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Alex Poterack's avatar

Jesus this is good. I have nothing to add, I just needed to note that.

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Ethan Cordray's avatar

Thanks for this description. It can be hard for us to see mass-categorization as a general, psychological phenomenon, because we get hung up on the ideological content of the particular categories (just as Marx described us getting caught up in the epiphenomena of politics and ignoring class structures). A category like "race" or "sexual identity" has so much immediate moral weight invested in it, that we forget to examine the ways in which the categorization process itself alters our moral reasoning.

Consider, as a perhaps less-fraught example, the BTS fandom.

"ARMY," the collective term for the band's fans, is conceptually a single, unified identity -- indeed, it's often linguistically employed as though it were a particular individual person, both by the band and by ARMY members ("We made this song for ARMY," or "I can't wait to see you, ARMY!" say the BTS members).

But ARMY is in reality tens of millions of people. And just like every assortment of tens of millions of people, it has all kinds of people in it. There's boring ARMY, interesting ARMY, weird ARMY, normal ARMY, smart ARMY, dumb ARMY, mean ARMY and nice ARMY. Out there somewhere, there's an ARMY that you'd love so much you'd want to marry them. And there's an ARMY you'd hate so much you'd want to murder them.

But we treat this collection of people as though they were a single entity -- as though they were almost a single person. And that requires us to have a conception of the entity's specific personal qualities, as though it had a personality with personality traits -- "ARMY is kind," or "ARMY is crazy." But then, to confirm our conception of the entity, we seek out examples that demonstrate these qualities -- and of course we find plenty, no matter what our conception is, because somewhere out there in the millions of ARMYs there is someone (probably thousands of someones) who do in fact fit our conception.

So in our minds, the collective entity "ARMY" becomes a person with a specific personality -- a person that we ourselves have compressed together out of a vast sea of possible qualities. And that compression is based a whole lot more on our own personal psychological drives than it is on whatever real qualities might be possessed by the mass of people we're compressing. If we need a friend, we can make a friend out of ARMY. If we need an enemy, same thing. If we need a role model, or an object of contempt, or a rival, or a mom, etc. we can make one.

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