Identity

This has to be included as a separate component due to its effect, applications from global scale down to personal lives. This explains the evolution of the demographic-territorial state of the world, how it came to be from historical states and possible states where we head in the future.
One of the core and most powerful component/bias resulted from natural selection. Also critical from the warfare standpoint. Under its influence humans are capable of assembling together in large populations towards single purpose(constructive, destructive), and compete for resources with other human groups.
Identity consists of the “two traits”:
1. Who my people are/which human group I belong to? (Ideally a two-way relationship between a person and community) (Social identity theory)
2. What my territory is (Not as a private property but social and with shared responsibility among inhabitants)
Throughout the evolution, and even in present-time tribal settings the territory is shared with “my people” i.e. The two traits are near-compulsory mutually inclusive.
In fact this is applicable to all social animals(Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Hyenas, Wolves, Lions etc.). In the case of solitary animals everything remains the same except the social collaboration part.
As humans started producing a variety of goods and trading, its rewards promoted them to step out of their local identity and form economic integration with other identities easing up the two traits. Obviously, easing up the two traits also leads to putting the guard down against invasive identities in both territorial and socio-economic space.
Reversely, if resources are scarce (high economic stress) identity intensifies and makes us engage in biological competition aggressively.
In modern times, we have (seemingly) established nation-state system and induce sense of identity in a way that the “two traits” are NOT compulsorily mutually inclusive which can be a positive thing but the presence of lots of other identity variables causes identity confusion in masses and leaving them highly vulnerable against identity crisis and its exploitation.
Identity is constantly exploited through political/economic/violent means worldwide(inter-national, intra-national). And it effectively triggers collective emotional reactions among involved identity(ies).
Examples of territorial provocations: Challenging territorial/boundaries status quo, territory partitioning/border redrawing to create new disputes.
Examples of non-territorial identity variables used to leverage or exploit: countries/states, communities, sub-communities, ideologies(left, right, capitalism, communism), physical attributes(various skin, hair colours, mono-lid eyes), religions, ethnicities, languages, gender/sexual orientations and recently trending generations (millennial, gen z etc.)
On the positive side, Achievements are celebrated in identity crossovers such as sport victories, technological, scientific advancements etc. but this does allow us to ignore addressing negative ones.
The collapse of the two traits’ beliefs leads to the identity crisis. Any observed/perceived information or experiences especially in non-negligible quantity and relevant time span that is contradictory/not aligned to existing identity beliefs can render identity model false e.g. Facing repetitive discrimination from people that you consider yours. In other words, there is non-negligible error/discrepancy between mind’s current belief(conscious reality) and actual reality WRT perceived information causing belief break(This should be true for any belief).
When we say the model collapses it’s not the two traits itself but the values it holds.
From my personal experience, the identity crisis is more like slow poisoning rather than sudden trauma. I have seen people suffering from an unresolved identity crisis throughout their whole life without being aware of its existence severely affecting quality of life.
Errors in our predictions are not that rare but since identity is core value from natural selection POV, the brain triggers a mechanism in order to rebuild the identity cognitive model at the earliest so the victim can successfully navigate and survive in the environment (navigation emphasising on psychological/information action space).
In CS terminology, the lower confidence score of cognitive behavioral model predictions leads to ramping up the learning rate (overthinking). Due to the injured mental state, years of existing pieces of information/memories are in dangling state and information gushing in from the environment is not efficiently and accurately analysed, labelled, assigned importance weights causing cognitive overload. Since our mind supports federated model architecture we can slowly build understanding about psychology to rebuild the primary behavioral cognitive model. It’s like using a malfunctioning tool to fix itself.
Symptoms/Behavioural traits: Increased vulnerability to addictions, naturally selected high reward functions/stimuli e.g. Sexual attraction/porn, social stimuli, food cravings. Discomfort in society, emotional volatility including impulsivity, mood polarity, mimicking behaviour of others/increased sensitivity to social proof, normative influence. unrestrained emotional and driven thinking, going through existing memories/data trying to find patterns and possibilities leading to day dreaming, self talk. Doorway to disorders. Most of these problems occur when deprived of aid and true feedback from environment/society.
Most of (if not all) behavioural and physical traits of living beings should be explainable by theory of natural selection e.g. cats hiss and fluff up fur when felt threatened, most animals walk/run but kangaroos jump, advertisement of being poisonous by warning colouration(aposematism). All these and infinitely more because that’s what helped them survive, reproduce and thrive iteratively over millions of years. We can say every being’s evolutionary cognitive model is trained over iterations of reproduction and, lives trying to maximize their rewards and surviving with respect to the environment they evolved in while also considering factor of random mutation.
I haven’t been able to find a reason why natural selection would debuff us with so many disorders while buffing us with such cognitive prowess. Considering this, rather than fixating on widespread terms like family history, genetics etc. we should cure the social disorder that nurtures malformed environment inducing disorders in individuals. Natural selection does not create statistically significant and major trait deviations in handful of ticks.
The reason behind facing difficulties rebuilding identity is extreme information-dense modern environment. The recovery is also affected by the identity design and its complexity of local society in which victim inhabit but it’s definitely not limited to it as most of the chaotic/politically dynamic regions are often fuelled by international politics.
Due to the above reasons the identity is most likely to be malformed by information ingested from the environment.
A natural way to recover is allowance of engagement in meaningful activities socially, culturally, economically which acts as true-positive feedback/rewards for brain to rebuild neural pathways.
Because of the higher sensitivity to environmental stimuli, an active identity crisis is a highly valued mental state from psyops POV.Applications at individual and population scale.
The use of this knowledge for psychological, socio-economic warfare is not acknowledged widely nor safeguards exist in society. Unlike traditional physical warfare these attacks are relatively difficult to predict, identify and confirm.