Reverse Causality: A Personal Story

"When everything falls down, you'll have Liberty"~Anonymous

Throughout the book's chapter and class the idea of how people come to have identity was discussed. Does it come about from others or ourselves, or neither. Are we shaped more by our peers or by ourselves? What role do the groups with which we associate have? Those are all good questions, but there is one idea that's conspicuously missing: How can identity itself shape a person's actions?

I'm about one of the most extreme examples of how identity can shape a person. In the past year I had 3 days that will shape my life forever, and all dealt with identity. The first day was when I realized that my personal beliefs had a name, that day I made my first step toward the rest of my life. I became a classical liberal. What followed would be a slow progression toward ever-greater radicalism. For years before my personal beliefs were a ball of clay, adapting to whatever situation presented itself. When I realized I had an identity, that would change for good.

The next day came after a month or so. I met another person with similar interests and we decided to become activists upon arriving in DC. I now joined, as one of my professors would put it, the tribe of the Liberty Activist. The fact that I identified with this group before doing a thing helped push me into becoming an activist in the first place. In this case identity influenced action rather than the opposite, which seems to be considered normal.

The third important day came almost exactly a yeah after the second. That was the day I took the The Anarchist's Declaration. This was the day I officially renounced the use or sanction of force for the duration of my lifetime. I decided this on the spur of the moment after a slow evolution brought about by the prior two days of identity shift. The final jump into the extreme has changed not only my actions but my outlook on life as a whole.

Taken as a whole, these three days illustrate how identity may change both actions and personality, as opposed to the standard view of identity changing how a person acts in the social context. I feel that this is important to consider in the context of communication because if one tries to challenge another's identity when it is the root of actions, they could react differently(possibly with more hostility) than were their identity rooted in action.

Nick