The Strength of Being an Outsider (by choice)

Identity

This time I will discuss an often overlooked aspect of identity. Perhaps it's sometimes peripherally mentioned, but it is rarely in focus. This has nothing to do with identity as a name, or your ID card, or how you are recorded in a bureaucratic system. All that is just an imaginary paperworld, not reality. One could say that it is a bureaucratic model of reality, but we must never confuse a model of reality or its elements with reality itself.

This will be about the real YOU, both inside and outside. Who you are and who you feel that you are. How you define yourself, and why it is important how you define yourself, because your own inner definitions will shape you and your life. To a large extent, you become what you think. If you think you are a unit in a bureaucratic model, you become one!

Humans are herd animals and that means that the majority adapt after the herd. They even think like others think, because imitation is a genetic part of both herd mentality and learning. Think about it: how much of what you do and think are you doing and thinking by genuine and original choice, and how much is just because you do and think as others do? And who are those “others”?

That's where identity comes in. Which herd, with which group of people do you identify yourself? A country, a cultural tradition, a family, a football team, a generation, a political party? Any group you feel that, in some sense, you “belong to”. A group of which you think “we” and “us” instead of “they” and “them”. Apart from a few exceptions, most individuals adapt to such a group or groups. You allow the group to shape you.

I might be extreme, and I know that my herd mentality is almost non-existent, but circumstances of my life from the very beginning, both by coincidence and choice, made me a permanent outsider. I never belong completely. Not anywhere, except to family. That is the only group I fully recognise. For everything else, I step in and out as I see fit, but I am not emotionally bound to groups and I don't allow any group to shape me. That is consciously applied outsidership as a strength. I have a foot planted almost everywhere, even in different cultures. But what I do, how I shape myself, is a matter of conscious choice based on what I perceive as superior quality (which is a subjective choice, of course), never a result of group pressure.

The most meaningless tie, is the tie to a state. Why? Because the state doesn't exist. It is an imaginary creation for the purpose of enslavement. It exists only in people's minds. It is words on paper, but lacks genuine reality. A city exists, a village exists, a family, clan or tribe exists, a cultural tradition exists - but the state does not. Borders drawn on a map, laws on paper, that's all there is. Without people believing in this as a sort of god, it would just fade away, but real life would go on anyway.

That's why passports are nothing more than entrance tickets; the right passport allows you to cross the borders you want to cross, and stay where you like to stay, it's just that. Just a document of convenience. So-called national identity means nothing to me. I have none. That is a great freedom.

Generation

Anti-ageing practises along with an intellectual approach of timelessness, cause the loss of another identity, namely that of belonging to a certain generation. For me, there are no longer people I feel are my contemporaries in that sense. I don't relate to people (or near history) in those terms at all.

It gives me another dimension of freedom, but I know that such freedom would be difficult for many people. They cling to that togetherness in values as a sense of security in the same way as nationalists cling to their patriotism and national identity.

When you enter the world without a national identity and without a time-based identity, you are on your own. For good and bad. If you are capable of creating your own identity from that, from inside yourself, it is a position of great strength and freedom - but if you are not, it might crush you.

I have seen examples of both.

"When the wind grows cold, when the sun grows old,

Nothing holds the outsider"

(Ian Hunter; "The Outsider", from the album You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic, 1979)

(Above I use the words “state” and “national” as they are commonly used, not in a way I consider as right. More on that here.)

(This article is based on material previously published in Meriondho Leo.)

Related articles:

Beware of Being Normal, it can Be Worse than You Think!

Acquiring Knowledge: Experience and Reading

Self-Knowledge & The Power Within

Either Health Freedom or Slavery - A Little of Each is not Possible

Nation & State, Art & Culture; How confusion serves a purpose

Old-Fashioned or Modern? Don't Care about Zeitgeist, Care about Quality

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