The problem though, is that it is only a possibility, that I am trying to deceive you. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, you've been found out.

But "speak meaningfully" does not exclude deception. So I can speak meaningfully in a way designed to support my own well-being, which will also undermine your well-being. — Metaphysician Undercover

However, my well-being does not necessitate your well-being,
— Metaphysician Undercover

If it is part of your well-being to speak meaningfully, then this clause is a performative contradiction. — unenlightened

But "speak meaningfully" does not exclude deception. So I can speak meaningfully in a way designed to support my own well-being, which will also undermine your well-being. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you escape from contradiction into falsehood. And in so doing, you undermine your own being, because it is now clear that you are not worth talking to.

I think it's a huge problem that you don't know how your own thesis is proven right or wrong. Many of us know social media produces addiction and suffering, but that's got really nothing to do with your thesis until you can prove that it does. There are more intuitive and specific reasons why social media causes the problems it does and they're more specific to the unique environment social media produces.

To reiterate, the specific dynamic I'm criticising is where masks become in themselves a focus of our appetites — Baden

Why does it matter whether people have the ability to exchange one mask with another? Why is that better or worse than being stuck with the same masks?

Some masks are good, and some are extremely bad, and social media produces bad masks because users are encouraged to tell lies for immediate gratification and validation. There's no substance to the pleasure, and over time, no long-term satisfaction and never a feeling of "winning". There are people getting way more likes and comments, and everyone else seems to be living happy perfect lives on their social media. The user in spending their time here haven't spent that time, or focus on bettering themselves, building real relationships or engaging in fulfilling activities.

However, that's not new, and we could apply many criticisms of the "American dream" to social media and have it applied extraordinarily well. When one set unrealistic standards, and then fails to meet them, but is surrounded by friends and family who seem to be doing very well, feelings of shame motivate the lying, which leads to nothing positive.

It's kind of unacceptable to put things like peer pressure and building great relationships into "social capital" and make no effort to distinguish between motivations. The examples where social capital is toxic, useless and harmful are the ones that create negative outcomes.

I'm still left unsure as to where "inner conflict" or really anything related to your OP about would come in. You don't know how to prove it exists, and you don't know under what environments it would be worse. Do you want me to dislike the capitalist power structure? Done. Do you want me to be with you on social media producing mental illnesses? Easy. I was there before I got here, but why should my problem with these things be that they cause "inner conflict" or "fractured identities"? It's totally normal to have conflicting identities, and it's not unique to these environments, so I don't associate any of the problems in social media with what's described by your OP.

I'm still left unsure as to where "inner conflict" or really anything related to your OP about would come in. You don't know how to prove it exists, — Judaka

You need look no further than your own first post for an example of how inner confllct would come in..

In a separate case, there was a documentary on how multi-level marketing schemes would attract mothers who perhaps had had their children leave home. To sell accessories, cosmetics or clothes, and to present this image of themselves on social media as living a great life. As things would start to go poorly, they couldn't face the shame of admitting their failures online and so felt forced to maintain the lie. They preferred to continue their losing strategy than embarrass themselves to friends and family.

Social media has taken away the barrier between the personal and social, all spaces are social spaces. It creates a state of being constantly on display, which creates constant social pressure. That social persona, however, is personalised and individualistic and exists on a page for one's exclusive use, presenting intimate details of one's life and thoughts. Social media has created an environment where so many are either addicted or forced to constantly present the image of themselves they want others to see online. — Judaka

We can't prove the contents of others' inner worlds but unless we're solipsists, we can often reasonably infer something about them. But, yes, if it's not a reasonable inference that such a dynamic could result in inner conflict that would be very problematic for my theory.

In lieu of diving into this for now, while we both espouse a form of freedom as a goal, my impression is that your route primarily involves normative claims about potential modes of self-conceptualization whereas mine primarily involves descriptive claims thereof to further a normative claim re the action of social institutions. Would you agree? — Baden

Yes, I'd agree to that. I think we adequately understand each other.

I'll tell you what I think is the principal point of difference between my perspective and yours, and you tell me if you agree. But first, bare in mine that I believe we are fundamentally animalistic, so many of our base instincts involve putting up a deceptive shell or façade to create an appearance for others, which hides one's true feelings, emotions, ambitions and motivations. My description of this feature is what @unenlightened is concerned about, but the feature is very real, and may comprise a large part of a person's inner motive force, whether the person properly apprehends oneself to be behaving in this deceptive way, or not. Animals have been interacting with each other for millions of years, and their interactions are generally not friendly, they are filled with destructive behaviour and fear of one another. So, this propensity to deceive may be very strong, and must be duly respected in any understanding of oneself.

Our social environment, our upbringing and training, inclines us to see others as having an identity. That is how we see differences and we are taught to respect others despite these differences which constitute the other's identity. Though we are aware that another may present us with false features (deception), we learn to understand and respect others through respect for identity. And, through thousands and thousands of years of moral training, we learn to suppress some of these animalistic tendencies toward creating false fronts and deception, but these inclinations still exert a strong force through instinct.

Now, the issue we are concerned with arises with introspection, looking at oneself, and introspection is something very human, probably not practised by other animals at all, as an aspect of self-consciousness. So we are not guided by instinct here, and we must be guided by principles we develop. Introspection reveals immediately to us, that the idea that a person has "an identity" is faulty. So you move to resolve this issue by assuming that a person has multiple identities. My introspection reveals to me that the whole concept of "identity" is faulty here, and it cannot suffice as an adequate tool for understanding oneself.

That is how I see our difference. We both recognize that the idea of having "an identity", is an inadequate approach to understanding oneself. So you propose that a multiplicity of "identities" is what Is required. I think that the whole idea of "identity" is not suited towards a proper understanding of a self, and we ought to move to something else.

So you escape from contradiction into falsehood. And in so doing, you undermine your own being, because it is now clear that you are not worth talking to. — unenlightened

It appears like I have adequately demonstrated my point then. Attempting to deceive is a very real part of the social interaction of human beings. Whether the person is "found out", as I was, (and consequently my own being has been undermined by being found out), or the deception is successful, (and the being of the other is undermined), is irrelevant. The point is that attempts to deceive and successful deception are very real, and constitute a very significant portion of social interaction in general, regardless of whether you personally want to face reality and talk about it, or not.

@Judaka
I don't think it needs futher explantion but to really spell it out to avoid running in circles again. From your own example:

1: "Social Persona"/Online identity: = Image woman is "forced to present". A "lie" that needs to be maintained.
2: Offline identity = Failed businesswoman. A truth that needs to be hidden.

Those personas/identities are obviously in conflict. They are both in one person. = Inner conflict.

EDIT: If your objection boils down to something like MU was saying, let me know. It might make more sense.

The concepts are quite slippery but I'm clearer about your objection to how I'm using them now at least. I'll read over your posts again and come back to this.

I believe we are fundamentally animalistic, so many of our base instincts involve putting up a deceptive shell or façade to create an appearance for others, which hides one's true feelings, emotions, ambitions and motivations…. through thousands and thousands of years of moral training, we learn to suppress some of these animalistic tendencies toward creating false fronts and deception, but these inclinations still exert a strong force through instinct. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is lying, deceiving, creating a false front animalistic, a base instinct? It’s true that animals and plants have evolved various strategies of deception, but this would seem to be quite different from human strategies. The difference as I see it is that our strategies are consciously planned, rather than evolutionary mechanisms concealed from our own awareness. We deceive for many specific reasons: to avoid hurting someone we care about (this relates to the moral training you mentioned), to protect our own ego from the feeling of shame and failure, to defend ourselves from enemies. What all these forms of planned deception have in common is that they depend on a gap in mutual understanding. We only feel the need to lie in circumstances where the truth will not be understood by the other the way we understand it.

The closer our friendship with another, the more we can avoid the necessity of lying about the core aspects of ourselves, because we know that other supports, trusts and understands us in ways that approach our own self-understanding. In sum, human deception belongs to the complex and sophisticated skills of social comprehension only humans are capable of. We can lie because we can do things other animals can’t: 1)we can abstractly represent the meaning of a situation (its truth) and our felt response to it.
2) we can deliberately manipulate this conceptual representation into a non-truth specifically and relevant tailored to how we want to influence the other.

1: "Social Persona"/Online identity: = Image woman is "forced to present". A "lie" that needs to be maintained.
2: Offline identity = Failed businesswoman. A truth that needs to be hidden.

Those personas/identities are obviously in conflict. They are both in one person. = Inner conflict — Baden

As I mentioned to MU, we lie to each other in situations where there is a lack of trust, intimacy and mutual understanding and often the lie is an attempt to prevent an even greater breakdown in being understood by others (being unfairly judged) . In the scenario of the women participating in online marketing schemes, there may be multiple motivations for lying. They are running a business, and showing signs of incompetence is not good from a sales standpoint. This is just good corporate strategizing.
Your argument is most relevant in regards to those social ties we believe we have more invested in emotionally.
We have to care about an other in a more intimate way than just as a sales client in order for our truth-telling or lies to play more than a superficial role with regard to our sense of identity. The fact that we can lie so easily and freely with our social media ‘friends’ is an indication that we know we have less at stake emotionally with them than we do with our closest companions.
It’s not so much that lies put up barriers between ourselves and those we lie to , but that the fact we feel we have to lie to them in the first place is a symptom of a gap in mutual understanding. We lie most easily in relationships that are dispensable.

But what about those who have not developed the skills to form deep , intimate connections with anyone, and are thus attracted to the superficial environment of social media? The argument can certainly be made that the social validation they receive keeps them tethered to an environment that makes establishing deep connections very difficult.

But what does the superficiality of the social media environment, and its consequent encouraging of deception, have to do with the inner conflict of identity?
Lying to people one is only cursorily invested in emotionally is not likely to cause any such internal strife. It would seem only self-deception is capable of that.

But self-deception may be a misnomer. I think such situations are more a matter of an inconsistent sense of self-identity rather than well-constituted identities fighting with each other. So here may be a bridge between your model of conflictual selves produced by technologies of consumer culture and what I’ve been saying about the superficiality of social media. Those individuals who are most vulnerable to suffering from prolonged exposure to social media are those who never developed a consistent sense of self-identity. They are the ones most susceptible to social media ‘addiction’, which runs the danger of preventing them from creating a core sense of personal integrity. Each encounter online introduces a different dynamic of interpersonal connection from the previous, and no one encounter allows one to establish a pattern of stable trust and shared deep concerns.

As to the connection between capitalist aims and a weakly integrated self-concept, I would suggest that social media technologies lend themselves more easily to the monetization of fragmented and superficial engagements than to deep and intimate relationships. Emotional pathology is an unintended consequence of this, just as the obesity epidemic is an unintended consequence of the food industry’s profit goals, and ruined lives are the unintended consequence of the gambling industry’s goals.

I don't think inner conflict as you describe it exists in a meaningful way. What I was saying was that social media isn't producing mental illness due to "inner conflict" or creating conflicting identities or contradictions. There are much better explanations for the problems, which relate to the types of masks and social interactions and behaviours that are taking place on social media. Social validation is literally displayed as likes and comments, and you're constantly on display and being judged, and you're surrounded by the apparent success of others and develop feelings of inadequacy. And well, there's a lot to talk about, some of which you've already talked about yourself, so, I know you understand it.

You keep bringing up the failed businesswoman example, but I was never trying to present it as though the businesswoman's problem was her conflicting identities. Her problem was that she was working for a multilevel marketing scheme and she needed to quit but she didn't quit because she was afraid of being judged as a failure by her friends and family. Her problem was the poverty and hardship created by her toxic job in an MLM.

What if instead, she was making a crapton of money but didn't want to alienate her friends by showing off, and thus kept it to herself? She's making so much money but presenting herself as though she wasn't so well off to gain a feeling of camaraderie with her friends and family or was just afraid that they'd treat her in a weird way. Well, she'd probably be doing absolutely fine in that case.

I didn't read everything MU said but for his last post, I do agree with it and I think I've already made similar points to it. Humans are instinctively deceptive and live in a constant state of deception, including deceiving themselves. For me, humans are masters at navigating deception and contradiction, and it's unthinkable that anyone isn't consistently deceiving others and/or struggles to cope with being deceptive or contradictory.

I've egregiously misunderstood you a few times, and I need to work on my ability to ensure that I'm understanding others correctly. I did try my best to understand you, more than I usually try because I was pretty sure I wasn't getting it. Clearly without much success regardless.

But his comments about identity... make me wonder how I managed to read your OP three or four times and miss how you defined identity. I've probably wasted a lot of your time and my own by failing to read this part of your OP properly. I'll take this as a learning lesson, showing that I really have a hard think about how to avoid this problem in the future. I think I just read the parts I thought were interesting, and impatiently skimmed over what seemed unimportant, I have ADHD, so maybe that's a factor...

Identity is an identifier that is negotiated between oneself and others, there is only one self, which I'd call the "ego". We may feel that how we're publically identified is very different to how we feel inside, perhaps most extremely depicted by someone experiencing gender dysphoria. Due to that negotiation, there's a need to qualify for identities, and people may be driven by the pursuit to be seen in a specific way.

Identities need to be communicated, and there are many parts of ourselves that either can't easily be communicated or that we don't want to communicate. Identities need to be qualified for, although there's something distinctly modern about giving yourself an identity without qualifying for it. Identities demand treatment of a specific social kind, which is what giving yourself an identity might be aimed at acquiring. Going back to the gender dysphoria example, you'd want to be identified as the gender you feel you are, not because you necessarily care to seek outward validation, but because you want to be entitled to the treatment associated with being identified as belonging to the gender you feel you are.

Identities are themselves shallow, such as someone being conservative or liberal, which is definitely not a sophisticated, nuanced take. A conservative as an identity needs to incorporate so many variables, and include so many different types of thoughts, ideas and opinions, that it's necessarily generic. All identities are generic, they have to be so that large numbers of people can qualify. Identities offer others an easy, simple way to understand you, but are completely insufficient to be used to understand oneself.

I focused on the parts of your writing which were interesting to me, and I figured identities would be defined in a boring way and so I guess I skipped over it. I think this is a pretty good example of a situation where I'd prefer to just lie and put the blame on you somehow and slink out of the thread without admitting to my fuck up. Anyway, I now understand why your examples and conclusions were connected, and what I was missing to think that they couldn't be.

I'm strongly against trying to define oneself with identities, because those identities exist to serve a social purpose, and are not designed in any way to be helpful ways of conceptualizing yourself. But it is fine to feel your identity is very important as they play such a significant social role, and desiring to be identified in a specific way is something anyone should be able to understand.

It's easy to understand why contradictory identities are a problem, as they can't perform their function that way. It's this kind of nuance that's precisely lacking in identities because they can't contain that nuance, but the nuance is necessary to understand a person. We can be both smart and stupid, kind and cruel, selfish and self-sacrificing, and so on. Partly because we're inherently inconsistent, due to our fluctuating emotions, mental states, physical states and so on. Context changes, our thought processes aren't consistent, our biases aren't consistent, and the concepts we work with aren't consistent either.

Identity is binary, it fits or it doesn't, you belong or you don't, you're identified that way, or you're not. There's no room for contradiction because you're supposed to be responded to based on your identity. If there's an identity that you can simultaneously both be and not be, that'd be terribly confusing. This is why identity as an area can be quite prejudicial. superficial, and resistant to change. For example, someone being mixed race or non-Asian and living in Japan or China all their life, but no stranger actually identifies you as being Japanese or Chinese. It's not automatically identified so there's a need to "prove" that you qualify. And even then it might be resisted. Identities need to simplify, and can't work with complex situations well, it's a necessary part of their functionality.

Someone will be identified by their occupation, say a lawyer, but without any knowledge of what kind of cases this person works, where they work, what their experiences are, how much money they make or anything more than just being a lawyer, or perhaps at least including the area of law they practice. Someone can certainly feel that "being a lawyer" is part of their identity, but why would you consider yourself to be just a "lawyer" as your self-narrative when you have an intimate understanding which is so much more nuanced and detailed than that? You'd only ever call yourself just a lawyer because people don't have time for your life story and it's not necessary to hear for them to get a very basic sense of who you are and how to treat you.

You can define identity differently if you want, but so long as it's being used in this social sense, that's irreconcilable with being a comprehensive tool for understanding oneself. I can understand why someone wouldn't bother to understand another except for a few identifiers they can spot, as that's the bare minimum they're due. But never why someone would understand themselves that way or actually view their identities as a kind of self.

Compared to the past, when society was far more tyrannical, and the ability to self-describe was oppressed, nowadays, there is a freedom of expression that hasn't ever existed before. Social media is actually a terrible example then because it's been largely responsible for tearing down the sanctity of identity as it may have once been. People through anonymity and the internet feel free to express their opinions and refuse the simple confines of their character identity offers.

As let's say, an oppressed woman in a particularly misogynistic place, you're actually being oppressed by those simplifications of identity. The inability to express yourself as more than just a woman is the oppression, that's... probably the best way to sum it up. Society restricts you to that one simple role and confines you there and refuses to see your potential to be anything else. Liberation would be the ability to adopt seemingly contradictory identities, all the things women aren't "supposed" to be, you'd be able to become.

Although I shouldn't have reacted as I did about the PC worker, it's primarily the restrictive and authoritarian way of asserting a reductive identity through the "outside truth" that bothered me. What we define as contradictory is very subjective to begin with, and even then contradictory ideas can exist - probably should exist - within a coherent self-narrative or self-understanding.

But his comments about identity... make me wonder how I managed to read your OP three or four times and miss how you defined identity. I've probably wasted a lot of your time and my own by failing to read this part of your OP properly. I'll take this as a learning lesson, showing that I really have a hard think about how to avoid this problem in the future. I think I just read the parts I thought were interesting, and impatiently skimmed over what seemed unimportant, I have ADHD, so maybe that's a factor... — Judaka

No worries. Appreciate your honesty.

Is lying, deceiving, creating a false front animalistic, a base instinct? It’s true that animals and plants have evolved various strategies of deception, but this would seem to be quite different from human strategies. The difference as I see it is that our strategies are consciously planned, rather than evolutionary mechanisms concealed from our own awareness. — Joshs

The way I see it is that there is in human beings, a base animal instinct toward false fronts. It may be derived from competitive factors, fear, or whatever, we cannot adequately make conclusions here as to "why". Being at a very base level, you might not be inclined to call this "deception", because you might not see it as a conscious, intentional thing. However, the subconscious interplays with the conscious greatly, continually, and it affects the conscious in ways that a person practising introspection cannot perceive, or apprehend. I can apprehend through introspection that there are subconscious causes involved in my actions, but I cannot grasp the specifics.

Further, I believe that at the conscious level we are taught through moral training, that the best approach to subconscious influences is to confront them all, and filter them. So for instance, when a subconscious emotive force inclines me toward action, I ought to arrest that motivating force and assess the action which it is inclining me toward, as to whether it is bad or good, before proceeding. If I fail in this conscious 'arrest and assess', I may fly off into a fit of passion.

From these two factors, the base inclination to deceive, and the need to 'arrest and assess' the base inclinations, we can conclude that if one's moral training in the 'arrest and assess' feature is not completely adequate, the person may develop habitual actions of consciously deceiving others.

We deceive for many specific reasons: to avoid hurting someone we care about (this relates to the moral training you mentioned), to protect our own ego from the feeling of shame and failure, to defend ourselves from enemies. What all these forms of planned deception have in common is that they depend on a gap in mutual understanding. We only feel the need to lie in circumstances where the truth will not be understood by the other the way we understand it. — Joshs

As I mentioned above, and this seems to be a critical point in my discussion with you, I strongly believe that we cannot properly apprehend the subconscious motivations to our actions. Because of this, we cannot say what are the specific reasons why we are inclined to deceive. And the inclination to act is prior in time to the conscious willing of an act, so the conscious will cannot go back on the inclination to act, and arrest it, prior to it inclining the act. So the only power that the conscious will has is to arrest the inclination to act, prior to acting, allowing deliberation and assessment of the act which it is inclined toward.

The critical 'gap in understanding' which results in the immoral act of deception, is not a gap in understanding between people, but a gap in understanding within the person performing the deceptive act. This is the gap between the act which one is about to carry out, and the motivations for that act. As described above, we cannot apprehend, grasp, understand, or know, the motivating factors, in any reasonable sense of these words. This is because the conscious mind has at it's disposal, a grasp of the act which it is inclined toward, but a very minimal grasp of the motivating factors, being derived from the subconscious.

The fact that we can lie so easily and freely with our social media ‘friends’ is an indication that we know we have less at stake emotionally with them than we do with our closest companions. — Joshs

This I believe is a failure of the ability of our moral training to keep abreast with the technological advancements which provide for many new possible forms of communion. The application of the 'arrest and assess' method has not kept up with all the different new forms of technology. So for example, I being old-school, living prior to the advancement of computers, find it somewhat easier to be freer to withhold information from the other, or even use misleading speech, over the telephone, than I do face-to-face. I believe I developed a face-to-face attitude of strict 'arrest and assess' producing a very restricted freedom when speaking to my parents and family, but later, when I picked up the phone, there was no such training on how to use the phone, and I found myself with more freedom to speak.

But what about those who have not developed the skills to form deep , intimate connections with anyone, and are thus attracted to the superficial environment of social media? The argument can certainly be made that the social validation they receive keeps them tethered to an environment that makes establishing deep connections very difficult. — Joshs

I believe the real issue here is the true nature of freedom. To be free to act in any way requires that one not be acting at all. So the "free will" is empowered by "will power", which is central to 'arrest and assess'. When technology offers us vast quantities of possibilities, it is easy to jump on board, and go with the flow of this new found "freedom". But human behaviour is naturally habitualized, so a specific type of new possibility rapidly becomes 'the only choice'. Therefore without learning to completely apply 'arrest and assess' in a consistent manner, the appearance of freedom evapourates. The idea that one is exercising one's freedom when playing the same electronic game for hours everyday, is just a manifestation of the misunderstanding caused by the gap I referred to above.

But his comments about identity... make me wonder how I managed to read your OP three or four times and miss how you defined identity. I've probably wasted a lot of your time and my own by failing to read this part of your OP properly. I'll take this as a learning lesson, showing that I really have a hard think about how to avoid this problem in the future. I think I just read the parts I thought were interesting, and impatiently skimmed over what seemed unimportant, I have ADHD, so maybe that's a factor... — Judaka

Baden's use of "identity" is very difficult, I had to read the OP numerous times myself. It's fundamentally counter-intuitive to think that a person could have many identities. It makes you think of a spy or something, but that would be the way that one presents oneself to others. Baden is asking us to represent oneself, to oneself, as having multiple identities, and that is quite difficult. I believe he validates this request by uniting the multiple identities under one "self". But this just kind of defers the problem because we now have a multitude of different identities united as a self, instead of a multitude of different actions united as an identity, and we are left with no principles as to how "the self" could produce such a unity.

@Judaka @Metaphysician Undercover @Joshs

Much appreciate the clarification on where we agree and disagree. It's been very helpful in terms of scrutininsing my own intuitions. I guess we agree this is happening and problematic:

"The thought process that went into building [social media] applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’

That means that we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever … It’s a social validation feedback loop … You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology … The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously."

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/14/facebooks-ex-president-we-exploited-vulnerability-in-human-psychology/

But I would need to establish a much more systematic and detailed justification of why I conceive identity(ies) operating as I've described, either here or potentially as a new OP in order to do justice to the points you've all raised.

"The thought process that went into building [social media] applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ — Baden

The best way to consume as much of a person's time as possible is to encourage them to "poke" as many people as they feel comfortable poking, and to poke them over and over again as much as possible. Encouraging people to poke each other will surely exploit their vulnerabilities.

The best way to consume as much of a person's time as possible is to encourage them to "poke" as many people as they feel comfortable poking, and to poke them over and over again as much as possible. Encouraging people to poke each other will surely exploit their vulnerabilities. — Metaphysician Undercover

:lol: Pokes Metaphysician Undercover.

---

Well, there's DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) if anyond would like to know. One must continually modulate who one is with the circumstances. Everyone does this except that on occasion the mind actually splits into psychologically distinct individuals - some kinda quarantine/isolation of each individual/personality prevents them from knowing each other i.e. these various persons don't communicate with each other in any meaningful way. Even their memories don't, as per some reports, overlap. It all boils down to acting then - I have roles as a police officer, as a brother, as a neighbor, etc. and I fuflill them as best as I can. Like Kantian conflict of duties, sometimes our roles clash - what do I do if I find out my brother is a heroin dealer? I'm a cop, but he's my brother. :chin:

Social identities, though there may be many (vide rough sketch above), are collectively applicable i.e. it's not an either x or y deal, it's both. I have to be a brotherly policeman. :rofl:

Why'd you poke me buddy? I'm trying to get some work done here. Hey, wanna go for a beer?

Why'd you poke me buddy? I'm trying to get some work done here. Hey, wanna go for a beer? — Metaphysician Undercover

You shouldn't go giving some people ideas. :smile: