I Identify as Hot, Cool, Smart, Skilled, and Good
Disagreement is bigotry
I’ve seen self-identified activists exploit causes and self-identified religious leaders violate children. I’ve seen self-identified conservatives expand government and self-identified progressives criminalize thought. I’ve seen people self-identify as new genders without changing anything about their lives and as new sexual minorities without remotely modifying their sexual behavior. I’ve seen self-identified victims profit from their alleged victimhood and self-identified supremacists violently self-destruct out of profound weakness. I’ve seen the self-identified mentally ill spontaneously lose their illness when it ceases to benefit them and self-identified experts intentionally misrepresent their fields for cultural clout.
At the same time, I’ve seen many people lose their jobs, reputations, friends, and families because they argued, essentially, that social respect is earned through skill. Their provocations derived from their belief that identities that require no actual sacrifice to obtain are just strategic words weaponized to increase personal power. They forwarded that truly respectable identities are consistently performed through increasingly disciplined actions in the face of mounting risks. They said that only identities of this sort reliably create value for the world. Time and again, I’ve seen people’s disagreement with self-identification culture successfully cast as bigotry and their livelihoods powerfully crushed by the very self-identifiers who proactively perpetuate the opposite viewpoint.
Through seeing all this, I have learned that I can self-identify as almost anything that people say that they like to get ahead. I can use the linguistic act of self-identification as a tool to gain interpersonal power and cultural credit at no cost. If anyone disagrees with me about my identity, I can immediately and without justification label their disagreement as bigotry by pretending their admonishment of my extractive laziness is really unconscious bigotry against a conveniently abstract social population. As long as I’m sufficiently passionate and eloquent, I’ll get away with it and even gain socio-cultural power because my fellow self-identifiers will pretend to see my loud expression of self-righteous indignation as an admirable display of virtue. They want to shortcut authenticity just like me.
I asked myself, If I can leverage self-identification culture to coerce people to pretend to understand me in particular ways to gain power, which identities would be most useful for me to self-identify as? The answers were obvious.
Here is how I self-identify now that I understand the power our culture grants self-identifiers.
I identify as hot because attractive people tend to be more disciplined and responsible. I will not exercise, improve my eating habits, develop my fashion sense, or invest in any beauty regimens because none of that is necessary. If you deny my self-identified attractiveness, I’ll simply construe whatever reason you give as prejudice against an abstract population defined by that reason’s reference point. If you say that the acne caused by my junk food diet detracts from my overwhelming beauty, I’ll concoct a social population out of thin air called “people suffering from acne” and suggest your observation about my lack of self-discipline with food perpetuates the marginalization of this fabricated category. Even though I’m obviously self-identifying as hot because appropriating hotness gives me power over you, I’ll manipulatively accuse you of perpetuating harmful beauty standards by disagreeing with my self-identified attractiveness. It’s a double win for me because I get the proceeds of hotness without investing in it and I get rid of people like you who have the courage to point out my exploitative hypocrisy.
I identify as cool because cool people wield charisma that inspires others. I will not learn how to capitalize on other people’s negative feedback to develop my relational skills or interact with unfamiliar kinds of people to gain social awareness. Why would I waste my time? There is no need to bother trying because I can easily accuse anyone who questions my lack of trying of resenting me for reasons entirely unrelated to trying. It’s not that my laziness is uncool, it’s that you hate everyone who thinks the way I do. You hate the specific sort of brain I have. You detest everyone who diverges neurologically from what you consider normal. Shut up and pretend to think I’m cool or contend with the semantic force of my weakness intellectualized as social victimhood. If I can talk better than you, then, according to the new logic, I must be understood to be better than you. See how easy it is to be cool today?
I identify as smart because smart people tend to be authoritative, resilient, and successful. I will not sacrifice my precious time and energy evidencing my vast intellect. In fact, if you ask me to demonstrate my intelligence in any way that could even possibly expose mental weakness, I’ll reflexively represent the demonstrative procedure as an instrument for perpetuating inequality. It’s not that I’m afraid I won’t perform well on standardized tests that have been rigorously engineered to be maximally meritocratic, it’s that you’ve already assumed I’m stupid because you’re a disgusting bigot. I refuse to defend my ideas intellectually because doing so platforms your ideas, which I claim are bad without actually expending the labor necessary to understand them. I’m worried that you’ll hurt other people with your thoughts if we converse. I’m definitely not anxious about the possibility that I’ll have to think about the ways in which the exchange revealed my intellectual unsophistication and hypocrisy. I don’t need to even try to be smart in any way other than in how I abuse language to masquerade my unintelligence as moral sensitivity because that’s the only kind of intelligence that matters now.
I identify as skilled because skilled people practice self-discipline to make significant and lasting impacts on the world. However, I will not actually cultivate any skills other than the rhetorical ones I use to protect my self-identifications from social delegitimization. There is no sense in working extra! I can get by perfectly fine playing the political self-identification game with my self-identifier colleagues. Together, we can replace sacrificing for the sake of creating new ideas and discoveries with demands that our uniqueness be continuously validated and celebrated. It doesn’t matter that our self-identified uniqueness always derives from existing social classification schemes and is therefore pathetically reactionary and unoriginal. There’s no need to be creative or original because we can live comfortably if we give true creatives bad names. All we need to do is stigmatize those who speak truth to power by challenging officially sanctioned doctrine. We need only label such revolutionaries as perpetrators of social discrimination, exclusion, and inequity to silence their originality. The only indispensable skill is that of manipulating language to coerce less linguistically sophisticated people into thinking that the only true tolerance is acceptance of those who agree that self-identifying is the same as being.
Finally, I identify as good because good people authentically love. Good people make life joyous and exciting by continuously sacrificing themselves to the ones they love with grace, forethought, and ingenuity. Of course, I won’t actually do any of that crap because it’s a waste of effort. Why risk love’s vulnerability when I can make people pretend I’m good without disrupting my psychic status quo? No thanks, I’ll stick to overwhelming people’s perceptions with semantics. They need only distrust themselves a little for me to have my way. Since labels are taken at face value in our self-identification culture, the superficially profane can stick as much as the superficially sacred. People are rightly afraid that skilled self-identifiers will weaponize labels against them if they risk questioning us too forcefully. The fear of semantic reprisal keeps their principles and our fear of discomfort at bay. The good of today are those who are good at talking. The better you can talk, the better you are.
Only language is real in a culture of self-identification.
Happy Pride Month.