Sevenfold Silence

The other day I read an article on salon.com (you will probably have to watch an ad to get their free site pass first) riffing off of the idea that we use consumerism as identity. Contemporary Western culture is good at this. Hi, I'm Veamoryn! I like David Bowie, the Decemberists, Doctor Who, Robert Heinlein, Aleister Crowley, and Death Note.

You are what you consume, in other words--not what you produce, or are.

The article, naturally, thinks this is Bad. It recommends, for the sake of experimentation, seeing if you can brand yourself more sincerely. ("I like Nestea, Sobe, Fuze, Excedrin migraine medicine, and St Ives' apricot facial scrub" isn't that cool of a list.) And then--it's implied--eventually dispensing with this consumerist identity entirely.

But then what? A commentator I read remarked that that leaves a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Or, rather--consumerism fills the vacuum of other identities, like tribe, religion, heritage, and "volk", and without consumerism they're what people would fall back on. ("I'm Veamoryn. I'm three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German, but I was raised culturally German even though I'm American. My mother spoke German to me when I was a child and we have a dirndl somewhere." Ow. Dangerous territory. I don't want to be proud of my particular flavor of human; people who are proud of heritage like mine join the Aryan Nation, and those people just aren't people I want to hang out with.)

So what happens when consumerism is seriously abandoned (rather than just pushed aside) in a society where the fallbacks of race and tribe are dangerous? I think it makes otherkin an answer. (And as I've written before--"making it an answer" doesn't mean that we're making it up. Instead it means it's an option that gets considered rather than discarded.) It has the trappings of tribe and race, but without the potential dangerous footing of nationalism and racism. It fills up that identity-hole.

It's not the be-all end-all of theories, but I think it's something to consider. It's significant, I think, especially in light of the strong individualism that tends to go along with otherkin, along with the environmentalism we show that's often hand-in-hand with a rejection of consumerism.

We can't go there, so we seek around, and eventually we find ourselves as 'kin.