Impulses Are Not Identities

Weekend Digest #3

Welcome to the Weekend Digest. In these brief Saturday posts, I’ll give you:

• One Opinion to Consider

• One Thing to Read

• One Comment That Got Me Thinking

• One Song, Poem, or Picture to Remember

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One Opinion to Consider

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

Imagine the following scenarios:

1. A young man in a quiet part of town sees a woman he finds very attractive. Very quickly he feels the impulse to walk by her and touch her body .

2. A young woman feeling the stress of her job and her relationships drives past a bar late at night. Very quickly she feels the impulse to stop and drink until she cannot feel anymore.

3. A policeman is making a routine traffic stop and the driver is constantly insulting and provoking him. The body camera malfunctioned earlier and would not record. Very quickly the policeman feels the impulse to grab the driver by the neck, slam them down on the pavement, and shut them up.

Let’s imagine that all three of these characters successfully resist their impulses. The man does not grope the woman, the woman does not drink herself into oblivion, and the officer does not assault the driver. Well and good. But this might present a subtle dilemma later. What does the fact that these people had these impulses say about them? What kind of people are they to have desired these things in a moment?

If that question seems confusing, then let us imagine that all three characters gave into their impulses. Let’s say the man groped the woman, the woman became blackout drunk, and the officer beat up the driver. If these three people were forced to give account for their actions, and if they were fairly typical modern people, it would not be surprising to hear them identify themselves in some category that explains their behavior. The man could say he’s a recovering sex addict. The woman could say she’s a recovering alcoholic. The officer could say he has anger management or PTSD struggles.

And these explanations would make sense to most people because of their actions. The impulse itself might reveal deeper desires of the heart, but impulses alone do not categorize people. It’s not that impulses are unimportant. It’s that the response to them is much more so. Gazing at our impulses to find out who we are is something we usually do only when we follow those impulses into action. Apart from our will, our impulses reveal only bits and pieces of ourselves. In the kind of scenarios described above, where the impulse is broadly agreed to be wrong, we intuit the importance of resisting the impulse, and the ridiculousness of resigning our personal identity to a desire that ought to suppress.

Today we are facing a contemporary trend where nearly every impulse or preference /is considered a legitimate identity marker.

The best and most accessible example of this is personality profiling. Enneagram especially seems to be a personality system that is fraught with “I am” language, to the point where your interaction with me comes with certain inalienable obligations to accommodate my Enneagram type. If you talk to me like I’m a 6, but I’m really an 8 (I’m making these numbers up because I have never taken the test and have no idea what they stand for), then accountability for my confusion, misunderstanding, or even offense lies with you.

Or you might have noticed that people talk about polyamory almost identically to how they talk about homosexuality. “I identify as poly” is considered a perfectly legitimate self-description, despite the fact that what they really mean is “I identify as one with the desire for sexual relationships with more than one person at a time.”

To see how incoherent this is, all we have to do is return to the three scenarios above. If impulses alone reveal who you are, then there is no real difference between resisting them and not. But of course, we know there is a difference. Therefore, we should interrogate “I identify as” language more often, especially when the context is an identity that seems rooted in a an excessive or morally wrong preference.

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One Thing to Read

Ian Harber on dopamine culture:

The effect of this dopamine addiction is the erosion of someone’s ability to handle Normal Mental Anguish. It’s hard to explain to a dopamine addict that life is hard and full of mental anguish—and that’s normal. It seems as though the category of Normal Mental Anguish is basically gone and the options are essentially some persistent ethereal Zen-like state or a diagnosable yet hardly treatable mental illness. The quickest way to live an unhappy life is to believe in the Zen/Illness binary and not believe that Normal Mental Anguish is a normal part of life and that experiencing it doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

Because discomfort is resolved with distraction and dopamine instead of doing the hard work of pushing through, figuring it out, and actually resolving it (or simply learning to live with it), people never build up the resilience needed to meet the Normal Difficulties of Life. The inability to handle the Normal Difficulties of Life is seen as a broken and unchanging fact of who they are that can only be relieved through professional help.

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One Comment That Got Me Thinking

From Rebekah Matt, on “Go Westbound, Young Man.”

I completely agree with your assessment of why GenZ is slow to get driving - and here's another reason: much of the stuff they like to do, or need to do, is at home. Video games, streaming, social media, social groups like Discord, even work and school sometimes, - all from home, or at least much more than in the past. This is a huge factor in not having a strong desire to drive.

Completely agree. Here is again another example of Andy Crouch’s observation that in the culture of technology, “Can” often becomes “Must.” Our migration to digital, especially with school and work, creates a powerful plausibility structure for never exerting too much effort to leave the home.

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One Song, Poem, or Picture to Remember

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling’s “If” is perhaps the all time greatest poem about shaping one’s identity through resisting impulses.

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!