- Mises and Chomsky both thought of the “unfreeness of the mind” as the same across people. This “unfreeness” is much of what both of them spent their careers—one of them in economics and the other in linguistics—thinking and writing about.
- That is: On the doctrine of the physical may be unfree but the mental is certainly free, both Mises and Chomsky made the (seemingly!) controversial move of saying: “No, the mental is no less unfree. But that unfreeness is the same for all people.” Those constraints on the mind are what they both analyzed: Both Mises and Chomsky analyzed what they thought of as the fundamental and unchangeable structure of the human mind. They looked into what necessarily delimits our powers as human beings, what necessarily constrains our minds in a way analogous to the physical laws constraining our physical bodies. The move here is: “The mental is no less unfree. But that’s not dangerous to say because that unfreeness is the same for all people. It’s the humanity that we all share.“
- Actually, Mises talked about some of the differences between the male and female minds in his book Socialism. Chomsky, a much more thoroughgoing leftist in this respect, wouldn’t have done that.
- There’s human nature, which both Mises and Chomsky were comfortable investigating. But there’s also the nature of the male mind vs. the nature of the female mind. And beyond sex, there’s also race. Mises talked about sexual difference but not racial difference; Chomsky talked about neither.
- It may be worth looking into how Kant influenced both Mises and Chomsky.
- Some attributes are (relatively) changeable, e.g. fashion. You can just put on a different shirt. Others are (relatively) changeable, e.g. sex, race.
- In American culture, you’re supposed to draw attention only to the most changeable of attributes. While an American may say something like “I like your shirt,” a Japanese person may instead say something like 鼻が高いですね. It’s a lot easier to change your shirt than your 鼻.
- In some cultures, being masculine is thought of as “becoming” of an adult male and being feminine is thought of as “becoming” of an adult female. To get to the general principle: Your role in the social order—and this is true of any traditional or conservative culture—is a function of certain (relatively) immutable characteristics. You just find yourself to be an adult male, which is a physical fact about you (that’s not easily changeable); the culture then expects masculinity out of you, which is a mental way of being. Identities bundle the changeable and the unchangeable, the malleable and the unmalleable, together; an adult male is expected to be masculine, and in the image of the archetypal masculine-adult-male of a culture is found the culture’s image of a “man,” of “manhood.”
- An identity, for it to have any kind of social effect (and in its social effect is found its only effect, of course), must present with some kind of “visible” manifestation, e.g. wearing a suit rather than something else, being one race rather than another. Some identity-related signals, then, are choosable; others are unchoosable.
- The more traditional or conservative a culture, the more the culture expects that you’ll combine certain choosable identity-related signals with certain unchoosable ones.
- If you dress a certain way, talk a certain way, etc., then people will “expect” of you certain other things as well. And this “expectation,” with its description-prescription ambiguity, turns prediction into social pressure. It’s possible, though, to use this to your advantage: If you signal in a certain way, thus giving people information about what you’re likely to be like or do, then you in effect give yourself motivation to live up to those expectations. For example, if you dress and talk like an intellectual, then you’ll disappoint people unless you live up to the expectations of an intellectual.
- That is: Identity—well, insofar as identity is choosable, for some of identity is unchoosable—is about giving people information about what kind of person you are in order to use to your advantage the phenomenon of description-prescription ambiguity, i.e. in order to harness the phenomenon of people expecting things of you starting out as dry prediction but ending up as motivationally useful social pressure to live up to those expectations. Modern American culture, being anti-traditionalist/conservative, plays up the choosable, and plays down the unchoosable, as much as possible.
- If you take on an identity willingly, then you pigeonhole yourself into the exact place that you want to be.
- It’s possible to argue about identity in that what, e.g., a man “is,” depends on the question of what attributes would be most useful when embodied in an adult male.
- Modern Western culture is such that it’s not the “form” of the person, but the “substance,” that’s important. We all have inside of us, deep down, our own unique spark of consciousness or sentience. We all have inside of us something unique to us as an individual, something worth protecting.
- Why is it that interpreting the proposition “no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” such that “Scotsman” is an identity results in a feeling of prescriptiveness? The answer is: Being included in a group that you’re supposed to be included in feels good, and being excluded from such a group feels bad. To continue with the above example, and to be concrete: An adult male born and raised in Scotland is expected to have the identity of a Scotsman. In fact, that’s why “Scotsman” is in its meaning ambiguous between the relatively “hard” facts, which are all but socially unnegotiable (e.g., whether you have a Scottish passport), and the relatively “soft” facts, which are much more socially negotiable (e.g., whether you have inside of you the national spirit of Scotland). If you have the “hard” side, in that you have a Scottish passport, but not the “soft,” then you’re a Scot in the statistics, sure, but you’re not a real Scot, you’re not a Scot in spirit.
- It’s possible to identify differently than you’re identified as. For example, a person may identify as a man even though most of the people around them would identify them as a woman.
- To identify as X is to take on the role of X, not only outwardly, in your action, but also inwardly, in your thought. And to be identified as X is to be encouraged to take on the role of X.
- Identity is a two-way negotiation. If a person decides to identify as X, then the people around them can decide to accept or reject that identity. For example, the identity “Japanese” is not only linguistic and cultural but also racial. If a white person, even a white person born and raised in Japan, identifies as “Japanese,” then they’ll almost always be rejected. Interestingly, and this gets into the difference between Japan as a traditional or conservative nation and America as being the opposite: The linguistic and the cultural are choosable, at least to some extent—even a person who wasn’t born and raised in a certain sociolinguistic system can immerse in that sociolinguistic system and end up passing as a native—but the racial is unchoosable. In Japan, identity is more likely to be an inextricable mixture of the choosable and the unchoosable. Japan gives people roles, which are changeable, based on their race and other unchangeable attributes. America, on the other hand, doesn’t like doing that: Anybody, regardless of their race or any of their other unchangeable attributes, can be or become an American, in fact can be or become anything.
- Another angle: In the aforementioned two-way negotiation of identity, who does the culture give priority to? The person who says what their identity is, or the people around them who agree or disagree?
- In a traditional or conservative nation: A person born male is supposed to grow up and become a man, and a person born female has the opposite destiny, i.e. to grow up and become a woman. Anything outside of those two boxes is rejected out of hand. Sex determines gender; the immutable, and essential, determines the immutable. You won’t be accepted as a feminine male or a masculine female any more than you’d be accepted as a white Japanese person. On the other hand, in a progressive or liberal nation: The immutable doesn’t matter as much. Whether you’re one sex or another, or one race or another, you can decide on any identity or role that you want. It’s only your propensities and talents as an individual that matter.
Unfreeness, identity
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