So many of our seemingly most intractable problems arise in no small part from having learned to see and understand ourselves as part of overwhelming, monolithic abstractions (enormous categorizations of color, sex, gender, race, religion), mistaking our own interests for the purported ends of the identity bloc we’ve been arbitrarily assigned to. This is true across the culture, whether the ill-conceived identity politics of the left or the spiteful populism of the right.
