we are an inventive species

on honesty, language, and identity

I value honesty and integrity over virtue and perfection. Viewing oneself as virtuous often leads to blindness as to where and how we are encumbered by shadow. Moreover, true virtue – perfection – is impossible to attain. Everyone has the propensity to be unkind, to treat someone unfairly, to make careless choices, and to behave in ways that are incongruent with their moral standards. Conversely, honesty and integrity requires that we look inward upon our actions and try to be responsible for them. 

From the view of this current social culture, I should be cancelled and obliterated straight away for things I’ve said and done in the past. Funnily enough, I really believed I was a good person back then, though I look at myself from my current vantage and see younger Maren as a bit of a menace. The reality, however, even with my careless, thoughtless, unconscious abandon — I was a good person. As good as any of you. As good as myself today. I was operating with the only tools I had, and one truly does not know what they do not know. 

We can’t fault people doing the best they can with the resources they have, despite what this culture is attempting to enforce upon us. This culture acts like everyone is on an even-playing field when it comes to behavior. We all supposedly have access to the internet, right? All of the folkways and ideals of how to be a person in modern society are at our fingertips. We all ought to “educate” ourselves and do the “work.” Never mind the environment, conditioning, modeling, and culture we grew up in. Never mind that most people do not have the time or privilege to discern all of the nuances of our time. Never mind the ever-changing target of what it means to be “good” or the belligerent saturation of misinformation online — we all ought to know better. 

But we don’t. Clearly. And virtually no space is held for anyone to figure it out. According to this culture, we are our worst day. We are our most unkind words. We are the most unaligned thing we’ve ever done. We cannot recover from our past transgressions, because how else will we be held “accountable”?

Obviously, this is nonsense. This perspective is born out of a mythology that ascribes all human beings as being basically sinful and evil. This is merely a story we tell ourselves, though. Society, parents, teachers, and peers reinforce it subtly, subliminally. We are punished and lambasted for our transgressions and infrequently rewarded for our goodness. The scales are perpetually imbalanced, because our badness is our true nature, really. One says something unkind, and someone says “I always knew she was a bitch.” A man cheats on a woman, “Oh, what a disgusting narcissist.” A woman cheats on a man, “She’s a lying, conniving skank.”

Our worst days and behaviors confirm to the culture the underlying assumption that human beings are bad, so we double-down on punishment unquestioningly. We walk through the world believing it is inhabited by enemies whom we could never understand, and we get to tell ourselves, “At least I’m not like that.” 

The thing about this mythology of inherent badness is that it is predicated on philosophical reductionism – in my view, one of the most damaging epistemological foundations we ever adopted. We are reduced and distilled into easily digestible ists and isms and ad-hominems. We are machine-people, and our badness is innate. It’s part of the design, sorry about that.

We are never challenged, in this culture, to view human beings as complex living wholes. We take for granted the ambient cultural mythology that says we are closer to machine than to nonhuman living creatures.

It’s a lot easier to believe someone is a bitch full-stop than to sift through that person’s story and try to understand her, or, dare I say it, have compassion for her. It’s a lot easier to look at someone who harmed you and call them a narcissist or a racist or socialist or a fascist or a misogynist and henceforth disregard their humanity and the complex reasons why people behave and think the ways they do. It’s quite a lot harder to put ourselves in their shoes and try to understand all of the factors that influenced how they became who they are. It’s really hard to see people as basically good as compared to basically bad.

I find this cultural moment to be profoundly lazy, which is why I’m so critical of it. I’m critical of the utter lack of effort to understand complexity exhibited by people who are supposedly among the “virtuous.” In this laziness, we not only exacerbate the problem, but we alienate ourselves from one another, and with that, any possibility of collective reconciliation. Our reductionist view of other people is what allows us to accomplish absolutely nothing in terms of creating a just world. “All white people are racist.” “All men are oppressors.” “All women are sluts.” “All Muslims are terrorists.” “All republicans are ignorant fascists.” “All liberals are bleeding heart communists.” Very productive assertions, we have here. Right?

I’m not saying I haven’t participated in this reductionism. In fact, I did it in the previous paragraph by labeling those people as lazy. I distilled them down, ascribing to them one adjective that could never accurately encompass the complexity of their beingness. Does calling people lazy produce the just world I want to see? Of course not. I am as guilty as anyone. We didn’t evolve to consider the complexity of 7.8 billion human beings, and yet –

Reductionism, as I said, is a foundational way of knowing that really solidified during the Enlightenment and has permeated energetically and epistemically throughout the world as a lens through which to understand the world. Used as a scientific basis for description and categorizing Nature, this may have also developed as a means through which to understand an increasingly complexifying human psychological landscape. It’s easier to separate the Logos from the Eros, the rational from the unseen, the observable from the mystery than to try to understand how all of these parts exist in tandem, necessitating each other. It’s also easier to separate the sinners from the virtuous, the educated from the uneducated, the right from the left, the civilized from the uncivilized.

We have a lot of descriptive words for ourselves now, with new ones developing everyday. This overwhelming increase of identitarian abstractionism is, underneath its fancy vocabulary, a lie. These new identities utterly fail to describe our true essence. It is deeply troubling that this categorizing and compartmentalizing ourselves this way has become the norm, but it’s also only a symptom of the deeper mythos. Fundamentally, I believe, we need to understand that reductionism itself is a lie.

Whether we call ourselves idealists, realists, pessimists, rationalists, optimists, nihilists, or fatalists, the reality is that none of us are any of those things at all. There is no universality to any of these terms, and no one is entirely one way or another all the time. My definition of a pessimist is varied greatly by my conception of reality. What one finds to be pessimistic, I may find to be realistic. If one describes themselves as a rationalist at the expense of ever having to think critically outside of their own bias, there is nothing rational about them. Similar points can be made about any of these ists and isms.

This is the sport political posturing, of course. Liberal, conservative, democratic, republican, right-wing, leftist, fascist, socialist, nationalist, universalist, communist – all vaguely understood terms, impossible to define with clarity, all radioactive identities to some and deified to others. In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell writes,“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Simply replace fascism with socialism, and the ambient meaning actually doesn’t change at all. From one person’s vantage, regardless of their comprehension of the terminology, it’s the visceral, emotional response that actually matters to them, not the true meaning of the language. The same principles of abstraction apply to all identity politics – none of them really mean anything because they are all predicated on every individual’s perception of the term.

These semantical traps dispossess us of our ability to properly be considered as individuals within a greater whole, whether we wield them upon others or voluntarily upon ourselves. We are then pigeonholed into a philosophical/social/cultural framework, the likes of which, when actually considered and all perceptions are accounted for, probably deviate a great deal from a person’s authentic philosophy – a nameless essence that is unique to each person.

These labels, particularly in the context of a social media bio, are nothing more than a sort of tribal posturing – a dogwhistle which says, “I am like the others.” or “I am not like them.”

And when we are labeled with a pejorative or unbecoming title, whether it is true or not, that is what we become to the rest of the reductionist world. We are forced to be static, unchanging, defined. To use my word from before – lazy. Inert. Unmoving. When we have selected an adjective for ourself or for others, there we have it: The Endpoint of Creation. Our Final Evolution.

There’s an astrologer/therapist called Jason Holley who describes his clients and others as going through a “process,” i.e. a depressive process, a narcissistic process, a borderline process. You get the idea. The brilliance of this framing is that it is far more honest to use verbs to describe people than adjectives. Verbs connote nonlinearity and evolution – they connote that the process will end and transform into something different. This is fundamentally the language of animism – of a living, fluid world that operates in undefinable cycles. This is not the language of reductionism.

I’ve ran borderline, narcissistic, depressive processes before. Does that mean I am forever these things? If I say something insensitive to someone, am I therefore forever an insensitive person? If I say something unkind to someone, am I therefore forever unkind? If I act out of alignment, am I forever unaligned? For a while, I ran a strict, unquestioning liberal process, too, and I have since changed my tune.

To curb the temptation to reduce all things down to their most easily digestible parts, we need to challenge language itself – particularly the English language, which is notoriously objectifying in its syntax. There are no ists and isms to describe the complexity of who I am currently, and to ascribe myself to any of these adjectives takes away from the complexity of my wholeness. It takes me out of the process of becoming.

Identity politics, despite current consensus culture, is at its core objectifying and fallacious, and it creates a void between all of us where real intimacy is supposed to exist. Instead of viewing a person in all of their living complexity, we’re told to see them as a collection of identities. It’s all written there in everyone’s bio – everything you need to know to either view them as an enemy or view them as part of one’s group of worthy select. The discovery phase of relational intimacy is bypassed.

Some people might see this as liberating: to be able to proclaim themselves to the world as collection of identities. To have language to describe who they believe themselves to be. If this works for other people, that’s great. Clearly, I do not feel the same way. Some may argue that it is my privilege that allows me to reject this distillation. Be that as it may.

I see it as another shackling into a reductionist world.

I will not partition bits of myself to make the complexity that is my being more digestible for a wider audience. I am becoming, I am evolving, and I am not my worst day. I am in a process of being – not static. And it is ultimately my choice to reject the terms of this cultural moment.

My problem with identity politics is that it is not honest. It is an attempt at seeking truth that fails to wade through the real discomfort required for evolution. That mucky water reflects back to me that I have been a bitch, that I have been abusive, that I have willingly blinded myself to aspects of past identities that I did not want to see. I didn’t want to see the shadow of liberalism or leftism or feminism. I was those things – so how could I criticize them without subsequently criticizing myself? Giving myself an identity, or collection if ists and isms to operate within, does not inspire my evolution or growth. It just doesn’t. It traps me in a lie – an incomplete portrait of who I am and what my values are.

Honesty is a confrontation with shadow. It is a willingness to be critical of ourselves in the most alchemical way possible. It is not groveling to our mistakes and forsaking ourselves for our transgressions – that is reductionist thinking. It is the movement toward growth that is not definable, not reducible, not linearly observable. It is meeting ourselves with grace and compassion, telling ourselves that learning is a process. That becoming is a process. We do not grow as individuals without confronting our shadow, and therefore we do not grow as a collective. We cannot enter the fluid, shifting space of healing without leaping into that dark water.

I want the world to be a better place rather desperately. I’ve always been an activist. I want racism, sexism, xenophobia, genocide, colonialism, and horror to end. I want the murder of the planet to end. But so long as we operate from the same mythological and epistemological frameworks that created the conditions for this chaos, nothing will ever change. If we don’t gently see ourselves as complex living systems, how then can we see our fellow human as such? How can we see the rest of the living community as not a machine or a list of “things”? I can we see life itself clearly if we continue to reduce everything down into abstract myopia?

We didn’t evolve to consider the complexity of 7.8 billion human beings, and yet that is our task today. In order to change the human world*, we must first attempt to understand it from as many angles as possible. We must view ourselves and the world holistically, animately, and in the language of verbs.

And to those who are running a reductionistic process, I see you. I see that you are inherently good. I see that you belong here, and you are a complex, indispensable part of the living community on Earth. I see that you are doing the best you can with the tools you have.

I am in my own processes, too. I am evolving, too. Perhaps in my evolution, I will come to realize that every word I wrote here is wrong and doesn’t align with my integrity. I will have to face that, wade through the muck, and come out on the other side: changed. It will not, however, mean that I am wrong full-stop. Regardless of if I am right or wrong about this phenomenon, something is not working, and I think we all feel that to greater and lesser extents.

We are an inventive species. We can invent new tools. We have the power to throw out the old tools that no longer serve us, and that is what honesty and integrity are calling us to do. And I pray we create the proper tools for the momentous task of ecological justice, wherein humans know that we are an inextricable part of the rest of the complex living community, before it’s too late.

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* The concept of the “human world” or the “environment” is a reductionist abstraction in itself, as humans are inseparable from the rest of the living community, as well as the laws that govern the rest of the living community, such as death necessitating life.