Identity

[...] as humans we tend to assign an identity to a stream of events.

--- Alice "from Over The Curve." 2020.

I came to understand why it is that people depended on their group identity and their cultural identification: because that helped themselves to protect themselves from their vulnerability.

--- Jordan B. Peterson

-Traumatic experiences during childhood can lead to an increased need for identity, which can be fulfilled by extremist causes.

-- Links between childhood experience of violence and violent extremism, 2017

I can attempt to make the subject matter of identity more explicit only by approaching it from a variety of angles-biographic, pathographic, and theoretical; and by letting the term identity speak for itself in a number of connotations. At one time, then, it will appear to refer to a conscious sense of individual identity; at another to an unconscious striving for a continuity of personal character; ‘at a third, as a criterion for the silent doings of ego synthesis; and, finally, as a maintenance of an inner solidarity with a group’s ideals and identity. In some respects the term will appear to be colloquial and naïve; in another, vaguely related to existing concepts in psychoanalysis and sociology. If, after an attempt at clarifying this relation, the term itself will retain some ambiguity it will, so I hope, nevertheless have helped to delineate a significant problem, and a necessary point of view.

-- E. H. Erikson

‘Identity’ is ‘the fact" or interpretation of being who or what a person or thing is.’

“You HAVE to believe things, because you just don’t know everything; so you have to believe things – they fill in the gaps. The beliefs fill in the gaps.

"If the beliefs are stripped from you, then your defences against the infinite are stripped. And it’s no wonder that people will defend their beliefs.

“I thought, well, if you’re too involved in defending your beliefs, you’re going to be willing to kill other people in their defence, and we’re so technologically powerful now that we can no longer be willing to kill other people in the defence of our own beliefs because the time for that has passed.

“Well, then I realised that if you don’t stand up for your beliefs, you leave yourself bereft, you’re open to the depredations of the infinite. That’s equally intolerable. It seems to leave no way out.

"But there is a way out, you know. And I think it's the way out that genuinely religious people have tried to offer humanity for thousands and thousands of years.

"And the way out of the conundrum posed to you by your reliance on ideological beliefs and your vulnerability in the face of the unknown [Your reliance on your programmes] is the development of a truly integrated and powerful character. And that's individual development. And it means constant confrontation with things that you don't understand, and constant attempts to ensure that your character is composed of truth and solidity, rather than deceit, and to make of yourself something that's built on a rock and not predicated on sand."

--- Jordan B. Peterson

Def

I personally think that any form of social context forces identity on you, that’s one of the reason I love solitude so much, because it gives you relief from the constant identity games around others

— Anon, 2019.

Metaphysics affirms the fundamental identity of knowing and being [...] and since this identity is essentially implied of the very nature of intellectual intuition, it not merely affirms it but realizes it as well.

— Guénon

The 'Self', in relation to any being whatsoever, is in reality identical with Atmâ

— Guénon

I think it is massive abuse, if a parent doesn't help their child develop basic survival skills and their identity.

- Anonymous, Facebook 2023-06-10

Identity can be exploited (see: identity exploitation), e.g. to manufacture crisis or gain.

Rhizomata

• Logos; Being; Belief; Rationality; Core identity; The self; Essence
• Credo ut intelligam; Faith; Mark; Sign; Significance; Quality; Form; Case; Self-projection.
• Cogito; Recognition; Assumption; Grasping; Identitarianism
• Imperatrix; See: Identity politics.; Quality of identity; Deep identity; Surface identity;

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