Identity, difference, and the question of self

The world is a difficult and darkened place for innocent creatures to live. The metaphorical term “innocent” refers to the alienation of rational creatures, feeble humans, who authenticate their existence with the proud establishment of their civilizational epoch.

The question is: How often has humanity reflected upon itself without delusions?

The very intrigues and gentleness that human depicts is the illusive art it had learned from its diasporic pestilence, around the world.

As Frantz Fanon says in his book “The Wretched of the Earth”: ‘The colonized and underdeveloped man is a political creature in the most global sense’. Here Fanon refers to civilizational colonization but the matter of concern is the duality in the nature of this creature: Socially colonized (Colonial) and mentally colonized (Post-Colonial).

Though we claim to be free, the reality lies in the context of being controlled from all spheres by “Control Freaks” in the broader sense and “Obedient Savages” in the narrow sense. Moreover, history had itself proved that human beings never really enjoyed freedom in the course of its existence in any real way, because the enlightenment ideals such as liberty and freedom comes with the price of obedience and loyalty.

The whole discourse of post-colonial criticism lies within the unequal and uneven depiction of culture, in contrast to political and social authority within the liberal world order. Hence, the emergence of post-colonial discourse as a domain knowledge explored the marginalization of subaltern identities and became a historical testimony of the marginalized “Third world” with a broader focus on minorities within the geopolitical division of East and West. Moreover, the whole context of post-colonial revolves around the ideological state apparatus by digging out the differences between culture, social gap and political discrimination within the rationalization of Liberal modernity.

Today, there is a heated continental debate between the Liberal Atlanticists and Eurasianists, the latter of whom reject the liberal led modernity of Europe. Moreover, the Eurasianist traces their racial and cultural identity from the Indo-European Chronology and calls themselves as indo-Europeans instead of Liberal modern Europeans – which despite the civic, legalistic criteria of the latter, is in fact a cultural, historical, economic supremacism over the broader Eurasian identity rooted in its people.

Likewise, by adopting a peculiar type of post-modern approach towards the world order, Eurasianists openly reject the Liberal superiority of the European over the Eurasian pivot. To deconstruct this casual narrative, the Eurasianist supports a “Fourth Positionist” form of socialism as a non-liberal form of Democracy [actually, Laocracy – ed, Flores]. What the famous Eurasianist scholar Alexander Dugin asserts as:

“The confusion of mankind into the single global proletariat is not a way to a better future, but an incidental and absolutely negative aspect of the global Capitalism, which does not open any new prospects and only leads to the degeneration of cultures, societies and traditions. If people do have a chance to organize effective resistance to global capitalism, it is only where socialist ideas are combined with the elements of traditional society.”

On the contrary, the so-called moderate voices claim that they don’t want to choose sides. Though it seems metaphorical, in practice – socially, politically and scientifically – this notion is absurd and it can be termed as “suicide by moderation”. According to science, even the tiny particle, the neutron, is not neutral rather composed up of two lower quarks and one upper quark that exert a mammoth force to maintain its identity inside the atom. Likewise, throughout history, the dilemma of identity has always been entwined around the sporadic speculation of cultism and clanism. According to philosophical discourse, our being is identified through the existence of the ‘Other’ that gives shape to the phenomenon of identity and difference.

In the context of Hegelian master-slave dialectics, the very existence of slave justifies the mighty existence of master. In a broader sense, our identity is parallel with the side we are going to choose in Montesquieu’s depiction of left, centre or right.

In contrast, the question of human self- assertion has been a critical dilemma throughout the history of human existence with the question as to whether we are being in-ourselves, for-ourselves, or for-others. Thus, this epic tragedy of existence had always been in the great thoughtful dispersion, as Hobbes said, ‘The outside remained anarchic’, the actual retreat of human self from every domain … freedom for nothing but slavery. But, in the ongoing geopolitical scale, we all to chose sides in order certify our identity either with left, centre, or right to reconstruct the coming world order, where every people must have the opportunity to represent themselves on the basis of fairness.