HOW TO ESCAPE THE IDENTIFICATION TRAP AND TURN IT INTO FUN.

Life is not about identities.

When I think it is, it is not a fight against others, but against myself. Only when one understands that several hearts beat in the human chest and that neither biology nor culture is really able to explain what the human being "really" is, can one stop fighting against oneself.

The materialist mind

who speaks of an objective biological reality constructs his world view in the same way that the rainbow mind does. Both use the means taken from the other camp to "prove" it.

But if the rainbow faction really believed in their own credo that a human being creates his or her own reality, they would not resort to material means (surgery, hormone preparations - in other words, pure biological methods of manipulation) and be content with the fact that the way one is in the world at the moment, one chooses one's role and can be who one wants to be without surgery or medication. It is the greatest contradiction of the rainbow people that they do not recognise this.

Just as the materialists contradict themselves by not recognising that they themselves, just like the others, are able to change their roles in everyday life without immediately losing their biological identity.

What both have in common is that they have an ideal image according to which others "ought to" live.

However, the ideal is never achieved and certainly not by "everyone". It is more like a seesaw that is tilted on both sides. It never reaches equilibrium for long, it's in the never ending process of tilting to this or to that side. The imagination that it one day can be fixed is just that: imagination. An image that is not thought trough to its very "end". For if the seesaw was fixed, all life (or death, for that matter) would end, to express it metaphorically.

Officially undecidable

The question of what constitutes a human being and his image of the world, i.e. whether "biology or upbringing" constitute him, is one that I call undecidable.

In this, I follow Heinz von Förster, who was called a "constructivist", but who preferred to say of himself "I am Heinz". He spoke about the non-decidability of questions that we humans ask ourselves and said that they would nevertheless be decided.

I understand him to mean that in everyday life you don't consciously walk around and ask yourself of everyone you meet whether they are biologically determined or socially educated. That would also be stupid.

There is no objective truth to this, even if the divided camps would like to see it that way.

From this point of view, the biologists have an advantage because they can prove something materially (penis, vagina, breasts as well as chromosomes etc.) while the constructivists also have a point, according to which man makes the world as he pleases.

What the rainbow mentality does not understand,

however, is that it does not need total conviction of its own constructing head to explain the world in order to counter the classical Newtonian mechanistic picture. This whole rainbow "movement" seems to me to have arisen precisely as an extreme anti-means because the materialists were and are all too determined to explain matter as the only valid and objective thing.

Now, I believe both camps have misunderstood that in the real world, none of the stereotypes and extremes represent everyday life/peoples.

Misunderstanding advertising and films as reality

is, I think, more the problem of these two - artificially created - sides. I understand the stereotypical man and woman shown in films (superhero, super-beautiful) as a stylistic device and also as a metaphor and not as an expression of solid reality. How one can even come up with the idea of taking literature and film literally is like taking the Bible literally and not metaphorically.

My conclusion from this struggle,

which has now escalated into the absurd, is that they are two sides of the same coin and that anger is the result of confusion, because everyone recognises themselves simultaneously in both material and ideological terms, but avoids to admit it.

This is so annoying that you get terribly foxy about it and confuse yourself with the fact that there are others who want to take you for a fool. Of course, people are always angry with themselves first, but they don't want to keep the buck.

Instead of learning to live with this dilemma,

people think that they have to solve this conflict "by all means". Because it is an officially undecidable question, we nevertheless decide it unofficially every day without giving it much thought. To impose something by law is like trying to give legitimacy to something that people do anyway, regardless of whether anyone tries to regulate it.

Using terms loosely

Now I have used attributions such as "materialist" and "constructivist" and could still take that of "postmodernist". This is not to say that there is any individual who "is" this or that. People ascribe these identities to themselves and then get pissed off when others pick up on it to make fun of them.

To escape this duality, that is, the dilemma, it helps that you learn about a tetralemma, for example. It is neither "this" nor "that", but can be "such". I need not choose between strawberries and raspberries, but can also eat ice cream. I can safely ignore the fact that I am only given two varieties (two sexes) to choose from, is what I am saying.

I therefore do not need to decide whether I would rather be a man or a woman, I can always detect male or female in myself if they seem useful to me.

But that such is understood by a rainbow mind as a call to be both or neither and to include this "both/neither" as its own designation in the catalogue of language is a complete idiocy, because no matter what one fixates on, this fixation is always only of a temporary nature.

It is just as stupid as saying that the human being is alive and therefore one can be non-dead. There is no difference between "living" and "not dead".

But where the materialists say there are only two sexes, they seem to suggest that the imaginary realm ought to be reduced to those two sexes.

The suggestion turns into a demand, then a command and then into coercion, on both sides.

"Be a man!" is as much confusing as "Be binary!"
Though the latter is nothing we are used to, while the former is something we are used to through habitual language. This does not mean that it always fits the situation in which people find themselves.

The premise of a two sex reality can be as much coercive as the infinite one.
But where all people actually can agree upon is that what they really want is existence by voluntarism and not by command.

Life happens situationally.

The situation is the only thing I have. But if I stop living situationally and start existing only in principles, I contaminate every situation with principles and tie myself to convictions.

If I don't do that, I fit into almost every situation. When I move among intellectuals, I communicate intellectually in order to accommodate the others a little, but without completely bending myself and making a "hardcore intellectual" out of myself. If I'm in a sports bar, I shout with the guys to cheer loudly for my team instead of bringing out my previous intellectual and despising the guys drinking beer.

If I'm staying in a fancy hotel, I play the grande dame

but need not to look down on the staff to feel great.
If I'm on holiday at a campsite, I need not insist on walking to my tent in stilettos and demanding a paved path from the campsite management. Though I can try to walk on high heels. When I am at a carnival event, I do not read Nietzsche, but crack crude jokes. But I can very well tell about my favourite philosophers later at the table, and why not? I don't have to make myself a slave to the situation at hand, but can master it.

If I find myself in a situation where I can't find a playful role,

then nothing need stop me from first quietly observing, listening and seeing that I don't have to or can't be the jack of all trades everywhere. Then I put my foot in my mouth once in a while, but that won't end the world if I'm able to laugh at myself.

When I visited California, back in the 2000s

I was asked irritatingly often in the clubs whether I was "gay or straight". I didn't understand at all why the question was so important, I didn't even know what "straight" meant (I am from Germany).

I lived my club life in such a way that you don't have to advertise such things and just find out if one person likes the other. In other words, I would have found a lesbian woman attractive without even knowing it, if I had simply liked her without being a lesbian myself. This was a time when I wanted to kiss women. Because I could have kissed all the people who shared the lightness of the moment with me.

I don't want to kiss the image, but to kiss lips. I do not feel attracted to a race but towards hips.

But this clumsy directness in the approach on the dance floor rather repelled me and I therefore did not dance with anyone, no matter what sexual orientation that person followed, who apparently could not wait to know something about me without being able to surrender to the uncertain moment.

What would happen if I answered?

Would the wrong answer then be a reason for not wanting to dance with me anymore? What nonsense. I was there to dance, not to save someone the diversions of first having fun with me, only to find out that if they wanted to go into a cosy corner with me, that I had the wrong sexual orientation. In doing so, one makes oneself and others into a commodity that, if it doesn't have the right label stuck on it, robs the moment of its dignity.

Where would be the fun if I didn't welcome the risk of kissing someone and then realize that kissing was not the right choice? But what if it was? In not knowing lays a chance and a danger. I cannot always be safe.

In the same way, I went to funerals and if I had been considered a non-Christian, would that be reason to think badly of me? Would I mourn less about the deceased one in not labeling myself a Christian?

During lockdown times I went to gatherings to experience normality. I was immediately asked if I was "a Sunday or a Monday walker" which was code for people who demonstrated in the streets, pretending to take a walk.

To know "where to belong" does not need a straightforward explicit identification.

It's a game of "finding out" situationally. It's implicit and we actually all know it.