Thoughts on Identity I: Actually, It's Just Conan

Who are you, really, as a person? Ancient cultures knew a person according to who they belonged to. If you had just met a person at the village well, you would ask them who their father was, and in that collectivist, backwardly-focused culture, you would know who the person was. This type of culture would be concerned with who you were as an individual only to the extent that you brought honor or shame to your family, and it was out of this framework that the entrenched casts of the aristocrats began. Today, the majority of cultures, including America, are individualistic, forwardly-focused societies. When you meet someone at the office water cooler, you ask them what they ‘do’—what their job is, where they are going in life, or what their ambitions are. Conan, son of Thor, has now become just Conan. Democracies have an even stronger tendency toward individualistic thinking because our society has no aristocratic tendencies of latent casts; you could easily become the President of the nation even if you were born into the log cabin of a backwoods farmer. Far from knowing a person by who their father is, modern cultures know a person according to what they do.

Today people marry later in life (only to divorce later), move farther from home, and participate less in social and religious communities than they did even fifty years ago. Many social trends have cultivated an increasingly isolated population in America. Many people work in professional (i.e. sterile) environments only to pull into their driveways and enclave themselves within their house for the night after the garage door seals with the cement. In our driven, individualistic pursuits, it may be worthwhile to rediscover the simple joys that come with an ancient understanding of finding self by belonging rather than achieving. This way of thinking is beneficial for two reasons.