Do not let your universal virtue schema become slave to your personal identity-construction. 

This is a thing I see a lot, although right now it doesn’t seem helpful to call out specific examples.  It’s a thing I’ve done a lot, probably a thing I still do sometimes, although Lord knows I try to be better than that. 

You see someone talking about X, or doing X, or being X.  And you think: “Man, I am not X.  It is really important to me that I am not X.  I would never ever in a million years want to be X, or want anyone to believe that I was X even for a moment.”  And that’s just fine, as far as it goes. 

But it’s so easy to underscore that identification by responding with, “X is stupid / evil / contemptible, and fie on anyone who is X.”  Which is an attack on a way-of-being, and on a lot of people.

Maybe you really mean it.  Maybe you really think that, in this particular way, everyone should be just like you.  Maybe this is a case where it’s worth flattening the diversity of the world, where it’s worth cutting off a bunch of selves and narratives that people find rewarding, in order to get rid of the awfulness that is X.  If that’s your position, then fine, go to.  Some things genuinely are just bad. 

But maybe you’re just trying to find a viscerally gripping way to shout, “BEHOLD!  I AM NOT X!  TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!”  This is pretty likely, actually, based on my experience.  And if that’s what you’re doing…then stop.  Let the X people be X in peace, with your blessing.  Their lives will be richer for it.  Hell, your life will be richer for it – in an identitarian sense, being not-X is more meaningful and more salient in a world where it’s not a universal default.   

This is one of the many mechanisms by which we might begin to reclaim reasoned discourse from the churning personal needs of the discoursers.