The title of this post is "Shattering My Identity," but you don't make it sound particularly shattering; it feels more as though you are letting go some affiliations. I'm an agnostic, and I've always had the attitude towards atheists that you have now. But for me, leaving libertarianism was a chilling, painful process, that was difficult even to write about: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/is-libertarianism-a-bad-idea
Atheism was a core part of my identity for the majority of my life thus far. It's true that now it feels like just letting go of affiliations, but that's exactly the point. The fact that what used to be so important now feels unimportant is what shows that it's no longer part of my identity. If you told my former self that I'd no longer be an atheist I wouldn't have believed you.
Thanks for writing about your experience and I'm sorry that it was so painful.
Oh, you just had it the lucky way around, where you were able to disengage emotionally before it happened intellectually. That's more the way I left Christianity; I had become so fed up with churchgoers that I stopped attending. I was still stuck with a lot of the intellectual baggage until The Internet, but then everything came clear. With libertarianism it was something I realized didn't make sense before I grew alienated from libertarians. In fact I'm still not alienated from them; they feel like, IDK, likeable kids who still hold out hope that Santa exists.
I'm skeptical of your declaration that you are not part of a pizza cult. How long have you been incorporating pizza in your diet and consuming it with "other worldly" delight?!
I understand that you're using the word Libertarian to imply a philosophy calling for less central government control, but I find that definition confusing in the context of broader personal beliefs. As an extreme example, slaveholders in the antebellum South favored less central government control - but that doesn't mean they were advocates of Liberty writ large. Aren't you really rejecting more forms of authority than just central government control? I know your overall purpose in this post is to question the utility of tribalistic labels, but isn't Egalitarian a more accurate description of your way of thinking than Libertarian?
I only mentioned that I once thought I was a Libertarian because it was an example of how once I realized that my views didn't fully align with Democrats, without questioning the need to be in any group at all, I searched for a different group that better described my views and landed on Libertarians for very superficial reasons. I've definitely not a Liberatarian either though, which is why in the article I say that I was never actually a Democrat or Libertarian. I'm not an Egalitarian either or any other particular label. The main point of the article actually was nothing to do with atheism specifically, but rather to say that I find labeling myself as part of any particular group or philosophy to be counter to thinking through my actual viewpoints. It's easier and more emotionally pleasing to pick a group or pre-existing philosophy, but the reality is that the world is a very complicated place and approaching any topic with a pre-existing philosophy in mind inevitably ends up causing some level of bias towards certain aspects of an issue and implicitly ignoring or downplaying others.
I understand that labels are invariably over-generalizations, but how far do you extend the principle? Would you describe your viewpoint as neither egalitarian nor authoritarian? Neither capitalist nor communist? Neither Zoroastrian nor Quaker? It's very useful to have a sense of which side of a continuum a person's thinking tends to gravitate toward.
Here's a more provocative example - I'm in a quarter-century long monogamous gay marriage, but I'm close enough to the middle of the Kinsey scale that I can easily imagine I would have been happy in a monogamous straight marriage if things had gone differently. In day to day conversation I label myself gay. It's an over-generalization - and it may be partly motivated by tribal identity - but it's mostly just a convenient way to quickly convey my experience of the world to casual listeners. It wouldn't be practical to always launch into some disquisition about how I'm neither precisely gay nor precisely straight.
There are three completely separate reasons that I'm against labels.
First, they often lead to people shaping their viewpoint to fit a pre-existing framework without realizing it rather than thinking for themselves.
Second, the labels may mean different things to different people and therefore people make assumptions about the viewpoint of the labeled person rather than actually listening to what they have to say. An example of this is that back when I thought I was a libertarian, my sister told me out of the blue that she couldn't believe that I wanted to privatize the national parks when I'd never said anything of the sort and I don't think she believed me when I said that I didn't want to privatize them.
Third, it can lead to an us versus them mentality.
I wouldn't refer to myself as a capitalist even though I think that capitalism is the best economic system developed thus far for all of the reasons above. I want to stay open to the idea that there are at least some areas where capitalism is not the best option, e.g. maybe Singapore's government forcing of apartment buildings to be multi-cultural is more beneficial to their society than bottom-up capitalism. I don't know if it is or not, but I'm open to the possibility. What is the advantage of labeling myself as a capitalist? If my favorite food is pizza, I wouldn't call myself a pizzaist, so why would I call myself a capitalist just because my favorite economic system is capitalism? Can't we just discuss ideas freely without putting ourselves and each other into categories?
I don't think the gay example is the same thing because it's just a short hand for telling people that you're married to a man. It's similar to me telling people that I'm left handed even though I golf and bat right handed. Defining myself as left handed doesn't cause me to be any more or less left handed than I would've otherwise been and it the incorrect assumptions that it might cause people to make about my golf and baseball stances isn't typically relevant.
In my initial comment below, I labeled myself gay to succinctly convey a key life experience that pushed me away from the type of thinking traditionally offered by persons labeled fundies. I'm not 100% gay and not all fundamentalists are homophobic, but those nuances aren't germane. Eschewing labels would have eschewed clarity! For some continua - such as the label evolutionist - I'm so far toward one side of the spectrum that refusing the label would feel like a cop out. Declining to call yourself an atheist who espouses capitalism likewise lands in my mind as a cop out. Your nuanced independent thought has moved you way over toward one pole on those questions and it's useful to have a succinct way of noting it.
When I was growing up as a gay kid with an intense interest in evolutionary biology in the '80s, I called myself an atheist as a shorthand way of expressing my vehement rejection of theocratic authoritarianism. After slogging through The Tao of Physics and other tomes of invisible pink quantum woowoo, I usually called myself technically agnostic - because while I didn't find the physics arguments particularly persuasive I decided I couldn't absolutely rule them out either. Nowadays I call myself an Easter Bunny agnostic. It's formally possible that God or a talking rabbit who hands out eggs might exist in some multiverse or another.
My ultimate realization has been that my problem with theocratic authoritarianism was never really about the theism, it was always the authoritarianism that bothered me. The older I get the more I realize I have what feels like an innate leaning toward egalitarian philosophy. And I note that egalitarianism isn't all sweetness and light - there's an element of my mindset where I see Christian fascists smugly prancing around and insisting that their holy boot belongs on my heathen neck - and then there's like a reflex arc where I angrily think who the F do these mofos think they are. It's a nasty feeling that can easily get out of hand. Mostly I do my best to convince myself that the fundies don't have anything useful to say and I try to just ignore them and focus on things I find interesting and/or things I can actually do something about.
The title of this post is "Shattering My Identity," but you don't make it sound particularly shattering; it feels more as though you are letting go some affiliations. I'm an agnostic, and I've always had the attitude towards atheists that you have now. But for me, leaving libertarianism was a chilling, painful process, that was difficult even to write about: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/is-libertarianism-a-bad-idea
Atheism was a core part of my identity for the majority of my life thus far. It's true that now it feels like just letting go of affiliations, but that's exactly the point. The fact that what used to be so important now feels unimportant is what shows that it's no longer part of my identity. If you told my former self that I'd no longer be an atheist I wouldn't have believed you.
Thanks for writing about your experience and I'm sorry that it was so painful.
Oh, you just had it the lucky way around, where you were able to disengage emotionally before it happened intellectually. That's more the way I left Christianity; I had become so fed up with churchgoers that I stopped attending. I was still stuck with a lot of the intellectual baggage until The Internet, but then everything came clear. With libertarianism it was something I realized didn't make sense before I grew alienated from libertarians. In fact I'm still not alienated from them; they feel like, IDK, likeable kids who still hold out hope that Santa exists.
I'm skeptical of your declaration that you are not part of a pizza cult. How long have you been incorporating pizza in your diet and consuming it with "other worldly" delight?!
I understand that you're using the word Libertarian to imply a philosophy calling for less central government control, but I find that definition confusing in the context of broader personal beliefs. As an extreme example, slaveholders in the antebellum South favored less central government control - but that doesn't mean they were advocates of Liberty writ large. Aren't you really rejecting more forms of authority than just central government control? I know your overall purpose in this post is to question the utility of tribalistic labels, but isn't Egalitarian a more accurate description of your way of thinking than Libertarian?
I only mentioned that I once thought I was a Libertarian because it was an example of how once I realized that my views didn't fully align with Democrats, without questioning the need to be in any group at all, I searched for a different group that better described my views and landed on Libertarians for very superficial reasons. I've definitely not a Liberatarian either though, which is why in the article I say that I was never actually a Democrat or Libertarian. I'm not an Egalitarian either or any other particular label. The main point of the article actually was nothing to do with atheism specifically, but rather to say that I find labeling myself as part of any particular group or philosophy to be counter to thinking through my actual viewpoints. It's easier and more emotionally pleasing to pick a group or pre-existing philosophy, but the reality is that the world is a very complicated place and approaching any topic with a pre-existing philosophy in mind inevitably ends up causing some level of bias towards certain aspects of an issue and implicitly ignoring or downplaying others.
I understand that labels are invariably over-generalizations, but how far do you extend the principle? Would you describe your viewpoint as neither egalitarian nor authoritarian? Neither capitalist nor communist? Neither Zoroastrian nor Quaker? It's very useful to have a sense of which side of a continuum a person's thinking tends to gravitate toward.
Here's a more provocative example - I'm in a quarter-century long monogamous gay marriage, but I'm close enough to the middle of the Kinsey scale that I can easily imagine I would have been happy in a monogamous straight marriage if things had gone differently. In day to day conversation I label myself gay. It's an over-generalization - and it may be partly motivated by tribal identity - but it's mostly just a convenient way to quickly convey my experience of the world to casual listeners. It wouldn't be practical to always launch into some disquisition about how I'm neither precisely gay nor precisely straight.
There are three completely separate reasons that I'm against labels.
First, they often lead to people shaping their viewpoint to fit a pre-existing framework without realizing it rather than thinking for themselves.
Second, the labels may mean different things to different people and therefore people make assumptions about the viewpoint of the labeled person rather than actually listening to what they have to say. An example of this is that back when I thought I was a libertarian, my sister told me out of the blue that she couldn't believe that I wanted to privatize the national parks when I'd never said anything of the sort and I don't think she believed me when I said that I didn't want to privatize them.
Third, it can lead to an us versus them mentality.
I wouldn't refer to myself as a capitalist even though I think that capitalism is the best economic system developed thus far for all of the reasons above. I want to stay open to the idea that there are at least some areas where capitalism is not the best option, e.g. maybe Singapore's government forcing of apartment buildings to be multi-cultural is more beneficial to their society than bottom-up capitalism. I don't know if it is or not, but I'm open to the possibility. What is the advantage of labeling myself as a capitalist? If my favorite food is pizza, I wouldn't call myself a pizzaist, so why would I call myself a capitalist just because my favorite economic system is capitalism? Can't we just discuss ideas freely without putting ourselves and each other into categories?
I don't think the gay example is the same thing because it's just a short hand for telling people that you're married to a man. It's similar to me telling people that I'm left handed even though I golf and bat right handed. Defining myself as left handed doesn't cause me to be any more or less left handed than I would've otherwise been and it the incorrect assumptions that it might cause people to make about my golf and baseball stances isn't typically relevant.
In my initial comment below, I labeled myself gay to succinctly convey a key life experience that pushed me away from the type of thinking traditionally offered by persons labeled fundies. I'm not 100% gay and not all fundamentalists are homophobic, but those nuances aren't germane. Eschewing labels would have eschewed clarity! For some continua - such as the label evolutionist - I'm so far toward one side of the spectrum that refusing the label would feel like a cop out. Declining to call yourself an atheist who espouses capitalism likewise lands in my mind as a cop out. Your nuanced independent thought has moved you way over toward one pole on those questions and it's useful to have a succinct way of noting it.
Cartoon of the day:
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/not-talking-about-capitalism/
When I was growing up as a gay kid with an intense interest in evolutionary biology in the '80s, I called myself an atheist as a shorthand way of expressing my vehement rejection of theocratic authoritarianism. After slogging through The Tao of Physics and other tomes of invisible pink quantum woowoo, I usually called myself technically agnostic - because while I didn't find the physics arguments particularly persuasive I decided I couldn't absolutely rule them out either. Nowadays I call myself an Easter Bunny agnostic. It's formally possible that God or a talking rabbit who hands out eggs might exist in some multiverse or another.
My ultimate realization has been that my problem with theocratic authoritarianism was never really about the theism, it was always the authoritarianism that bothered me. The older I get the more I realize I have what feels like an innate leaning toward egalitarian philosophy. And I note that egalitarianism isn't all sweetness and light - there's an element of my mindset where I see Christian fascists smugly prancing around and insisting that their holy boot belongs on my heathen neck - and then there's like a reflex arc where I angrily think who the F do these mofos think they are. It's a nasty feeling that can easily get out of hand. Mostly I do my best to convince myself that the fundies don't have anything useful to say and I try to just ignore them and focus on things I find interesting and/or things I can actually do something about.