Identity in Stasis

John was a member of the Luo tribe, according to his passport he was Kenian, though with a permanent residence in the United States, where he practiced as a Harvard trained general practitioner and he had lived the last ten years of his life in Boston. He was one of the proudest members of the Luo, and the tribe was at least as proud of him. When I met him, Obama was president for two years, while John was elaborating on his theory of self identity and advocating the importance of the tribe. He had not asked me about my tribe, he knew of course, there was no such entity in western society. I wasn't sure if he had immediately guessed my Dutch origin, but I was pretty sure that he was not aware of the tensions between the westerners, the southerners, the easterners and the Frisians, in the Netherlands. I of course am a member of the Heracleitian tribe of thought, and I do not believe in the concept of identity, or it would be in my persona as an anarchist deliberately trying to disturb all my pre-existing attachments and ideas like a Nietzschean lion. The main argument I tried to make against John's was based on Marxist principles however, where identity is the superstructure of my class origin, which is determined mostly by technology and ownership of capital, but this is a very typical belief for someone of the middle classes, and a very white and western notion, which he refuted of course.

Male-ifide

From the Feminist Dictionary of Words:

"mal-e-ifide or mal-e-ified [mah-l-e-eefee-de or mah-l-e-fied; Eng. mey-l-e ah-fah-dee or mey-l-e ah-feed]
adj.
contraction of terms.
feminine ablative of malus, bad + fid, declination from french, feminized form of mal;
ablative of fids, faith;
from Latin masculus, diminutive of ms, male;

used to indicate the false pretense of women in contemporary society who have taken on male role patterns and masculine, aggressive behavior to seek assimilation and acceptance from existing, conservative male elites.

"She is a real bitch. She always aggressively cuts people short, clamors above every one else to be heard, and tries to make jokes all the time. She is an archetype of the male-ified woman."

The Life and Times of a Poor Bibliophile

He stared at her deformed toes, waggling nervously before the shabby couch, in which her lump body had sunk away. Her frowned face stared puzzled at the crossword she had found to occupy herself with. A fire ball of hate welled up in his guts simply watching her. He turned to the book shelves in the living room, her living room, and felt relieved, deeply felt inner joy, the sight of these books gave him an overwhelming pleasure. The fact was that she had the best bookshelves of anyone he knew. Although now, she was a repulsive mass of thoughtless babble, she once, as a student, had been a promising Lacanian psycho-analyst. Her shelves were filled with surrealist literature, existentialist plays, and works by Lacan and Freud. But in the last ten years she had not read a single book of interest anymore, indulging in the mediocre life of a routine-filled job as an editor for a psychological magazine. Georges counted the backs of the books he had lined up in the top right shelves. All the other books he had read already in the long years since they had met. Thirty-two to go, he whispered. He never had loved her, he found no sexual attraction in her body, in her dull eyes, he hated kissing her thin lips, but once a week he kissed those horrid lines in her face. Thirty-two times ten, three-hundred and twenty days, one more year, he crossed the lines in the imaginary wall of the prison of his relationship with her, then he would be free of her, having read all the books in her library, free to leave.

Dialog between a Therapist and a Philosopher

P: Life is without meaning.
T: You mean your life. Let's talk about your life instead of the more impersonal life in general.
P: Well, no, yes, of course, my life too, my life has no meaning either, it is implied, but I meant to say life, I intended to say life. Your life, his life, our lives, life has no meaning.
T: I just think it is interesting that you use the impersonal form. Maybe you are evading the real question, and therefor the answer to the lack of meaning in your life.
P: Your assumption of meaning is false. I would even argue that it is you who are escaping the meaningless of your life by attributing to it unique qualities of a personal meaning.
T: Every life has meaning, every person has a function, a role in society. People are attached to you, they care, they are interested and you matter, and you believe this too, otherwise you would not talk to me right now.
P: I do not deny my perception of meaning, but it is false. I was transcending the personal to the generic, this is the quality of truth.
T: You mean your truth.
P: No, I mean truth. My words are carving out a universal truth, and this truth is that life is without meaning.
T: Your words.
P: Yes, my words.
T: So, thereby your truth.
P: How could my words be understood if they were my words, verbalizing my truth, only. It is my cause to find truths that are valid for everyone.
T: That's exactly why you cannot find meaning, you seek your meaning in the ecstatic space of the collective 'we', you are in a permanent state of narcissistic love, where you have lost your sense of reality as the 'I'.
P: But my philosophy would have no meaning if it only applied to myself.
T: Maybe not your philosophy, but you, the philosopher would find meaning in your life.
P: Life, I was talking about life, not my life, my life is irrelevant in the context of life.
T: I don't feel we are making progress, you keep dancing away from the essence of the problem.
P: No! You are just afraid.
T: I think it is you who are afraid, and you transfer your fears onto me, it's a known occurrence in psychology. Your life has meaning through others, but you avoid this contact by generalizing your life to life.
P: But my philosophy can only be perceived as meaningful to others when it is generalized to a philosophical truth.
T: You have castrated your life as meaningless through your philosophy.
P: My philosophy, truth is the only purpose I can perceive in life.

Link: Stanford Prison Experiment

I am a sweet guy. I could never hurt someone. I am funny. I am a good person. I like working with people. I could not kill a fly. You can laugh with me. I am sensitive. I am really nice. I am tender. I am gentle. I am intelligent.