Identity

An identity cannot recur unchanged because recurrence itself is a transformation.°° There is no neutral repetition. Each loop, each attempt to return to what was, carries the imprint of what has occurred since; vortical stochasticity. This is as true for personal identity as it is for culture, civilisation, politics. The moment you repeat, you alter—because memory, context, and structure are not inert. They fold back in.

We often speak of preserving freedom, democracy, peace—as though these were stable artefacts. But they aren’t. They are ongoing effects of unstable systems, recursive outputs of entangled tension and release; gradients of difference. They recur only by being remade. The self does not remain—it reforms under constructively dissonant tension. The centre of that reform is not a core but a void, a logically undecidable dynamical vacuum we interpret as stability.

The world isn’t broken because it can’t be resolved. It’s functional precisely because it strains, stretches, and rebinds under tension. This is rubber-banded logic. This is the mechanics of recurrence. What changes us is not the loss of self, but the seductively discombulating pull of having to become it again, differently, every time.

°° apologies to both Heraclitus’ diachronic amanuenses, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.