I am endlessly astounded by the way so many essentially unique and fundamentally different individuals lash themselves to hollow systems of belief, ideology and narcissistic self-gratification for nothing more than a deep and unrelenting tribal urge to copy other people, to self-validate and affirm identity through the distributed and prefabricated grammatical and behavioural prescriptions of external forces beyond their control. When considered as a species orientation towards the replication of material or conceptual, symbolic and cultural tribal pattern or behavioural encoding, the manifold ways that human beings become swept up in overt displays of group membership or (other) cultural games and competitive or adversarial grammars reveal themselves as being really quite strange and self-defeating.
What people rarely seem to notice (and almost never possess the requisite maturity to acknowledge) is that all the swirling, turbulent and profoundly complex social, cultural, conceptual, behavioural and symbolic information patterns we attach ourselves to are equally – if not much more so – attached to us and they pass through us like invisible compression waves of language, image and culture. We ourselves are not the bearers of meaning, we are born by it, upon it and every act or attachment to notions of individuality or self-determination is first and foremost the replication of the clockwork or organic machines and entities of emergent complexity we experience in all its tragedies and triumphs as our human, all to human, world.
You are not the individual you think you are, but you are an individual.
Daedelus Kite 