Self-identity is a complex fiction.

Self-identity is little more than a complex fiction.

Attempt to suspend your disbelief or any moral affront you might at first experience when engaging such a thought as that the foundation upon which you build a world of meaning and purpose is utterly and ultimately insubstantial.

In fact, the vigorous spectrum of discomfort and aggression which generally percolates through consciousness into disagreement or conflict is hardly evidence of certainty or security but, rather, historically speaks (if not hysterically screams) of uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity.

Notice that the extent of disbelief and affective anxiety invoked (by suggesting that a person’s core identity might be little more than a contingent, transient game of words and meanings) is an identical emotional response to that experienced when systems of belief clash with each other in any tribal, political or geostrategic theatre of conflict and internecine absurdity.

The doubling-down on sources of external authority or moral guidance inversely proves this point of fiction.

It is the insecurity over uncertain self-identity that leads us to such attachment upon belief systems for which we are quite actively willing to ignore and trade axiomatic inconsistency for the temporary security blanket of purpose or meaning, haunted as it must be by the relentless diffusion of facts that challenge and disassemble our certainties.

The assertion of fictional selves and tribal or ideological systems of belief are processes with which we engage as though this is a necessary property of human being and not in fact some historical accident.

The core uncertainty of self-identity is a optimally propagates through a transmission medium of dissonant turbulence, insecurity or alienation and through this cultivates us all as unwitting observers to the reproduction and self-replication of our own essential insubstantiality.

Even that of which you are most certain masks the fact that your self-identity is foundationally dependent upon that which you are not and this is the empty set upon which the algebra of cognition, language and technology is built: an irreducible emptiness.