this, in time, became the identity of many. Which goes into our more modern notion of identity.

Nearly all people believe that their self has worth. We believe ourselves to be significant. If we didn't, we'd stop wasting the resources of our betters. When we identify as being one thing, but our reality is something else, we reach a struggle. If We believe ourselves to be astonishing, but our reality is mundane, we need to justify this. This is where identity comes in. Identity is a mediator between the reality of the internal and external worlds. Identity is the doorman, letting things in and out, and determining how portions interact. He is also flexible, changing and altering himself. However, the boundaries between self, identity, and external world are not fixed. Sometimes, one can seem much more important than the other, and we act accordingly. Soldiers ignore their self and bury themselves in their identity, which negates the self, because of the external world. Trauma victims often have their self fundamentally changed by external events and find it necessary to create a new identity. Oftentimes, creating a new identity changes a person's external experience, and changes the path of the self. It is in these shifts that we experience some of our great mental battles.

When nothing in our lives appears to have value, and when we produce nothing of value, yet our self cries out into infinite space that it is significant, our identity must cope. If we cannot define ourselves by production, we have two main choices. We can define ourselves by action, or by consumption.

Action is not the same as production. Many factory workers hate their jobs, yet refuse to leave them, even if it means an improvement, simply because in order to reconcile their self worth to their seemingly meaningless task, their identity is one that has deified the process rather than the result. An action, in and of itself meaningless, a person, in and of himself meaningless, takes on a new meaning by submitting himself to a whole. By making himself a machine, he believes that he transcends mechanization, and he becomes a force of nature. Forces of nature have value. So does he. I often wonder whether the decline of the labor movement is related to our growing personal isolation. It is harder to give up the self to the whole when there is no whole within sight. Similarly, vegans interest me. For so many, their identity is wrapped up entirely in what they will and will not do. Their lives, not always but often enough, are consumed by their identity of a person who will or will not perform an action. I've found myself fascinated by atheistic Jews who refuse to believe in God, yet keep rabbinical law because they identity themselves as Jewish. With God, the rules are meaningful pieces of advice and guidance handed down by a benevolent force beyond human comprehension. Without God, they are arbitrary and difficult rules that make no sense and cause nothing but problems for the people involved. Yet we see atheists following the rules of so many creeds, I speculate, because simply going through the process is enough. Action, without any meaning, can become meaningful if we are desperate enough. And we all of us very desperate.

When production is impossible and action is too difficult, finally, we find the degenerates of Earth, most of us, defining ourselves by consumption. Consumption is a way of appropriating meaning. We are not significant because of what we do. We are not significant because of how we do it. We are significant because we wear the trappings of others' significance. It is the sympathetic magic by which a man in a bear skin, with a few mushrooms, can become a bear. We become dilettantes because we are too scared to be amateurs. We become educated consumers because we are terrified, terrified, of the failure we would be sure to face should we attempt, even for a moment, to be even adequate producers. Consumption, and the turning of acts of consumption into some bizarre fetish, are the means by which we can show our value to the world. It is symbolic, yet, on some level, most know that there are those who will not and cannot see the value of our symbols. Because the worthless are always the majority, they create a constantly shifting notion of taste and style, so that we may, at least in some way, be relatively active in our passive consumption.