Birth of the Social Identity

I never really identified myself with any group or community, much less a city. I shift to Gurgaon and suddenly I am a Mumbaite. Innocent instances -- dry summers, open spaces, unmetered rickshaws -- reminded of the psychological divide I had yet to cross even though I am not given to such biases. It seems simple enough a phenomenon and is overwhelmingly common but I feel there is something we can learn here.

The secret lies in how we understand who we are. We tend to identify ourselves with the help of echoes from the environment we are in, as if we only understand ourselves when we see the world react to us. You cannot base yourself in yourself -- how do you find the position of an object without having an external coordinate system? You are because something is not you.[1] It is well and good to not base yourself on a geographical or communal environment, but there will be an outside, always.

When you move to a new place, you are suddenly without that familiar environment that makes you you. Not knowing who or what you are is an unsettling feeling, forcing you to reach out and replace the void with a template. This is when a social identity becomes crucial. A ready cheat-sheet of who you are, what you like and whom you absolutely love to criticize. And this holds for any event that forces you into an identity crisis. Remember how quickly you fell into stereotypes when high school became a failed attempt at figuring out who you are?

This leads me to wonder what if this kind of identity crises were the reason social identities came into existence? Mass migrations, uprootings of peoples, famine, wars -- the entire gamut that characterized early mankind. What if they were the crucibles within which a Darwinian evolution of the concept emerged?

"Wait a minute," I hear you think, "Why would social identities need to come into existence? Don't societies have them by default?"  

I don't see a reason why they should. We often confuse a society with its social identity but they are not the same. A society is a functional group of people that achieves what the individuals could not by themselves -- it is an entity without an identifier. The social identity is what you think of when you think of the group. It is the personality, the spirit, the flavour. Its customs and fashions are suddenly a part of a larger pattern that suddenly make sense, no longer heuristics, and you will refer to it as you would an organism. (Some would call it an illusion but I do not see why the illusion of the self is any more substantial).

Now ask yourself, is it really necessary that the two spring into existence together? I think not. I go out for lunch with six people and we are a group. It is not until I need to leave that I am conscious of plucking myself from a group and this stickiness is my mind having unknowingly understood its own existence using the interactions within that group.[2]

The above is unresearched conjecture on my part (as will be most of my blog-posts) and I invite you to tear, gut and burn it. Why don't you share your views on the topic in the comments section?


Notes:

1. My guess on why loneliness makes you feel empty: reduction in the number of interactions you have with others reduces acknowledgments and assertions of who you are, thereby bereaving you of a sense of being.
2.  It is possible that the constant sticking and unsticking ultimately shapes how we evolve. If we are who we relate with, the pulling apart and adhering to entities is an continuous process and these metaphors are just a different way of saying that we are never the same river twice.