E9: Essence or Consequence; S13: Is Identity Really Delusion? What if it's contextual? Mira Costa High School's Mascot is Hung Like a Horse. Gross!

<p>There is an enormous amount of delusion in the world, but not necessarily where we most comfortably put that word.</p><p>Money is a collective delusion. Borders are collective delusions. Nations are collective delusions. A corporation is a collective delusion with lawyers. We agree that it means something, and then the agreement becomes powerful enough to decide whether you eat.</p><p>That does not make money unreal. That is part of the problem.</p><p>Different cultures have understood what we now call psychosis in very different ways. The experience happens; then culture arrives with a vocabulary and starts arranging it.</p><p>Which may be what we do with almost everything.</p><p>We are each trapped inside a body, but barely notice because language has been laid over the whole operation.</p><p>Before there is a category, there is sensation. Something wants. Something fears. Something recoils. The body does something, and language arrives late with a clipboard.</p><p>Homosexual. Heterosexual. Male. Female. White. Black. Canadian. American.</p><p>Useful words. Sometimes indispensable. Still words.</p><p>“Homosexuality” is strange if you stare at it too long. It sounds as though somebody is attracted to a homogeneous category called MEN, when most gay men are not attracted to most men at all. A particular person evokes something in the body. Another does not. Then we compress a lifetime of reactions into an identity category so we can talk.</p><p>And we do need language.</p><p>It helped us coordinate the killing of mammoths. Then dodo birds. Eventually we became sophisticated enough to invent neonicotinoids and remove staggering numbers of insects from the world.</p><p>So clearly the system is working beautifully.</p><p>The problem isn’t that we invented categories. It’s how easily we forget they are tools and begin treating them as essences.</p><p>Medicine has participated too. AIDS followed GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. Even “acquired” is an odd little word—as though somebody went shopping. We don’t say “acquired syphilis.” Language can smuggle interpretation inside description.</p><p>But that isn’t really what this episode is about either.</p><p>This episode is an experiment.</p><p>What if identity is not essence?<br>What if it is not delusion either?<br>What if identity is contextual?<br>What if a category can be arbitrary and still have consequences?<br>What if something can be socially constructed and still hurt?<br>What if the map isn’t the territory, but the map determines where the water goes?<br>What if the body knew something before language arrived?<br>And what if language is still the only way I have to tell you about it?</p><p>Hello, by the way, to anyone from Mira Costa who has wandered in here.</p><p>I think about high school reunions. I would actually like to go to one.</p><p>The problem is that I would probably have to say something, and a high school reunion is a terrible place to have to say something.</p><p>People are there to have fun. I want you to have fun. I want to have fun. And I’ll have more fun elsewhere than sitting at a table thinking: How am I going to say this?</p><p>Most of you were silent.</p><p>You were nice people. Some of you were kind. You certainly didn’t want to seem like assholes. But that wasn’t much comfort to me at the time, when I was dealing with all that shit.</p><p>I know some of you were gay too. Maybe you just hadn’t gotten around to realizing it yet.</p><p>I was precocious. I always have been. And I imagine some of you probably thought that about me.</p><p>Maybe the kindest thing you could do was let me be the weird kid who got there first.</p><p>So thanks for that.</p><p>I don’t remember much happening after what I describe in this episode. Maybe some of you came up to me.</p><p>What I remember is the auditorium. What happened in it. What didn’t happen in it. And what I eventually had to do because of that.</p><p>You may remember the aftermath differently. I probably