DETERMINING OUR IDENTITY: OUTWARD, INWARD, OR SOMETHING ELSE?
For most of human history, identity came from the community you belonged to. Your family. Your tribe. Etc. Because of this you knew the rules in which to play by. The value of seeking the community good and living with personal integrity was very important in that context. However modern man has shifted this idea that we gain our identity from outside of ourselves to the idea that our identity must come from within ourselves. The culture message is: Don’t seek affirmation from others. Affirm yourself and the choices that you make. This is when you will find yourself.
Just look at almost any Disney movie. Moana needs to leave the island and her family to discover who she is. Elsa needs to “let it go” and find herself on her own. In the article 12 Disney Movies That Should Inspire Your Twenties, the writer brings out the fact that most of the time the focus is on the individual forming their own way and own identity. In business, this has led to a huge shift in the focus being on “how do I contribute to the tribe” to a focus on my personal performance.
How has this change affected us? Sebastian Junger wrote a book called Tribe. One of the most interesting sections of the book is about the 2008 financial crisis. For decades the personal banking industry was all about celebrating personal performance. When mortgage bankers approved lots of people for home loans, they got huge personal paychecks! The reward was on personal performance not on community good. Junger says that if the financial crisis happened in pre-modern times, we would have taken all the bankers, all the subprime mortgage guys, and thrown them out of the tribe. They would have been ex-communicated. They would not have been able to work. But what did we do? Basically we bailed them out and propped them up. Now it’s about external performance (think “Too Big To Fail”) and not about personal integrity.
The old way of looking outward for identity was insufficient. It couldn’t make sense of diversity. Different races, views, ideas, innovation, etc. However, the modern way is lacking as well. When the focus is only on the individual, you lose a foundation strong enough to build your identity.
As C.S. Lewis said in The Abolition of Man, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
If you can’t look outward to others or deep enough within to answer questions of identity, then where can we turn? Maybe the answer is upward.
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” -Col 3:1-3
-Greg