In a world where unwanted information gets painted as false and differing opinions are discredited as evil, contributors to society are no longer socially allowed to call spades as spades, because few remaining members of society technically know just what a spade even is anymore. We now have this mass-marketed pathos of a culture too ignorant with its own self-centeredness to know that proper names already exist for the purposes of personalized identification. Prompting that pronouns be additionally warped to suit private ego, while inadvertently making things that much more problematic for those persons learning the language as a pathway to assimilation, as curiously the vernacular nomenclature of identity politics seems much less of an issue in settings where English is not the primary language. Subjugation exists everywhere, obviously, and will for as long as our species continues to exude itself, but syntax is not aided through added addendums or sub-clauses or exceptions to rules of the preexisting shared universe. Streamlined communications for sharing ideas and culture and anything else is evidently not as important as how others perceive one’s own ego. Childlike minds, expressing their individuality by way of face-value labeling and surface level branding while candidly looking to share in nothing.
Labels are in such overabundance today that they’ve lost all meaning, outweighed unconditionally by a bloated desire for conjecture, always ultimately self-serving. If we do not like a thing then it must be unreal and devalued, with knockoff imitations and homemade variants replacing what endured all generations which came before. “This is what the universe actually meant, and I know this as fact because I have decided this for myself and the universe does not exist outside of my definitions for it.”
It’s the same as religion today. Orthodox theologies have too much history and established tradition to learn for those with attention spans of toddlers, and far too many required obligations, so instead of learning from and understanding what has come before, even if only to avoid repeating its mistakes and fallacies, persons today would rather just create their own gods, their own spirituality, with all the measurable weight of imaginary friends or Facebook thumbnails doctored to convey something other than reality. They choose to compete for some imaginary qualification when they could far more easily just go without altogether. Instead of studying the threats of differences to ascertain their natural weaknesses, they’d prefer to invent their own, whole-cloth. While truth is never synonymous for individual ideals, forced perspective is conducive for sleight of hand.
By all means we should call ourselves whatever we’d like. Yet my electing myself as official boyfriend of all the anal-friendly, lithe and lithesome, pale-skinned, red-haired ladies is no cause unto itself for everyone else whether form-fitting my description or not to abide, no matter how cool that might be for my personal tastes. I would never in a zillion years force or coerce that perspective, because who might it possibly benefit but myself? The argument most cited against dissenting opinions by those with fascist logic, “Of what concern is it of yours to care about how I define myself/the world” openly contradicts their own argument on behalf of personalized theology or identity politics entirely, which demands that others care about how they define themselves/the world. “You are under every obligation to accept my labels but I am under no obligation to accept yours.” And everybody is expected to just look the other way while pretending that there is not a giant, hypocritical contradiction right there screaming for all to see. Logic has no place in such arguments, in this case coming from the pro-choice advocates so deeply troubled by foreign-born children abducted and detained into prison camps where they are met with torture simply for not being acceptable by whichever private standards. If you see an unplanned pregnancy as an inconvenience that could be rectified by disposing of the evidence, you have no right to object when others implore the exact same logic. It can be seen with no sense of irony in series three of The Handmaid’s Tale, conveyed as a feminist right-hook this idea of “How dare someone else care about this child that I would do without.” It is operating with a logic incontrovertibly as insane and self-contradictory as a pro-lifer being in favor of war. When whatever persuasion of brands and labels depend on double standards, then maybe their own foundation is what’s really at fault. If an ethos cannot remain consistent, then maybe its flaws are more clear than any packaging might ever conceivably explain, or obscure.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jordan B. Peterson have both proven capable of generating perfectly valid arguments regarding identity politics, but far more often do they contradict themselves, and almost always by imploring the same logic. I think anybody who challenges that statement is not paying one lick of attention to what they profess to challenge, opting instead to define them whole-cloth. Followers of one who deny the other will blindly refuse to acknowledge any relative commonality, because it is so much more appetizing to stress over feigned controversy than to consider actual problems with what brief time we have here in this hopeless place we all universally find ourselves. Republicans are manifestly incapable of seeing that their party has committed the same crimes against humanity as have the Democrats, and versa vice. Subjecting others to treatment they do not care for is one thing, but seeing others lacking esteem for you as abuse is something else. When unmatched, it is pure arrogance, as what might benefit, but the ego? Abuse is abuse, which is also abuse, but a lack of worship is not synonymous for a condemnation. Obstruction of needs is evil, but not abiding by a predilection is, believe it or not, not the end of the world.
The adage of “Don’t tread on me” should really be modernized, as “Don’t colonize my mind.”
As different as we are, trading eye-blinks with a cat builds more of a rapport than fascists are capable of with others, accomplished from looking at them as opposed to talking at them, reflecting one another rather than forcing a perspective one way or the other. What if we can recognize each other without either praising or defaming? What if we already have the potential to address one another, in ways well and beyond merely taking turns being the recipients of each other’s adcopy or not? What if every last one of us might be more complicated than any label, regardless of how much we may loathe it, may lust for it?
If, as Samuel Butler once declared, “Oaths are but words, and words are but wind,” then what poorly presumptive costuming they be. Maybe we would better service ourselves, by saving our words for anything else.