The loss of individual personality can itself become an identity
Evidence
Lawrence was seduced into becoming a secret agent in Arabia because of his strong desire to leave the world of dull respectability whose continuity had become simply meaningless, because of his disgust with the world as well as with himself. What attracted him most in Arab civilization was its “gospel of bareness…[which] involves apparently a sort of moral bareness too,” which “has refined itself clear of household gods.” What he tried to avoid most of all after he had returned to English civilization was living a life of his own, so that he ended with an apparently incomprehensible enlistment as a private in the British army, which obviously was the only institution in which a man’s honor could be identified with the loss of his individual personality. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 563
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The mechanism of self-erasure maps onto the toolkit’s theme of colonial psychology and racialized selfhood — how the subject is dissolved and remade.