(The style of this OP is quite article-like but it was written specifically as an OP. A one-sentence summary of the main point might be: current ideologies of identity obscure their own function, which is to serve the social at the expense of the self).

An attempt to problematize notions of personal freedom and social progress via a brief analysis of the concepts of identity and self in contemporary society.

An identity is posited here as similar to a self but without the absoluteness of the physical boundary necessarily applicable to a self in order for it to be distinguishable from other selves—the absence of which boundary makes it significantly more coherent to speak of “shared identities” than “shared selves”. An identity then is conceptualized as a narrative of self, or a narrative of a narrative that hones a greater degree of coherency out of the self narrative such that it goes beyond a mere stable and clear judgement (on a variably coherent but at least self-contained subject) to a more defined role or character among several within a subject that subsist in varying interrelationships.

The limits of identity then are more like the limits of conceptual groups that fit under the broader concept of “role/character” or sets of roles/characters and so are abstract limits in contrast to the more concrete limits of selves defined ultimately by their respective associated physical bodies. In this sense an identity is a narrative that takes one further step into the abstract than a self and is granted there a more flexible and shared territory within and across individual bodies. This territory is wholly socio-linguistic and so fundamentally social and socially controlled. But it may be more or less recognizably social to the extent we can have both ostensibly personal and social identities, which do not necessarily harmonize.

Our personal identities are concerned more with general psychological character and our social identities more with occupation, career, status etc.—not that these don’t overlap or aren’t located on the same spectrum, but that personal identity tends to reflect ideologies of “individuality” (which in so far as they remain within the social sphere [in so far as we are “sane”, i.e. recognizably social actors] are just more social narratives) and social identity tends towards ideologies of the collective.

The former “personal” identity is how we tend to play our social role through difference/isolation and the latter “social” identity through similarity/cooperation. But again, in so far as we are “sane”, we do play a socially recognized (individually limited) role and political stances that arise from disparate roles need not be conflictual on anything other than a superficial level. On the contrary, the illusion of fundamental conflict can be a stable breeding ground for the reproduction of the same basic social system because it blinds us to our individual impotence and consequently to paths to overcome it. The self of a “free individual” whose behavioural choices span a consistently tiny percentage of those theoretically available and, in fact, come largely predefined and narratively packaged is less a threat to, and more a tightly controlled unit in, modern liberal democracies, and as such not unsuited to reproducing an ever more tightly controlled, less behaviourally diverse, system. So can proceed a process from apparent freedom to domination, diversity to uniformity, progress to regression.

Centrally problematic is that the behaviours of "free" individuals tend not to stray far from well-trodden paths, despite the proliferation of such paths, thereby an overall social/ideological stability that subsumes intra-cultural political conflict is maintained, while personal stability is rendered at best incidental. In fact, identity formation in modern “free” societies allows for and even encourages the creation of conflicting identities that war with themselves in a (self) destructive fashion. And there are practical reasons for but no overwhelming force towards the attainment and perpetuation of an identity that is consistent and encompassing enough to effectively abrogate such inner self conflict. In fact, such an orientation is often actively discouraged under ideologies of "self-exploration" etc. Fundamentally then, modern society facilitates the greater and greater separation of identity from self, or, more specifically, the proliferation of identities that do not tend to reconcile themselves in a stable self but form unstable selves that are defined largely by inner conflict.

The thesis presented here then is that this phenomenon of multiple and fractured identity formation, the creation of self-conflictual selves (subjectively experienced in the long term as unhappy, meaningless and anxious selves, characterized by indecision and irresoluteness, I.e. undeveloped selves misdirected from their means of self-development ) is not a bug but a feature of advanced society and the more “advanced” the society the more a feature it tends to become.

Here, technological progress, particularly through mass and social media, provides us with the “freedom” to tie ourselves in ever more convoluted psycho-social knots which present themselves to us as novel experiences or experimental or disposable identities, while having the same fundamentally stultifying character of limiting our ability to narrativize a coherent and unified self in a meaningful social context. The consumption of proliferating identities becomes an endless self-consumption and ultimate limitation rather than emancipation.

This is to suggest that part of the immune system of larger social systems of huge numbers of social units is that those that may present a threat do not play an antagonistic role but remain inert and impotent due to their inner conflicts. They become the waste products of society rather than a cancer upon it, its detritus rather than its mutations. And so meaningful change and progress are effectively resisted while efficiency of exchange, material and ideological, is continuously perfected. A quantitative dominance of material/ideological wealth pervades over qualitative human experience, particularly wherever such experience threatens the rate of economic expansion/technical advance.

This ongoing process may ultimately lead to social disintegration, revolution, the dominance of artificial intelligence or some combination thereof. It’s difficult to predict, but we can at least observe that human flourishing, diversity and depth is not its telos. The subject is subjected to the social insofar as it cannot coherently arrange itself in opposition to it, or at least in opposition to its failings, because it has internalized conflicting psychological forces that prevent a coherent response. And a society that systematically protects its failings at the expense of its subjects is antithetical to the notion of meaningful human progress.

The freedom of identity a technically advanced consumer society facilitates (identity commodified / personal paralysis packaged as endless novelty) contains within it the anaesthetic that neutralizes a more valuable freedom, the freedom of resistance against an orientation towards the self that dictates that a self must consume even the self and in as many flavours as possible in order to fully experience itself. And is directed to do so through the conduits of mass media, celebrity culture, and social engineering technologies.

I had written a bit more. But that's enough for now.

Anyhow, is this a problem you recognize? Does the analysis make sense? What, if any, are potential solutions?