True identity is the key to resisting propaganda

With the relentless demand for reparations, land acknowledgements, and gender-fluid pronouns, it can be easy to understand why conservatives are burned out on the concept of identity. The left has used identity politics as a weapon to mercilessly bludgeon foes and extract material and political capital that are then used to bribe the client classes of the Democrat Party. This progressive obsession with an artificial and hollow collectivism can easily drive the right to assume that radical individualism is the only answer, but that would be a mistake.

The lack of a true, organic, and meaningful identity lies at the heart of our nation’s ills, and to fight back, we must understand the role identity plays in creating a healthy and prosperous social order.

While modern Western culture is obsessed with the notion of individuals choosing their own identity, it is important to recognize that none of us construct ourselves from the ground up. All of us are born into families and communities that serve as the substrate from which our individual person arises.

Identity is never formed in a vacuum; we define ourselves by our relationship to others and our place in broader society. Father, son, mother, daughter, elder, child: These are our most fundamental identities and the ones that will inform all other relationships we encounter.

These organic familial structures also introduce us to key formative concepts that shape our world, like language, religion, tradition, and custom. These concepts give us a sure footing and help us to understand how we should order our lives, how we should treat others, and what common moral vision guides our community.

Most people do not deeply interrogate these beliefs because they form the bedrock of the social order. These unquestioned axioms serve as pillars of identity that hold the broader civilization aloft and help it to maintain its particular character. To be a member of one culture is to be defined by the pillars of identity that set your way of being apart from the many other societies across the world.

Human beings are more clearly defined by their limitations than by their freedoms, and it is in the limitations of our identities that we find true meaning.

The spirit of the strong, independent individual is burned deep into the Americans psyche. The courageous pioneer carving out a new piece of civilization on the Western frontier remains the ultimate American archetype, even after all those lands have long been settled. But what we often forget about those brave frontiersmen is that their ultimate goal was to bring civilization, to create a community where none existed before.

The first structures built to mark the transition from trading post to frontier town were the church, courthouse, and schoolhouse. Even the most rugged individuals knew from their own cultural upbringing that religion, education, and law were fundamental to the continuation of the way of life they held dear.

Conservatives are often blown away by the speed at which culture now shifts. New ideological trends seem to burst forth from nowhere, dominate our society, and then recede as quickly as they emerge. Mass media is the main delivery system for these memetic contagions, blasting them like endless propaganda across every platform of communication until they are superimposed on the public consciousness.

Parents watch their children adopt alien forms of speech and dress, chanting strange slogans and spouting ideological pronouncements with no connection to reality. The constant drip of social media, state education, and algorithmically curated entertainment has the capacity to create entire social movements seemingly out of thin air.

Read the rest at the Blaze