identity drones: doomed forever to perform
plus: the fundamental non-existence of men, a special case study on identity drone men, and some beautiful photos
Identity drone case study:
the mindset of the identity drone
fake identities besiege us from the moment we enter the world. as soon as we are born, we are surrounded by people who religiously believe that these fake identities are real fixed things, and these people act upon those identities like scripture. the identities forced upon us become the basis for a wide variety of our behaviors and dispositions: our attitudes, our tastes, our thoughts, our feelings, the decor on our bedroom walls, the types of games we play, the types of books we read.
imposed identities do not only control us. they automate us to control ourselves and others in a variety of settings: the home, the classroom, the street, the bar, the clothing department, the bookstore, the workplace, the place of worship. everywhere this web of concepts entangles us, twists us until we no longer know ourselves, and everywhere we turn there are identity drones serving these fictions. we may sometimes feel uneasy, like we wish we were someone else, like we aren’t really ourselves: and that’s because we aren’t. we have been taken captive by identity drones, and if we don’t do something, we risk transforming into identity drones ourselves. for the artists out there: identity drones are incapable of being authentic, and by taking up false identities they inhibit their own authenticity.
mountains seem still: but like the glacier melting icebergs into the ocean, they are constantly changing (photo my own)
the goal of the identity drone is to ensure the same outcome for us as for them. we find ourselves constantly stopping ourselves from doing certain things, looking at certain things, liking certain things, saying certain things, or even thinking certain things: all in the name of preserving our sense of compliance with the demands of our externally imposed identities. even as the outer “self” that people see is nothing more than a performance of an artificial identity which we have unconsciously internalized to the point of automation, we may not even acknowledge that we have identities.
the study of identity is probably the ultimate threat to the identity drone. “serious men”, “men of the enlightenment,” may even say that they don’t believe in identity. they reject the need for new concepts to help us think about reality and they cling to their own subjectivity as a basis for objectivity. they mock the study of identity at universities. they explain society’s focus on race, gender, and sexuality as some kind of mass “social contagion.” they see people just being themselves and they suggest that these people have been “groomed,” “brainwashed,” and “indoctrinated.”
but they are only playing with made up words that shield them from the true subjective reality of their own authentic experience. they are afraid of authenticity: and they bury themselves the moment they deny the truth of identity as a force.
identity is a force which exists in at least two senses, on the inside and on the outside. the internal identity is subjective, and the subjective identity is the true reality; the externally composed, enforced, and neatly categorized identity is a fabrication, a product of the imagination, an ideological device for domination and control. but the external identity is the identity most people perform and perceive — even if they know nothing about identity, even if they say they have no identity, even if they think universities should replace identity studies with more “science.”
the people who deny the importance of identity are also the people who most aggressively impose fabricated identities. they unreflectively make assumptions about others and then react with discomfort, surprise, or even outright disgust when those assumptions are violated by the being in front of them. they have a need to keep that being inside the cardboard boxes that give their own life its fictitious meaning. they automatically enforce consequences when we violate the made up identity’s norms. teachers, parents, grandparents, police, border control agents, friends, mean girls, frat boys: whoever they are, they themselves are hostages to a sweeping range of externally fabricated identities whether they mock the study of identity or not.
we say: “that is a waterfall!”
but the waterfall is not a thing (photo my own)
they say they are simply being rational. but is it rational to think this way? they say: “i am x, therefore i must do y.” then we discover that “x” has no clear definition and “y” represents much more than the entire alphabet. i am a man, therefore. i am a professional, therefore. i am a teenager, therefore. i am an adult, therefore. i am a parent, therefore. i am a serious person, therefore. i am responsible, therefore.
in many cases, a completely valid implication follows “therefore,” and the “x” concept itself contains some truth. but in terms of society as a whole, we must admit that all of these behemoth identities operate as collections of totally arbitrary assumptions, rules, morals, fashion standards, parenting guidelines, educational principles, and rigid restrictions (or mandates) for virtually all forms of self-expression. our own day-to-day subjective experience demonstrates how these identities, although fabrications, are used to dominate us.
there are people of all genders who act as identity drones and impose various fabricated identities on their children; on their friends; on their colleagues; and even on random people around them.
but how can we identify an identity drone? here are 5 characteristics.
identity drones: 5 characteristics
these characteristics are by no means exhaustive. i would love to see additional characteristics in the comments! but here are five which have me thinking.
1. insistence on a boxy reality
my favorite alan watts quote: “humans like to put things in boxes, but the real world is wiggly.” identity drones take cardboard boxes and adamantly declare them to be great discoveries of science. when someone rips the cardboard up, all the gears in the identity drone’s mind turn toward putting that box back together again. the identity drone constricts his own thinking in the name of adherence to “objective reality.”
identity drones think almost exclusively in terms of socially constructed concepts. when presented with a new idea, they test the idea against made up concepts which they take to be reality.
2. hostility toward subjective experience
identity drones are skeptical of subjectivity. when they see people on the internet or in schools saying that they are doing away with the cardboard, they have looked inside themselves and seen something that is so much better than cardboard, the identity drone says: “you have been infected by social contagion.” the identity drone invalidates the person’s experience: “you have been spending too much time on the internet,” “you are unwell,” “there is no such thing as bisexual / non-binary / queer / teenage girl in her 30s.” the identity drone says: here, read this “scientific article” that studies humans from the perspective of socially constructed categories. except they do not think this last part: they truly believe in the externally imposed reality.
3. arbitrary fears of meaningless objects
i remember i was backpacking in southeast asia and a few of us from the hostel were looking to take out some bikes. one of the bikes, the last bike, was pink. the man with me was visibly distressed when he realized he would have to ride this pink bike. it took him a while to touch it. “i don’t want to be a girl,” he said. the identity drone is often afraid of meaningless objects, so much so that he is even uncomfortable when he sees someone else come into contact with these meaningless objects. even worse for the identity drone is when someone takes a meaningless object and gives that object meaning: charms, amulets, and beads, for instance. the identity drone is afraid.
4. need to self-propagate
identity drones operate in a similar way to genes: they must pass themselves on to the next generation. they become especially confused and distressed when their children deviate from the externally imposed identity. the identity drone believes it to be their responsibility as a parent to replicate their imposed identities onto their children.
the identity drone’s need for reproduction goes beyond the family. the identity drone is eager to ensure that institutions all across society join in the propagation: primary/secondary schools, universities, libraries, medical institutions, local governments, hospitals, airports, corporations, restaurants, even kindergartens.
5. religious fervor
identity drones often possess a faith-like confidence in the externally imposed identity. they are as driven to spread the externally imposed identity as a fundamentalist christian is to spread the gospel. in the case of a religious identity drone, they may even believe that ripping up the cardboard is punished with hell.
case study: identity drone men
the identity drone man says: “there is no such thing as a non-binary person!”
and i say: there is no such thing as a man.
i say there are only beings with penises pretending to be men.
it is the constant agony of performing a ludicrously restrictive heterosexual manhood which lays behind so many cishet man issues:
the repression of their feelings;
their inability to speak about almost anything save sports, politics, religion, and the physical appearance of women;
their refusal to contemplate most of these topics too far beneath the “objective” surface because this may awaken forbidden feelings or expressions;
their literal fear of riding pink bikes, wearing pink hats, wearing pink socks, listening to girly music, watching romantic movies, talking about feelings, moving their body in supposedly feminine ways;
and their utter terror of simply seeing their sons, fathers, man friends, or even strangers on the street doing any girly things. these fears and anxieties consume them because they are terrified of being seen as girls. why? it is because deep down they sense the truth: their expressed identity does not exist. they are walking around the world covered in cardboard and they will never rip it off to find their true selves.
are we like rocks? or are we like rivers?
if we are like rocks, then we are no different from rivers (photo my own)
of course these conclusions do not apply to all cishet men. but i have spent a good part of my life being forced into spaces full of supposed cishet men. i have wasted many of my best days on earth believing the lie that i am a cishet man and doing my best to act out the cishet man script.
the tragedy of the identity drone is that he knows in his bones that his expressed identity is not real. he feels himself constantly tiptoeing past a thin pink line.
the identity drone man, fearing the ultimate insult (“girl!” oh no!), anxiously performs so that other men see that he is a man and not a girl. because the interesting thing about identity drone men is that they do briefly see the girly reality of select other men, but they insult that reality away to avoid looking at it. if a man can force others to be men, and if a man can feel that he is accepted by other emotionally repressed men, then maybe he can finally look inside himself and briefly glimpse a man.
but if “man” were a real thing, a stable thing, a fixed thing, then why would any man ever need to agonize over being seen as a man? would they not naturally act as men?
in their agony they sense that they are not really men. in their confusion they sense that if they simply did whatever they wanted and openly expressed their feelings, other men would eject them from cis heteronormative society.
other men would call them girls and even refuse to associate with them. but these other men — deploying “insults” like girl, queer, and gay — are actually just as anxious to keep their bodies, minds, and souls painfully contained within the flimsy cardboard construction which they take as hard metal. they cannot handle the presence of anyone whose behavior calls the reality of their precious cardboard into question: deviance alarms them. they are afraid to look inside and see that a “man” is nothing more than a collection of indoctrinated beliefs, forced behaviors, and repressive restrictions.
their efforts to be men are hopeless. they will never find the man inside. if they let go of the concept of a “man” and looked inside themselves without the restrictions of language, they might see something beautiful and whole. but they continue stumbling around in the dark, grasping out, trying to find the “man” inside. they never see him; they only glimpse him, and he is blurry; he is a phantom, a script, a computer program. if they were more like girls, a diary would be helpful. but a diary is among the many objects which they fear. the identity drone man would rather have his head dunked in a toilet than go anywhere near a diary. he would never spill his guts out into a diary. that’s for women and teenage girls; that’s for people who are more willing to see through concepts. the identity drone man’s fear of objects, and even of “unserious” writing itself, runs so deep that he restricts his own private life and even his own mind on the basis of needing to be a man. he is doomed forever to perform.
despite his failure to find the man inside, he forces something like him to emerge.
“man” is a very powerful identity construct because “man” carries with it a built-in defense mechanism: the man is told not to talk about his feelings, not to express his emotions, and not to examine his soul in an honest way. the man sincerely believes that because he is a man, he must perform a specific list of behaviors.
the man fears “weakness” and “feelings.” for the man, anger is the one emotion which carries with its expression hardly any restrictions. the man is told: be a man, don’t cry. be a man: don’t walk like that; don’t talk like that; don’t move like that; don’t sing or dance like that. to be a man is to deliberately avoid authentic self-expression and even authentic self-reflection: in the name of being a man, the man avoids himself. in the name of being a man, the man becomes nothing. the little boy living under these restrictions often has no way of handling his emotions beyond disruptive behavior. “boys will be boys” — disruptive behavior is believed to be in the nature of a man. the being assigned to be a man grows up believing that he is a man and that there is nothing he can do about it.
because of this, it is very difficult for the supposed cishet man to ever find himself. i suppose this is why so many angsty young men are drawn to existentialism. the identity drone man lives in a constant state of anxiety which he cannot put into words because he only allows his anxiety to manifest as anger. he tries to look for himself, the construct of manhood as his guide. but he blinds himself rather than gaze upon his own inner radiance, and when he looks inside of himself, he sees nothing.
his determination to repress his emotions results in frequent bouts of rage. anger is his primary mode of expression, but only because he refuses to embrace other emotions. he won’t even look at these other emotions. he will only look at anger because anger is the one emotion which poses no threat to his manhood.
virtually any other emotion could result in “feminine” expressions. this terrifies the identity drone man. for the identity drone man, there is something deeply concerning about another man wearing a romper, but there is nothing fundamentally unusual about a man who is punching another man in the face.
the angry man obsesses over “controlling his anger” but he never succeeds, only incrementally improves, because he refuses to replace his anger with his other feelings or with forbidden expressions. when he confronts a challenge, anger is all he has. at a certain point in his existence, the identity drone man risks becoming nothing more than an npc, a non-player character in a video game, either so afraid to be in social situations where his manhood could be questioned that he is quiet and hardly talks; or perhaps he becomes aggressive, a deranged npc with maladaptive code who randomly shouts at you or attacks you when you’re just walking down the street.
are we like clouds? if we are, we can only briefly be categorized before we spill ourselves out as rain (photo my own)
whenever the cis men have really been closing in on me, i think about the cyber men in the show doctor who. they used to be people! but now they are cyborg drones plugged into a hive mind. they are mainly machines: their brains are mush. “you will be assimilated” — they repeat this over and over as they reach out for your throat. and then they turn you into one of them. when we don’t reflect on how fabricated identities have been imposed upon us (and they have been imposed upon all of us, in ways that go far beyond gender), we are assimilated into something like the cyber man hive mind, and we become identity drones who serve that hive mind’s agenda.
the identity drone man executes his patriarchal agenda upon his children, his grandchildren, his cousins, his parents, his friends, his employees, and even random strangers walking down the street. he is a machine who has been programmed to ensure that all beings with penises, or all beings he assumes have penises, adhere to the hive mind’s dictates. many of these identity drone men don’t even realize they are doing this because all identity drones see the made up norms which they enforce as stemming from the fabric of reality itself. when they judge others based on made up criteria, they believe they are fairly evaluating their victim according to “objective” moral guidelines. in truth, they are bullies, and their heads are full of nonsense.
i say the man does not exist. if the man exists, he exists as a program, as a set of code: long and contradictory, generative of malfunction, desperate to self-propagate, generously predisposed toward rage.
and this code was written into him by people who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, who copied the error-prone code into him as best as they could. why? because they saw he/they/she had a penis, and they take the code like scripture even as they deny the code’s existence.
they worship the code itself because this code is not like dna: this code is like the bible. in the same way that a fundamentalist christian feels an urge to spread god’s word into schools, the identity drone man feels a responsibility to propagate manhood.
are we like cities? if so, we contain such an infinite variety of authentic experiences that no other person can ever hope to accurately define us (photo my own)
the identity drone man — thoughtful, serious, logical, dispassionate — denies that this code controls him, and he denies that this code is fabricated. if he is a fundamentalist religious person, he even pretends that the code is divinely inspired. granted, sometimes the most “enlightened” man even asserts that “man” is nothing more than a definition in the dictionary or a biological category with certain predictive powers. but then, on the basis of sometimes imagined genitalia, he does everything in his power to force a whole set of behaviors, tastes, and modes of expression upon himself and anyone else he insists to be a “man.”
there are men who say i am being “performative” and “fucking fake.”
this is because they are identity drones. they see me and they decide that the nature of my being is “man”; therefore, my deviations must be performative. if i were being myself, i would be a “man.” instead, they say, people like me have succumbed to “social contagion” “gender ideology” and “transgenderism” (all meaningless concepts which they made up to support their arguments by combining various words and definitions in the dictionary).
they say i must be refusing to be myself, which to them is a “man,” and so my behavior is simply perverted: i am deranged. but if they would only look inside themselves they would see that there is no man there at all. they would see that they are the ones who are performing. it is they who are deranged.
it is they who have succumbed to “social contagion” and it is they who spread this “social contagion.” to spread “social contagion” while accusing authentic people of being infected by a “social contagion” seems deeply ingrained into the nature of the “intellectual”, “positivist”, and trans-misogynistic identity drone man.
but the vast majority will never see this, because they cannot they see this without becoming angry. these are serious people, driven by logic and dispassionate masculine analysis. unlike me, their hearts are not bursting with emojis. they don’t let themselves think with their emotions, and so they don’t really think at all.
i can never completely escape the eyes of the identity drone men. but at last, i have enough grasp on reality to be able to slice right through their slimy tentacles.
can you think of any additional characteristics of identity drones? drop them in the comments!
are we like the earth? if so, then we have no fixed reality.emotional geology
we have great depths of which only we can know. (photo my own)
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