When people become attached to destructive, antisocial or extreme beliefs, we tend to focus on the beliefs themselves. We ask where the ideas came from, how they were reinforced, and how they might be challenged or removed. But this begins after much of the important work has already happened. The deeper question is not simply why someone adopted a particular ideology, but why an identity of that kind became necessary or useful to them. Identity is formed relationally, through families, communities, institutions, economies, technologies and encounters with other people. Yet we tend to treat this surrounding environment as normative and necessary, while treating the destructive identity emerging within it as the anomaly.
That is a substantial blind spot. Contemporary technocratic systems continually classify, measure and represent people as stable, discrete individuals, then present those identities back to us as though they were simply what we are. Yet the identities organised through these systems are conspicuously brittle, comparative and insecure. This is not economically or politically incidental. An insecure subject is unusually productive: continually required to establish, display, improve and defend who they are through comparison, performance, recognition, affiliation and antagonism. Behaviours that might otherwise appear socially corrosive can be absorbed and normalised remarkably easily when economic or political value attaches to them. Competition, insecurity, resentment and antagonism are not simply tolerated by the surrounding system; under many circumstances they are useful to it. The world we have therefore does more than accidentally produce oppositional identities. Significant parts of its economic, political and communicative organisation depend upon their continued production.
Nor is this insecurity directionless. The surrounding system supplies the categories, aspirations, threats and competitors through which it can be organised. As the subject asserts an identity outwardly through these structures, that assertion reflexively and inversely asserts the structure back upon the subject, constraining what that identity can be. The system produces the categories through which the self becomes legible; the self reproduces those categories by inhabiting them; and their reproduction further binds the self to the world they describe. The bootstrap closes.
The current American resurgence of anti-communist political rhetoric provides a useful example without requiring us to decide here whether capitalism or communism is good, bad or anything in between. Defining communism as an enemy does more than make a claim about an economic or political system. It provides a mould through which people can orient themselves: this is what we are, that is what we are not, this is freedom, that is its opposite. None of these identity structures is necessary, eternal or fundamental. They belong to particular histories and circumstances. An identity organised strongly around being capitalist rather than communist is nevertheless precisely the kind of differentiated political and economic identity that capitalist institutions can mobilise and derive value and power from. Communist systems can perform analogous operations with their own oppositions. The distinction reproduces the identities, and the identities reproduce the distinction.
From this perspective, the ideology is not necessarily the primary object. The demand for the kind of identity that ideology can stabilise is. Remove one ideology while leaving that demand intact and another belief, grievance, group or conflict can occupy the same structural position. A genuinely preventative approach therefore confronts an uncomfortable problem: some of the conditions we would need to change are also conditions through which existing systems generate value, participation and power. The question is not merely how to prevent destructive identities from appearing, but how to alter a world that repeatedly produces, rewards and sometimes depends upon the forms of insecurity and opposition whose extreme consequences it later attempts to contain.
Daedelus Kite 
One reply on “why destructive identities take hold”
There is another recursion here. The brittle and antagonistic identities produced within contemporary social, economic and technological systems become precisely the problems towards which enormous institutional resources are subsequently directed. Policing, courts, security agencies, counter-radicalisation programs, regulatory systems and entire administrative structures organise themselves around managing behaviours and conflicts that cannot be understood independently of the larger system that produced them. Institutions therefore do not merely respond to social problems. Their continuing organisation, funding and authority can come to depend upon the persistence of the categories of problem they exist to manage.
This does not require conspiracy or conscious intention. It is a systems problem precisely because the recursion can remain largely invisible to the people participating in it. A system produces conditions conducive to insecurity, antagonism and conflict; institutions emerge or expand to manage their consequences; those institutions then classify and stabilise the behaviours and identities as recognisable problems; and those classifications feed back into the social field from which further identities are formed. The system progressively reproduces both the problem and the machinery required to manage it. Each part can appear locally rational while the larger recursive structure remains almost entirely unexamined.
This is one reason prevention at the level of underlying conditions is so difficult. It threatens not merely particular beliefs or behaviours, but established ways of defining problems, allocating resources, exercising authority and reproducing institutions. Education might provide one place from which to examine these recursive structures, yet educational institutions are themselves embedded within them and occupied with maintaining their own organisational continuity. The deeper difficulty is therefore reflexive: the institutions we ask to understand and interrupt these dynamics are themselves participants in the dynamics they would need to see.
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