identity politics, otherkin (and otherwise), bona fides
For the record, I do NOT identify as an otherkin. I feel the label implies a certain amount of material-realism and an approach to identity that assumes some element of the "kin" identity is objective and somehow "real."
But... I don't think ANY part of identity is real. I'm a pretty radical skeptic there, influenced by drinking too much Mahayana Buddhism and post-structuralist philosophy in college, not to mention the scraps of cogsci I've picked up. From where I'm sitting, this stuff is ALL "added in post," so to speak. Identity, like will, is an illusion brains slap on us to keep us tied together.
That was actually a big reason I started the postfurry thing. Once upon a time, there was a huge war on USENET between the furry "fans" and the furry "lifestylers." (What was that I was sayin' a few toots ago, about the Red Queen's Race?)
And honesty... I didn't like either side's approach. Most people on *both* sides were nice people, but the people who were normative about "Furry Is Just A Goddamn Hobby" were narrow-minded pseudo-rationalist jerks. They were the sort of people who (literally, this was a real conversation) thought that skydivers and people who got visible tattoos were almost as "crazy" as lifestylers, because anything that risked your career, health, or finances was literally insane.
And I tried to flee to the "lifestyler" side, but it seemed like they were far more interested in creating emotional support cliques than actually *discussing* the wild philosophical implications of what they believe. They took an approach of "Yes! Yes, of COURSE you're a fox!" and supported each other totally uncritically, and their quiet hostility and indifference when I tried to raise serious, respectful questions about that— and about what "real" actually MEANS— drove me off.
Honestly? Really honestly? I feel the same way about my friends' statements like "I'm really, really truly a $SPECIES" or "I know deep down my soul is really from $WORLD" that I do about Anthracite doing sigil magic and stuff. My own personal belief is that it has ~0% *direct* impact on the actual physical, noumenal world... and 100% potential impact on the ACTUAL thing humans call the "real" world, because that's mostly a fake symbolic overly over an imperceptible cloud of atoms and superstrings and neurons and shit that WE WILL NEVER SEE ANYHOW, and constantly forget even our tiny glimpses of.
So, yeah. Um... you're probably not "really" a fox. You're probably not "really" from the Magical Realm of Zikkizots. But that's okay, because that person you thought you were before you were those things was ALSO totally fake. You have no idea what you "actually" are, because your brain just... doesn't work that way. You would go mad.
Isn't that reassuring? *big old friendly and totally not reassuring tiger grin*
identity politics, otherkin (and otherwise), bona fides
I was thinking recently about whether many of our current problems are caused because humans think in terms of objects -- as far as I know that's universal, not cultural -- and objects are not a well-defined concept at the physical level.
If you're trying to not get eaten by tigers, you don't need to understand that a "tiger" is a complex of hundeds of millions of lifeforms which are in turn loosely bound collections of molecules. You can just draw a circle around it, call it a tiger, and model its behavior at that level.
Which works fine when you're dealing with tigers, but not so well when you're, say, making things out of plastic. They appear to be unitary objects which remain unchanged... until you develop the technology to detect the microparticles that they shed and which are now in everything everywhere...
re: identity politics, otherkin (and otherwise), bona fides
@zebratron2084
It's not even intellectual shortcuts, exactly. Our brains fulfill the purpose for which they evolved VERY WELL. That's how we had enough free time to get into all this other trouble. We are now putting brains to uses for which their heuristics are not well suited, and it is amazing how far we've gotten, but it's not surprising that there are problems too.