It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of politics as identity and identity as ideology. Somehow, I thought people were bright enough to stand apart from what they believed, to see themselves as a person believing a thing, not believing that they were the thing believed. But apparently not. When some people buy into a political ideology, they identify with that ideology, and when the ideology is attacked, they think that they themselves are being attacked, not just their idea.
I can’t imagine holding any idea so strongly that a destruction of that belief would destroy me, but that is not the case with a lot of people. Decades ago in a theology class, the teacher broke down everything we believed. His intent, if I remember correctly, was to make us rethink what we thought we knew. To get us to start building up a new way of thinking. Before he got to that point though, a student in the class got really upset, and told him he was destroying everything we believed without giving us anything to replace it. It was as if he had destroyed us, since those beliefs were the foundation of our lives until then, and most of the class were as upset as that one student, but it didn’t bother me. It was just something else to learn, is all. (As far as I was concerned, nothing I learned in school was ever about me. It was just the curriculum.)
To be honest, that’s the only thing about that class I remember. Well, there was one other odd thing that has stuck in my mind all these years. He taught that “Love is the movement of an appetite toward a recognized good.” (His exact words.) I think the discussion that day centered on the supposition that if this were true, then what we think of love is really like and vice versa. But the upshot of that class is lost in the shadows of time. Or rather, in the shadows of my mind. Odd that I remembered those two bits.
A more recent example comes from The Wheel of Time. In the books, there is a people, a warrior society, that takes their entire identity from their belief that they were always warriors, that what sets them apart from others and makes them morally superior is that they use spears rather than swords, their thinking being that spears can also be used for hunting while swords can only be used to kill other humans. When this ideology was proven false, a huge percentage of those people couldn’t handle it and ran away, not just from their culture but from themselves. (It often seems to me that these books are a brand-new allegory instead of a decades-old fantasy series.)
The odd thing is that the story of this warrior society helps me understand many politically motivated people today, while at the same time, these people today help me understand the people in this warrior society.
Another odd thing is that in the book, the chiefs of this society knew that the destruction of their beliefs and their people had been prophesied, but as a chief said, “It’s one thing to know prophesy will be fulfilled eventually, another to see that fulfillment before your very eyes.”
This statement certainly rings true to me. It’s one thing to spend a lifetime studying “prophesy,” aka history, both overt and hidden, and to know that one day we will be balanced on the knife edge of keeping our country a constitutional republic or turning into another sociologic cesspool, but seeing it happen before my eyes is . . . disheartening. It’s also weird to see all the political, global, and economic machinations that had been going on behind the scenes my whole life, suddenly appearing on stage as if it’s no big deal. I’d always presumed I’d be gone by the time this new world order would be put into effect, but it’s happening faster than I expected. I try to look at it as seeing history in the making — both the push toward socialism and the pushback of the republic — but it’s hard to continue to see it all as “out there.” It comes too close, at times.
Still, whatever happens, I will still be me. My identity is only as a truth seeker, not as a victim or oppressor. (And even “truth seeker” is only a surface identity. I am . . . me. Period. I am not my ideas. Not my writing. I’m just me. No further definition needed.) And, if I am being truthful, there is a chance I will never see the fruition of this current push since part of the “ideology” has always been to get rid of the old folks who are perceived by the young as using up too many resources without contributing anything.
But who knows. The curtain is up. The play is still going on, and we have yet to discover the plot.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
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