How identification works, afaict: one of the ways alienation works is by directly invalidating people’s experiences or encouraging preference falsification about how much they prefer being in the shape of a good, interchangeable worker, which is a form of indirectly invalidating your own experience, especially experiences of suffering. People feel that their own experience is not a valid source of sovereignty and so they are encouraged to invest their experience into larger, more socially legible and accepted constructs. This construct needs to be immutable and therefore more difficult to attack. But this creates a problem, the socially constructed categories are now under disputed ownership from many people each trying to define or control it in a way advantageous to themselves, and to avoid running into the same problem they had originally. Namely that if others control the category definition, then they will again feel like their experience is invalidated. So now you have activation of fighting/tribal circuitry in the people involved.
The next layer up is particularly sticky and difficult, something like “I am being attacked because I am X.” Attempting to defuse this construct is perceived as an attempt to invalidate/erase their experience, rather than an attempt to show them how constructing things in this way both causes them suffering, and encourages them to spread this shape of suffering to others and fight hard for it, along with not providing them a good predictive model of the world that would allow them to update towards more useful actions and mental representations.
Attempting to defuse this structure directly is extraordinarily difficult, and I have mostly found success only with techniques that first encourage the person to exit the tight network of concepts involved and return to direct experience (the classic, you are racist against this group, but here is such a person in front of you, notice how your direct experience is that you can talk to them and get back reasonable human sounding things rather than the caricature you expect).
How identification works, afaict: one of the ways alienation works is by directly invalidating people’s experiences or encouraging preference falsification about how much they prefer being in the shape of a good, interchangeable worker, which is a form of indirectly invalidating your own experience, especially experiences of suffering. People feel that their own experience is not a valid source of sovereignty and so they are encouraged to invest their experience into larger, more socially legible and accepted constructs. This construct needs to be immutable and therefore more difficult to attack. But this creates a problem, the socially constructed categories are now under disputed ownership from many people each trying to define or control it in a way advantageous to themselves, and to avoid running into the same problem they had originally. Namely that if others control the category definition, then they will again feel like their experience is invalidated. So now you have activation of fighting/tribal circuitry in the people involved.
The next layer up is particularly sticky and difficult, something like “I am being attacked because I am X.” Attempting to defuse this construct is perceived as an attempt to invalidate/erase their experience, rather than an attempt to show them how constructing things in this way both causes them suffering, and encourages them to spread this shape of suffering to others and fight hard for it, along with not providing them a good predictive model of the world that would allow them to update towards more useful actions and mental representations.
Attempting to defuse this structure directly is extraordinarily difficult, and I have mostly found success only with techniques that first encourage the person to exit the tight network of concepts involved and return to direct experience (the classic, you are racist against this group, but here is such a person in front of you, notice how your direct experience is that you can talk to them and get back reasonable human sounding things rather than the caricature you expect).
A nice compression I hadn’t thought of before is that moral categories and group categories are not type safe within the brain.