The Map and the Earth Are Not the Same Thing

Despite however convincing the Cartographer may be...

A cultural artifact in contemporary media and artwork you’ll find today is to downplay what we do and focus on “who we are.” Identity is often the moral virtue we most often virtue signal. Action is often portrayed as the enemy of wisdom and is associated with superficiality and posturing. In other words, the cultural wisdom of today says that an understanding of “being,” is greater than “doing.”

However, if the argument is that identity is virtuous and action is superfluous, then we must assume know what identity is to begin with. My hunch is that if you honestly wanted to know “who you are,” you wouldn’t just go up to someone and ask them that and expect an honest response that exactly reflects who that person is. The question itself is vast and vague. My feeling is that your honest search for something as vast and vague as this question, someone’s “identity,” would lead you to discover that in order to answer “who someone is",” it is necessary you see that person’s life play out in realtime. You must see how they behave and react and here’s the killer, how they “do things” in the real world. You watch their actions. As much as we like to think spoken or written language is as honest a medium of communication as we hope it to be, I don’t think it alone is capable of communicating honestly “who” someone is, whatever that means. Really, what are we asking when we say that? What a sweeping idea it is to be convinced I can tell you who I am, who I really am, just by uttering some jumble of adjectives and trademark nouns. We are vast uncharted territory. And we want to mold that territory into recognizable cookie-cutter shapes. Spoken language is insufficient for answering that question. The breadth of our lives communicates it better. And by that, I mean literal physical movement. Actions. You read a man’s actions, you can be certain of who he is. It is the byproduct of habits. And in turn, that is the byproduct of character, which is in turn the result of what we supposedly believe to be the innermost core of ourselves, our “identity.” Action is the most honest communicator of that.

It is my gut feeling that we outsmart ourselves when we begin to virtue signal the importance of identity over action. The very fact that a certain person thinks identity supersedes actions will in the end produce a certain set of actions that prove what kind of man they are. The proof is in the pudding. We can fight wars at the level of abstraction of mere language, but in the end, spoken and written language is just that: abstraction. Which is to say: one way of expressing oneself. Action, on the other hand, is the whole picture of who a man is: living proof of what a man believes to be true so much so that it warranted a certain set of actions. Identity is the engine but the places the car goes in the end is all that matters.

All this is to say that we trust our abstractions too much. Another abstraction, indeed another way of expression, is social media. We presuppose what we see as truth. But images too are also an abstraction. They do not answer the question of identity. They do not even come close. Blocks of light on a 60hz to 120hz display. It is purely functional: like spoken and written language. It is a communication medium, a tool. Likes? Pure bookmarking. This fleeting dopamine hit we associate it with? We constructed that. And like language, we attach emotion to the abstraction, and if we are not self-aware enough we become too emotionally invested and fail to remember it’s just one of many channels of expression. What is done outside of the abstraction, that is the truth. Our actions. Not what is mentioned about us on a thread. Not what enticed millions of people to look at the same image and interact with an SVG icon of a heart the same way. Not what a popular account “declares” to be true about the human condition on a fleeting image lasting less than 24 hours. Not what is liked the most, shared the most, what appears first on a search engine. What you do, regardless of what is posted on, lauded upon, written or said on man-made channels of expression, tells us so much more than all of this. This is because “who we are” cannot be written down. Any attempt to do so ends up as opinions or propaganda. You can’t pinpoint the myriad of complexities of a human being. But you can always watch one’s life in realtime. You can always read about the actions of great people and at once get a vivid picture of who they were.

We cannot downplay human action if it’s the only truth-telling mechanism we’ve got.