The Insidious Lie That We Can’t Understand Each Other

The desire not to be understood, to assert the impossibility of mutual comprehension is experienced by every healthy teenager (and parent thereof) in the process of separation (into adulthood).

It is not merely a rejection of "everything you stand for" but an assertion of total separateness and inscrutability. To be "understood" is to be colonised, categorised, placed on your Cartesian grid and thus dominated and neutralised. The chosen identity is arbitrary, it is simply not yours, and the demand is that the very apparatus of perception, the frame within which mutual recognition can take place, be reset. And yet, weirdly, it is not a genuine bid for isolation, but Greta Garbo saying "I just want to be left alone!"

Why this happened culturally in this century may remain a mystery, but I see seeds of it in our own geek version of proto-identity-politics, in Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" [0]

   " Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh
    and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf
    of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are
    not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

But there’s an even more egregious and insidious lie here: the idea that a person can be reduced to their social identity / group membership, and that this gives a complete understanding of somebody’s life. Many people nowadays are even offended when you tell them they can’t know if I’ve had an easy life or not by looking at my skin and knowing what my parents did for a living.

However, it seems to me that the writer makes a mistake by attempting to evaluate a political strategy as though it was an academic philosophy position. That is to say, he's likely right that "identity synthesis" is not completely intellectually rigorous; however, it was never intended to be, it was intended to be a pragmatic political strategy.

For example, "identity synthesis" was likely never intended to suggest that there is literally a set of shared experiences shared by literally every member of a given minority group. It is just meant to suggest that in general a given group more or less shares a set of experiences.

Similarly, "identity synthesis" most likely is not concerned with whether, from a philosophical perspective, it is possible for groups to have knowledge of experiences they haven't had. Rather it is concerned with the fact that in practice the majority does not prioritize experiences they do not share with minority groups.

in taking a pragmatic political stance and argue that it is not intellectually rigorous; when I don't think it was ever intended to be.

For example, I don't think the point of

- In the past, the two parties primarily differed in how they thought issues should be tackled. E.g. should the economy be stimulated by cutting taxes or by increased government investment in infrastructure.

- Now many of one party's priorities simply don't exist in the other party's platform. For example, Republicans have no plan for promoting social justice/equality because it's not something that they prioritize at all. Similarly, Democrats don't really have a plan for advancing Republican's "traditional values" priorities.

- Because of this, Democrats and Republicans often talk past each other. For example, Democrats can't work with Republicans to tackle economic justice because, in a manner of speaking, economic justice doesn't exist in Republican's world view.

It’s not always possible, however, to agree, because the core values are frequently incompatible. A catholic can not reach an agreement with a leftist on e.g. first trimester abortion, because for the former it’s murder, and for the latter it’s not. So the leftist will consider the woman’s right for bodily autonomy, and the catholic will simply want to prevent murder, and evil from happening.