On identification: how politics works and intelligence fails

Yogic philosophy of mind, and the concept of ‘ahamkara’ or identification, offers the clearest explanation for the human condition and today’s political madness

In The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022) author and physician Gabor Maté reveals the driving question behind his decades of work examining trauma and addiction. As an infant, Maté survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary. He writes:

All my life, no doubt spurred by the horrors that shaped my childhood, I have wondered how it is that so many good people can be hypnotised into compliance with the indefensible. There has to be some mechanism to acculturate us to accept as normal what is inimical to ourselves and to the world we inhabit; it is certainly not an inborn inclination.

“There has to be some mechanism” – I relate to the sentiment. In 2014, I began investigating the mainstreaming of transgender ideology on my blog, and the undertaking exposed me to some of the most disturbing and bewildering aspects of the human psyche. It prompted the very same question: how is this possible? What is the mechanism?

2014 saw a dramatic rise in pro-transgender media coverage. Since then, the public has been under pressure to support the rights of ‘transwomen’, or else be considered complicit in the violence and suicide affecting an apparently marginalised community.* The question “what is a woman?” – which no-one used to ask, since we simply knew the answer – suddenly became loaded, complicated, even daunting.

By 2023, New Zealand prime minister Chris Hipkins made international news with his bumbling response to the question at a press conference. “To be honest … that question has come slightly out of left field … Well, biology, sex, gender … umm … people define themselves, people define their own genders … it’s not something that I’ve preformulated an answer on …”

Many public figures have had similarly embarrassing moments over the last decade. In 2018, New Zealand’s then-Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter sat before a television journalist clearly unable to define what a woman is (“transwomen are women … feminism is about equality for everyone …”). She was heavily pregnant. Her body proudly and unapologetically declared what her words tried to conceal: the truth of female reproductive biology.

This degree of cognitive dissonance should not be tolerable for any person. Being a pregnant Minister for Women who cannot define the word ‘woman’ should be intellectually untenable. The knots you would have to tie yourself in each day! And since human beings are social creatures, the mere idea of being in this position publicly should evoke unbearable embarrassment.

So how is this happening? What is the mechanism that allows people, left, right and centre, to accept the clearly untenable notion that a man can be a woman if he says so, and that a woman can have a penis?

Many people still treat transgenderism as a ‘fringe’ issue, or a petty identity war we should all just opt out of. Yet the spread of this ideology may be as close as humanity has come to a real life expression of the Emperor’s New Clothes parable, in which a naked emperor parades his “new clothes” before a public who applaud and go along with the pretence. For that reason, it should interest us all.

An Emperor’s clothes moment happens when someone in power is exposed. They reveal their incompetence, tell a barefaced lie, or contradict themselves. We see the level of cognitive dissonance they carry. It is humiliating and discrediting. What transgenderism reveals is that many people, whether they hold positions of responsibility or not, would rather expose themselves publicly and repeatedly, than course correct.

And many of them seem convinced by their own fabrications. They are not simply lying. It seems more like they are under a spell.

What is this spell that allows us “to accept as normal what is inimical to ourselves”?

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The clearest answers to this question are provided in yogic philosophy of mind. In yogic science, mind has three major components: buddhi or intellect, ahamkara or identification, and manas, the chattering mind.

Buddhi, intellect, is the discriminatory faculty. It is our non-judgemental and impartial capacity to discern x from y, a from b, man from woman. If we are cutting a carrot on a chopping board, buddhi allows us to distinguish between the carrot, the board, the knife, and our fingers. It is key to our survival, because without this discernment, we hurt ourselves.

Buddhi is trumped by ahamkara, identification. Often translated to ‘I-sense’ or simply ‘ego’, ahamkara literally translates to I-maker. It refers to our identifications (they are what ‘make’ the ‘I’). Sadhguru, founder of Isha yoga, explains: “In the yogic system we consider the ahamkara, or the identity that you take on, far more important than the nature of the intellect itself – because intellect is a slave of the identity that you have taken.”

Interesting. The intellect functions for our survival, but it is trumped by our concern for our identity. How can that be possible – that our concern for identity can override our survival-based discernment of facts?

It is possible because our original, primary safety concern is connection. Human beings are a social species, highly dependent on one another. We are characterised by especially vulnerable young who remain dependent for a long time. About three-quarters of our brain growth and almost 90 per cent of brain development take place after birth, mostly in the first three years of life, which is sometimes called the ‘fourth trimester’ of pregnancy. During this time, we cannot survive by ourselves. A threat to connection is a threat to our lives.

As I argued in Out of the Fog — it seems safe to presume that if children grew up in a culture that was not hierarchical, not “toxic”, to use Maté’s phrase, but healthy and sane, “we would grow out of the sense that abandonment is lethal at roughly the same time that this was no longer physiologically true for us.” But,

in a patriarchal culture, just about every aspect of life comes with conditions: making sure you are warm, dry, fed, clothed, and sheltered requires meeting those conditions. Our parents help to teach us what those conditions are ... As we grow, our fear of abandonment is confirmed and consolidated rather than gradually shed.

Rather than learning to exercise our human faculties to the fullest extent possible, becoming strong and active participants of a human community, when we grow up in a hierarchical culture we learn how to meet the conditions for acceptance in society. I summarise it like this: “a patriarchal culture does not allow people to naturally mature out of childhood dependency. It leverages our dependency instead, to promote conformity.”

Conformity means identification with the man in charge, or with the interests of people who hold societal and institutional power. One impact of this kind of identification is that it directs and distorts the intellect. Anarchist philosopher and mystic Simone Weil understood this well:

If a man undertakes extremely complex numerical calculations knowing that he will be flogged every time he obtains an even number as the final result, he finds himself in an acute predicament. Something in the sensual part of his soul will induce him each time to give a slight twist to the calculations, in order to obtain an odd number at the end … Caught in his oscillation, his attention is no longer pure. If the complexity of the calculations demands his total attention, inevitably he will make many mistakes – even if he happens to be very intelligent, very brave and very deeply attached to the truth.

This is the mechanism that allows people like Hipkins and Genter to suddenly appear to forget the basic facts of life. Transgenderism is the ultimate example of the power of ahamkara to direct the intellect, and the ultimate demonstration of just how much cognitive dissonance people will tolerate before they will question their identifications.

Transgender ideology is not just at odds with reality – it is internally contradictory. The same people who claim that a woman can have a penis, because womanhood has nothing to do with biology, also claim that some men need to have their penises surgically transformed into imitation vaginas in order to become ‘real’ women. Without this surgery, they would suffer intolerably from the mind/body disconnect resulting from living with a woman’s mind inside a man’s body. A man’s body. But wait – didn’t you just say there is no such thing as male biology?

What a shambles!

The last component of mind in yogic philosophy is manas. Sometimes called the ‘monkey mind’ or ‘puppy mind’, my understanding is that manas is the noise in your head that chatters, judges, compares, tells stories and provides rationalisations. Manas could be compared to a radio station that relays the news of the day. Let’s say that the news, before it is broadcast, is buddhi. The facts of what happened. The stations broadcasters will relay those facts according to the station’s affiliations. Each station relays the news (buddhi) in a different way, telling a different story (manas), according to its identifications (ahamkara).

Identification causes people to contradict themselves, and appear to forget the most basic facts of life, since they are not ultimately concerned with facts or consistency, but with the interests of some person or group of people with whom they are identified.

Trans advocates offer plenty of examples of this – telling whatever story supports the person they want to support in that moment. Take science. Trans activists often claim that biological science itself is a construct that was imposed on Indigenous peoples during colonisation. The existence of Samoan fa’afafine, Māori takatāpui, and Native American ‘two-spirit’ people proves (for them) that for indigenous people, there was no sex before colonisation, only a plethora of gender identities.

Transactivists also used the bizarre language, appropriated from intersex people, of doctors “assigning” sex at birth. So the sex marker on your birth certificate does not represent a biological reality about you, but the sex someone “assigned” you when you were born. Biology is irrelevant.

Members of the New Zealand Green Party (like Genter) generally take this position. It was the Greens’ “Documents with Dignity” policy proposal that had sex self-identification legalised in New Zealand, allowing people to change the sex marker on official documents at will. Sex has no basis in science.

When it comes to climate change, the Greens take an opposite position on science. ‘Science deniers’ are some of the most dangerous people on the planet. The March for Science campaign, represented in 600 cities worldwide, began in 2017 to “mobilise advocates around the world in support of evidence-based, science-informed public policies.” In April 2017, two Green Party representatives spoke at the March for Science in Wellington.

Transgender advocates are also not motivated by the values they espouse, like love, inclusion and kindness. A friend once told me the perfect story to illustrate this: he walked into a meeting only to be immediately cast out by someone who identified him as a critic of transgenderism. The person marched up to him and shouted in his face: “This is an inclusive space! You’re not welcome here!”

Most human beings exhibit this behaviour to some degree – it is not unique to transactivists, just uniquely blatant. That is because every human being can independently verify the reality of biological sex. We all know the truth, so the lie is especially stark. As such, transgenderism invites us to look more closely at the human condition, and ask deeper questions about who we are, how we operate, and how we might do better. Approaching it this way can help us make wiser decisions about how to engage and respond.

We are going to delve further into this topic in upcoming posts. We will:

• Look at the major ways we acquire our identifications

• Make sense of the major political traditions through the lens of identification

• Find out what the famous 1960s Milgram experiments taught us about identification (the experiments with the shock generator)

• Look at violence expert Gavin de Becker’s insights about how identification blocks safety signals from our intuition

• See how identification is used to turn spirituality into religious doctrine

• Learn what identification has to do with postmodernism

• Clearly see how today’s political and product marketing draw on appealing rhetoric moulded to the shape of identifications

• And more. Stay tuned!

To write on yogic philosophy of mind, I consulted many texts including Eknath Easwaran’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Barbara Stoler Miller’s Yoga: The Discipline of Freedom, and the teachings of Sadhguru.

*There was a 400% increase in pro-transgender media coverage in 2014 in the United States. This is noted in Jennifer Bilek and Mary Ceallaigh’s 2016 essay, ‘In the Absence of the Sacred: The Marketing of Medical Transgenderism and the Survival of the Natural Child’. The essay appears in Ruth Barrett’s anthology, Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights, published by Tidal Time Publishing.