The Compelling Call of Identity

We humans use identity to organize our actions and beliefs to give meaning to our lives. We, like all living beings, live in networks of relationship. And like all living beings, we need to stay alert to what’s going on in our environment, what might require us to adapt and change.

Amid all the information available in our environment, which identity filter(s) do you use? Are you dedicated to popularity, to a role, to a cause, an ethic, a nation, an ethnicity? What identity gives meaning to your life?

While celebrity culture offers an escape from reality, there are two potent examples today of how identity can be a compelling dynamic for sacrifice and service. This dynamic appears in the early stages of a new civilization when invaders band together to subvert and conquer a decadent culture. Today we see this in the rise of terrorist groups around the world. And it is also true of those who, living inside the decadence of this culture, are willing to sacrifice and work to restore moral virtues such as justice, equality, and compassion. Today we call this form of activism “identity politics.”⁶

In putting these two examples of social activists and terrorists in the same paragraph, please note that I am not saying they are at all similar in their intentions or methods. What they illustrate, in very different ways, is the power of identity to mobilize people into purposeful actions, foregoing self-promotion and self-protection. As leaders, it is important for us to take note of the incredible power of identity.

Even knowing the power of this dynamic, I keep asking how is it possible for terrorists to lose all sense of personal identity, strap a suicide belt on themselves, spend weeks building bombs to kill and maim, and then go kill themselves?

How is it possible for a person to kill colleagues at an office Christmas party? How is it possible to deliberately target children or to be a child who commits these actions?

There is so much to understand in these continuing horrific examples, but at their core is an individual or a group that has been influenced to believe that what gives meaning to their lives is killing themselves and murdering people on behalf of a cause. (It is the premeditated suicide that distinguishes their behavior from soldiers who go to war. Soldiers are willing to sacrifice their lives for their nation or cause, and they may kill many people in military operations, but they want to return home alive.)

We know that these young men and women feel hopeless about their own future, that they feel excluded and invisible, that a few of them are mentally ill.⁷ We know that drugs, brainwashing, and the availability of thousands of online videos turn them into suicide bombers. Suicide is on the rise globally, especially among youth.⁸ These young people have been conditioned to eagerly accept an ideology that gives meaning to their desire to die and erase the pain of life.

The very function of identity—to respond and change in order to survive—has been inverted. It is hard to identify with this upside-down world. No wonder we can’t understand it.

What is much easier to understand is the rise of identity politics, people organizing on the basis of their marginalization from the rest of society. They unite in their demands for fair treatment, justice, equal rights, access. It can be race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, nationality, age—any of the “isms” that flood public discourse these days. They stand in solidarity and gain visibility through many forms of protest. This is happening in many different countries on all continents. Because of their experiences of oppression, neglect, violence, they demand their country pay attention to the values, laws, and practices that, at an earlier time, were recognized as important to that national identity or were pledged in UN resolutions. In the United States, we may never have achieved the goals we set for ourselves as a nation, but they were important enough to struggle for in many wars and social movements.

If you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator

These values and practices constituted our national identity before we became so distressingly decadent. Is it possible to reclaim them? Are we even interested?

There is an unavoidable consequence when people from the margins organize.⁹ The burden of change and the restoration of national values get placed on them. If you want equal rights, it’s your job to fight for them. If you demand equal pay, convince us. If you want to be included at the table, prove yourself. The very values that defined who we wanted to be as a nation are no longer defended by the nation. Instead, those who are marginalized must speak loud enough to get our attention. It’s no wonder that they end up screaming. And when they finally do get our attention, more often than not we blame them for raising the issue. Either we’re doing fine, or it’s their fault that we failed. Anger intensifies on both sides, polarization increases, and any ideal of national identity is trampled beyond recognition.

Such civil divisions are predictable in a declining civilization. Instead of uniting in common cause to protect the nation from real threats, we take ourselves down by ever more hateful exchanges.

We are not protesting.

We are protecting.

Native Water Protectors at Standing Rock, 2016