On the Origin and Basis of Identity in Individual & Society

At the time of writing, I am a 26-year-old, college-educated, upper-middle-class Asian American male founding an early-stage technology startup in hospitality. These are concise details I might plausibly provide (passively or otherwise) to a new acquaintance, to help them understand how we might interact in the complex interplay of human relations. They are simple, digestible, and externally apparent facets of this internal, subjectively experienced axis, which we might all together call identity, through which we organize much of our understanding of the world around us.

Identity is a fundamental component of the human animal. To understand why, consider us for a moment from the vantage point of an extraterrestrial zoologist. What makes humanity notable among a sea of other biological life? Perhaps it is because we are bipedal, unlike many of our terrestrial neighbors. Or perhaps we are intriguingly hairless among primates. No. Rather, I suspect the immediate observandum for the human species is our production of 19 terawatts of power, firing across a vast infrastructure of hundreds of billions of tons of concrete and steel. It is as moving, breathing, and dynamic as any biological organism: a vast leviathan of human cooperation and organization, fueled by the actions of billions of individuals, spanning kin, continents, eras, and civilizations.