8. The Impact of Othering on Identity
The re-entry. Who is vulnerable? Who has been vaccinated? How did they get vaccinated? Why don’t they get vaccinated? What about the variants? Will I ever get to leave this town? This country??? It is difficult to not see things as binary. The grey area holds the complexity to offer more than one or the other way. Yet it is not easy to hold the complexity given just how fraught these times we’re living in are.
Namely:
The dislocation we have experienced from the body public as a result of the pandemic and lockdown,
The dislocation we face from our planet,
And direct violence as a result of the rise and rise of populism in the West.
Building a self-construct
This binary also creates othering, an unconscious deep-seated understanding of ourselves or Self by contrast to the other. This is how we build identity and separate from the mass. It is how we find our tribes. In psychology, selfhood underpins everything. Today’s social theory (and woke politics) is grappling with identity and intersectionality. And yet we are not singular entities shaped strictly by our parents or family constellations. Our sense of self is formed and influenced by others or the groups embedded into wider systems and structures we co-habit with from arrival. This is positively defined as ‘community’. It is then extended outwards widely more into society where social norms and codes of behaviour are implied in order to fit in. And then extended further into national values and consciousness. Our adaption process happens very early on because we need to find ways to fit in somewhere for our survival.
The violence of differences
We’re not a homogenous mass. We also desperately want to find ways to stand out which also gives us self-definition. Particularly in Western neo-liberal societies where the pinnacle of selfhood equates to total independence and absolute individualism. This is a false form of individuality Jung defined as the 'persona’ undergirded by a kind of performative authenticity or what Susan Sontag called ‘aesthetic consumerism’ [1]. We construct personas to fit into the external world and may even be rewarded for it through power and money, or influence and followers, but we lose our grasp on our real feelings and desires which go underground contributing to our shadow.
Our selfhood is not defined by capital and bespoke lifestyles nor is it constructed with a shaman in an ancient hillside in Peru. Our Self is constructed in awareness of our psychological construct - our limits and strengths and relationally in our collective experience. This is where Jung’s central concept, called individuation or wholeness, occurs, free from the trappings of the ego and the persona.
“Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to itself.” [1]
If the tension of current times is any indication, we are unable to relate to each other due to the clashing of complex identities and values. It seems easier to live in separate worlds/bubbles/cultures/platforms in the further atomisation of our existence.
There is a kind of violence to differences particularly towards those who contain multitudes – gender, race, religion, class, citizenship, political ideology, and so forth. We can see this weaponised in the so-called cultural wars, an old, divisive strategy that demands uniformity in order to maintain power. And yet every individual possesses a kind of changing hierarchy of identities that makes us unique. The trouble is when we have a fixed or rigid mindset – a kind of fundamentalist attitude on life to not change, it prohibits real connection to others.
“The great psychological appeal of fundamentalism is that it offers certainty” (Kramer & Alstad, ‘Masks of Authoritarian Power’, 1963)[3] This is often motivated by nostalgia which is etymologically defined as pain and longing (Hollis, J. 2020)[4]. A fantasy for something that wasn’t so. Both fundamentalist and supremacist ideologies manifest this psychic wound.
And arguably, there is a kind of scientific fundamentalism where we exalt data and submit to empiricism which requires us to forsake any agnosticism at best. If we are not at the altar of some kind of divinity, absent any spiritual dimension, we learn a kind of helplessness to algorithms, scientific certainties, and wider structures we are part of.
It all leads to a kind of psychic rootlessness, a kind of soul sadness…
It begs the question: So who is in charge here?
Is it God? Is it science? The conundrum evokes the power complex. Depending on your life position, it is either someone looking after us to our benefit OR I need to protect what’s mine and my own. Outside the binaries, in the grey area, we have to confront the universe as essentially unknown and not in our control – this is the ultimate, transcendent, immutable Other.
Hang on, I’m not a racist/supremacist/ fundamentalist, so this does not apply to me (obvs)…
Many of us don’t take an extreme stance and yet we can blind ourselves to what Hannah Arendt so famously called ‘the banality of evil’. [5] That is to say that violence is not always extreme or radical. It can be mundane. It can be quiet and out of view. Left unacknowledged, out of awareness, it can be called ‘complacency’. We collectively live in a social-political order that is systematically built on a power-over paradigm (aka ‘patriarchy’ or ‘supremacy’ or ‘authoritarianism’ - take your pick!) that is founded and functioning from violence. No matter how ‘good’ you are you can’t extricate fully from this overarching system. Our born legacies that locate us to the streets we live on and the house you keep and the education you obtained, and the social position you maintain, the clothes on your back, the food that you eat, and so forth. Our inequalities through the power-over framework are in fact, institutionalised.
From the position of the Self, if our identification in adult life is left unchecked, it is problematic because we are still carrying over unconscious ways of being between subjects and objects that fulfill power-over patriarchal scripts (i.e. - being like daddy, becoming what my family wishes for me, having a good time and nice life like my alumni and taking what’s mine, letting my man get to choose his career over mine just like mum did, doing all the emotional/feeling work in my marriage, acting like one tough ars bit* like Sigourney Weaver in your workplace just like the boys do, insulting introversion, telling children to not cry, etc).
Look, I don’t doubt that you and/or your family worked hard for it AND the legacies inherited by [white male] dominant culture made it just so. It is not an ‘either’ ‘or’; it is a ‘yes’ + ‘and’. As long as we live under the power-over domination of this social order, we have to face up to the benefits and uncomfortable truths we have reaped and perpetuate AND while we, the collective, suffer the consequences from this universal suffering. How do we uncouple from this either/or social order? How does power-over supremacy filter through my relationships? How am I enabling myself through complacency or submission? It calls for a different way of interaction and encountering in relationship to each other:
“In the wake of disappointment, harm, danger, fear, uncertainty, heartbreak and injustice, we make a decision after decision, and each decision impacts the relationships we have with ourselves, each other, and the world. Decision is where our sovereignty resides - not in controlling our emotions, other people’s behaviours or outcomes & circumstances, but in our power to make decisions rooted in our integrity, grounded in that which we are (knowingly or otherwise) most committed to.” James-Olivia Chu Hillman @Inquisitive_Human
I can’t relate to you authentically if I want to control the narrative for my protection.
I can’t connect with you if I avoid or deny aspects of your behaviour or identity I don’t like that don’t fit into my cultural code.
Our relationship can’t deepen if you gloss over our differences to keep comfortable.
“And the day when our human race has fully matured, it will not define itself as the sum of the inhabitants of the globe, but as the infinite unity of their reciprocities.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
On reflection
Who comprises your community? Who helped the making of you?
What is your life position? How/in what situation do you move out of your preferred position?
How do you interpret difference? Are you able to hold a curiosity for it and name it or do you try to find sameness and likeness?
How is the urgency of finding a quick resolution to your discomfort over fomenting a long-term connection?
How can we accept our differences not as a confrontation but as a conversation for understanding and growth?
How do your interactions, decisions, and use of language align with old, patriarchal forms of power-over relationships?
Sources
[1] Sontag, Susan, On Photography (1977) Picador.
[2] Jung, Carl. On the Nature of the Psyche 1960, p. 432.
[3] Kramer & Alstad, Masks of Authoritarian Power (1993) p.167
[4] Hollis, James Living Between Worlds (2020)
[5] Arendt, Hannah, Banality of Evil (1963).
[6] Subramanian, Samanth. The UK is free of institutional racism, a government race report claims. It’s wrong. Quartz. 21 April 2021.
Stewart I, Joines V. TA Today, 2nd Ed. (2012)
@The Inquisitive_Human