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Limits to self-invention

gleech.org · 1,785 words · saved by 1 readers

I and my friends have a practical theory of identity, inspired by an (implausibly) positive reading of the oddball sociologist Erving Goffman. Call it bootstrapping: Compared to the received view of identity, which holds that “Once grown, you are an essence of given things that will not change. Biology + Childhood + Peers = Self”, this approach hopes for: freedom from some of the more obvious social determinants; allophilia; psychological neoteny; and maybe less distortion of beliefs by tribal forces (or maybe just interestingly different distortions). It seems to have worked. One friend changed from an anti-sport crumpet to a diehard Liverpool FC encyclopaedia at very short notice. In the space of two years, another took himself from deadbeat, drunken self-loather to literally the hardest-working star in his cohort, summa cum laude. I am slowly becoming a scientist, where for my whole life I have been a verbal child, in love with the figurative and the suggestive, too undisciplined to

...we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. 3 – Pico della Mirandola ...a human being, for moral purposes, is largely how he or she describes himself or herself. – Richard Rorty Disclaimer This feels slightly alien, ill-conceptualised. It confuses preferences with identity, and doesn't have any sense of which preferences we can or should treat as adaptive. I didn't know the term " f

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