Identity Politics Stems From Young People’s Quest To Answer The Question, ‘Who Am I?’

The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

Boy, girl, young man, young woman; gay, straight, trans, gender fluid (or “genderqueer” or “genderf–k” and hundreds more on the so-called gender spectrum); black, white, “white adjacent”; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, “none”; rich, poor; victim, privileged, oppressor. Youth must navigate all of this and too much more. They have been politicized and intersectionalized practically unto death.

Young people have always had to work out a sense of identity. If their minds are not molested with identity politics, it’s a natural development known in the field of psychology as “individuation.” That’s the process by which a person develops his sense of unique self and integrates it with the wider world. But politicized schools, the call of social media, and popular culture disrupt that process by driving hard the propaganda of identity politics and enforcing it through political correctness.

It adds up to a mass identity crisis. Youth have to deal with multiple, competing narratives, some that are inconsistent even within themselves, fed to them by the education establishment and by propagandists. In the midst of this chaos, they strive to manufacture a solid sense of self. Not surprisingly, many flounder. They take on assigned personas and act out what they think they are “supposed to be”—perhaps a social justice warrior, an antiracist, “gender nonconforming,” or a privileged ally of the oppressed who dutifully apologizes for their “whiteness” or for being male.

These pathologies among the young are tragic but entirely predictable. Youth are susceptible to being packaged and defined by both peers and authority figures. Without a distinct sense of reality, they are vulnerable and reliant on others for social direction and protection.

Very young children must navigate a frightening line between make-believe and reality, between the world of night terrors and what goes on around them while awake. The renowned child psychiatrist Jean Piaget emphasized the importance of respecting the different developmental stages that children go through so that they can make sense of the world and later function in it as adults.

The late Fred Rogers often talked and sang to his young audience about the difference between real life and the “land of make-believe” in his long-running show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on public television. If children don’t get that clarity while young, they are more susceptible to future dysfunction and despair.

At the same time that youth must anchor themselves in reality, the conformity impulse is usually stronger in them than in the general population. Separation anxiety is especially pronounced in them, and the urge to conform leaves them even more vulnerable to those who want to define them. When “everybody else is doing it,” many feel as though a tractor beam is pulling them into the trend. Ostracism is a terrifying prospect, so they tend to do and say whatever they think is necessary to be

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