Thread by @HusseinAboubak

Rant: Identity is not property. You don't own a history, a tradition, a faith, a historical memory, a human experience. Identity is a democratic tradition, it includes you and countless others, dead, alive, and yet to be born. It interacts with you, it gives you meanings and

wait for you to add to it. The utterly pathological way that people deal with identity as if it is a claim to be put onto others or property is just man's tyranny finding another precious thing to hide behind. Our sickness to which we have no cure. The insistence on being the

definitive and determinate voice mostly comes from whom I call "the walking as's," people who live "as a such and such," without ever giving their identity the respect and the attention. They don't study the culture nor the tradition, the way cultural traditions subject us to

democracy by forcing us to listen to those who came before us. The modern man, the walking as, uses identity as long as he/she finds in it a claim to power over others. I meet young walking as's all the time, who know of that identity which they hang as a badge, nothing but

platitudes and cliches. Identity is not some endowment, but it is an entry ticket into a human experience inviting us to join and participate. We claim it as much as we give it the right to claim us. To make a one-way claim is to be a coward tyrant hiding behind what others made.