Mercerism says...

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Indeed...there are times when we must "violate" our own identity....in order to pave the way to creating a new identity.

poppy cock.

"required" by whom? is there some mysterious gremlin like entity that needs you to do wrong?
there is no such thing as "wrong". "wrong" is just a concept of the mind. in the emotionless and unbiased sterility of the universe, everything happens as a matter of inevitability.


identities are never static. they can not be violated. they can only be transformed which is a continuous and ever unfolding process.


entropic decay is inevitable and all matter and manifest energy will be unraveled into a homogenous field of only possibilities at the end. the end of the manifest universe will leave an infinity of possibilities all of which are zero.

Oh my. A quote from a fictional religion via an author (Philip K. Dick) who suspected that everything he experienced was a simulation and who wrote many books on the theme of people unwittingly embracing inauthenticity. Given that he was so conflicted about identity (are androids who they think they are? is anybody?) it makes sense that his fictional religion says it is inevitable to violate it.

I agree with Dick that identity is a simulation. It's the software that organizes data the brain has taken in. It changes over time but usually so smoothly that the changes can go unnoticed unless in extreme retrospect (looking back on your little kid self when you are an older adult, for example).

I don't agree that it is a mandatory condition of life to violate it, although that can happen in the course of forging a new identity like kraftiekortie says. And in those cases I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

I do think it's a basic condition of life that you will have to do wrong wherever you go but I don't think the "wrong" is violating your own identity. I think it's destroying the life of other living creatures, which really doesn't have anything to do with your identity (unless your identity is The Guy Who Never Harms Another Creature which was actually a guy I dated once and he was anguished to accidentally swat bugs). There are some people who try their utmost to never destroy the life of another life form through being a fruitarian, never killing bugs etc. but this isn't consistently possible. You can't stay alive without something else dying, even if you only eat plants (and even just fruit!) and gently shoo away bugs.

I don't think that's a shadow, curse or defeat of creation. But then again Dick may not have agreed entirely with his fictional creation of Mercer either.

hehe.. I sometimes wonder if Dick wrote the things he wrote, just to provoke us to think.

On the violating identity thing, I have done this in the past... gone along with the boss for the sake of staying employed, even though it conflicted with my notions of integrity (and other examples I could think of). I think our identities not only evolve, but what we hold to be true and fair and right and good also does.

I sometimes think, how we act and what we believe are like parallel railroad tracks that we hope one day will converge, so that what we believe shows up in all of our actions.

And contrary to what Mercer says about it being the defeat of creation, I think it's the most elegant way that an individual can evolve.

Thank you for your responses thus far.