Group Identity Quotes

“Here’s the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique—and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“All groups operate by means of phantasy. The type of experience a group gives us is one of the main reasons, if not for some people the only reason, for being in a group. What do people want to get from the experience of being in a particular set of human collectivities?
The close-knit groups that occur in some families and other groupings are bound together by the need to find pseudo-real experience that can be found only through the modality of phantasy. This means that the family is not experienced as the modality of phantasy but as ‘reality’. However, ‘reality’ in this sense is not a modality, but a quality attachable to any modality.
If a family member has a tenable position within the family phantasy system, his call to leave the system in any sense is likely only to come from outside the phantasy system. We vary in readiness, and in desire, to emerge from the unconscious phantasy systems we take to be our realities. As long as we are in apparently tenable positions, we find every reason not to suppose that we are in a false sense of reality or unreality, security or insecurity, identity or lack of identity.
A false social sense of reality entails, among other things, phantasy unrecognized as such. If [someone] begins to wake up from the [group] phantasy system, he can only be classified as mad or bad by [that group] since to them their phantasy is reality, and what is not their phantasy is not real.”
― R.D. Laing, Self and Others

“None of us belongs only to ourselves. We don’t always get to decide who we are.”
― Ashley Blooms, Every Bone a Prayer

“group identity essentially means rules, and therefore security. Every group is concerned with regulating jouissance”
― Paul Verhaeghe, Love in a Time of Loneliness

“Why is society crumbling, collapsing, as it surely is?

One of the fundamental reasons is that the individual – you – has ceased to be creative.

I will explain what I mean. You & I have become imitative, we are copying, outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly, when learning a technique, when communicating with each other on the verbal level, naturally there must be some imitation, copy. I copy words. To become an engineer, I must first learn the technique, then use the technique to build a bridge.

There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation, surely we cease to be creative.

Our education, our social structure, our so-called religious life, are all based on imitation; that is, I fit into a particular social or religious formula. I have ceased to be a real individual; psychologically, I have become a mere repetitive machine with certain conditioned responses, whether of the Hindu, the Christian, the Buddhist, the German, or the Englishman.

Our responses are conditioned according to the pattern of society, whether it is Eastern or Western, religious or materialistic. So one of the fundamental causes of the disintegration of society is imitation, and one of the disintegrating factors is the leader, whose very essence is imitation.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Right Livelihood

“When we start to categorize people into groups, we create the US them dynamics that we can create in the lab by assigning people to a blue team or a red team once we start to put a label and attach stereotypes to it we create intergroup conflict where it doesn't need to be”
― Jay J. Van Bavel