Identities Part 2: Current Trends

This is the 2nd of a five-part series on identity.  We review our current identity trends by answering our 5 questions that help us answer how good an identity is.  Our identities are currently psychologically driven.  Within the psychologic dimension, our desires drive our identity while our emotions act as gatekeepers deciding whether another person’s words will be allowable or not.  Our rational thought has a much lower priority. 

 Here are our 5 questions and insights regarding our current trends.

 1.     How much is based on truth?  Current alternative truth claims regarding gender are having poor outcomes while denying the truth of parenthood shrivels the soul and destroys another life.  

2.     How unifying is it?  A shared identity with common goals will result in an increase in the common good.  Multiplication of identities (e.g., 58 gender options) results in more division. Even biologic identities are becoming more individualized due to an emphasis on lived experience.  

3.     How competitive is it?  Will it intentionally harm a basic good?  Transgenderism increasingly harms family friendship.  The biologic identity of parent is rejected by a self-created identity as a non-parent resulting in abortion.  Gender expression uses drugs and procedures that harm health.  Sexual expression identities result in risky sex and harms to health.  Sexual activity has harmed marriage with poor outcomes on every measure for children.  Freedom of speech is curtailed by strict speech codes to avoid any unwanted psychologic emotions, but this degrades the free exchange of ideas and harms knowledge.  

4.     How meaningful is it?  Man needs meaning to survive.  Dr. Viktor Frankl said this “The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love –the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”  Psychologically driven identities cause the individual to focus on the self rather than others which has led to poorer mental health and social division.

5.     How permanent is it?  Desires-driven identities vary with our emotions and desires.  Gender fluid people are never quite certain what their identity is and are continually searching for their real self which is disorienting and disintegrating.  Without a common moral horizon by which we can gauge our life, we use our own desires as the standard of meaning which inevitably will not lead to meaning or joy in life.  

This inward turn towards the self for identity has been termed narcissism by many observers of Western culture.

References

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment by Francis Fukuyama

The Impact of Psychological Man—and How to Respond by Carl Trueman

Superbia: The Perils of Pride. The Power of Humility by Dr. Steve Willing 

Preserving the Warrior Ethos by H.R. McMaster

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