As I See It

Vayu Putra

Chapter 10

Identity as a Weapon

You inherit identities before you can evaluate them.

You are born into a religion, a nationality, an ethnicity, a social class. These categories are assigned before consciousness develops sufficiently to question them. By the time you can think critically about who you are supposed to be, the identities have already wired themselves into your sense of self, your social networks, your opportunities and constraints.

This is not inherently problematic. Human beings are social creatures requiring group membership for survival and psychological wellbeing. Identity provides orientation in complex social worlds, shortcuts for navigation, frameworks for meaning. The problem emerges when identity transforms from descriptive category into prescriptive boundary, from tool for belonging into weapon for exclusion.

This chapter examines how identity becomes weaponised, why this weaponisation is so effective, what historical and contemporary cases reveal about mechanisms of identity-based violence, and why systems under stress systematically exploit identity divisions. Understanding this connects the psychological mechanisms explored in earlier chapters to the political violence they enable.

The psychology of group identity formation

You learn who you are by learning who you are not. This is how identity formation operates at the most basic psychological level, beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout life.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's research demonstrated that children develop categorical thinking around age four to seven. They learn to sort objects, people, and concepts into groups. This cognitive capacity, whilst essential for navigating complexity, also creates foundations for in-group/out-group thinking that can later be exploited for political purposes.

By adolescence, identity becomes central to psychological development. Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial development identified identity formation as the critical task of teenage years. Adolescents ask "Who am I?" and answer partly through affiliation with groups—peer groups, subcultures, ideologies, religious communities. These affiliations provide sense of self that is simultaneously personal and collective.

Social psychologist Henri Tajfel's research in the 1970s revealed how minimal and arbitrary group membership produces profound psychological effects. In his famous "minimal group" experiments, Tajfel divided people into groups based on trivial criteria—preference for one painter over another, even random assignment presented as based on coin flip. Despite knowing the groupings were meaningless, participants showed immediate bias favouring their own group and discriminating against the other.

This finding was shocking because it demonstrated that group identity does not require shared history, genuine differences, or even interaction. The mere categorization into "us" versus "them" activates psychological mechanisms that favour in-group members and disadvantage out-group members. If arbitrary groupings produce these effects, imagine the power of identities rooted in religion, ethnicity, nationality—categories taught from birth and reinforced through every social institution.

Tajfel's social identity theory explains why. According to his research, people derive self-esteem from group membership. When your group succeeds, you feel successful. When your group is threatened, you feel personally threatened. This creates motivation to elevate your group relative to others, to defend group boundaries, to favour in-group members even at cost to yourself.

Neuroscience confirms these dynamics at biological level. Brain imaging studies by psychologist Jay Van Bavel show that when people view faces of in-group versus out-group members, different neural circuits activate. In-group faces trigger activity in regions associated with empathy, social cognition, and reward. Out-group faces may trigger reduced empathy response and, under conditions of perceived threat, activation of fear and disgust circuits in the amygdala.

This means that at neurological level, identity literally shapes how your brain processes other human beings. An out-group member is processed differently than an in-group member before conscious thought occurs. The brain's automatic systems have already categorized, evaluated, and prepared response based on group membership alone.

From in-group preference to out-group dehumanization

In-group preference does not automatically produce violence. Many societies maintain distinct group identities without systematic inter-group harm. The transformation from preference to dehumanization requires specific conditions that political actors can deliberately create and exploit.

Psychologist Albert Bandura's research on moral disengagement identified mechanisms through which ordinary moral standards become suspended. One central mechanism is dehumanization—the psychological process of perceiving others as less than fully human, lacking the qualities that would normally trigger empathy and moral consideration.

Dehumanization occurs along two dimensions, according to research by psychologists Nick Haslam and Steve Loughnan. "Animalistic dehumanization" involves attributing animal-like qualities to others—seeing them as savage, primitive, lacking culture and refinement. "Mechanistic dehumanization" involves seeing others as robot-like—cold, rigid, lacking emotion and warmth. Both forms reduce the target's perceived humanity and corresponding moral status.

Language provides the primary tool for dehumanization. When Hutu extremists in Rwanda referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" (inyenzi) on radio broadcasts before and during the 1994 genocide, this was not metaphorical rhetoric. It was systematic dehumanization designed to make mass killing psychologically possible for ordinary citizens who would normally recoil from murder.

The Rwandan genocide provides perhaps the clearest modern example of identity weaponization producing mass atrocity. Between April and July 1994, approximately 800,000 people were killed—about 75% of the Tutsi population of Rwanda. The perpetrators were not primarily soldiers but ordinary civilians armed with machetes, encouraged by radio propaganda to kill their Tutsi neighbours.

The speed and scale were extraordinary. Genocide scholar Scott Straus's research showed killing rates exceeded those of the Holocaust in concentration camps. This was possible because identity boundaries had been constructed, reinforced, and weaponized over decades through colonial policies, post-independence politics, and systematic propaganda that portrayed Tutsis as foreign invaders despite centuries of shared language, culture, and intermarriage.

Identity cards instituted by Belgian colonial authorities in the 1930s had formalized Hutu and Tutsi as rigid ethnic categories despite the fact that these were historically fluid social classifications based primarily on wealth and occupation rather than ancestry. By mandating that every Rwandan carry identity cards specifying ethnicity, colonial policy created the administrative apparatus later used to identify genocide victims. At roadblocks during the genocide, these cards determined who lived and who died.

The psychological preparation for genocide involved years of propaganda portraying Tutsis as existential threat to Hutus. Radio stations, newspapers, and political speeches described the Tutsi minority as foreigners who had oppressed the Hutu majority, who were plotting to regain power, who must be eliminated to ensure Hutu survival. This created perception of defensive violence—not aggression but self-protection.

This framing matters because it reveals how identity weaponization operates psychologically. Perpetrators of identity-based violence rarely see themselves as aggressors. They see themselves as defenders. The violence feels necessary, justified, even heroic within the identity framework they have internalized. This is how ordinary people participate in extraordinary cruelty whilst maintaining self-image as moral actors.

Historical precedents: partition and ethnic cleansing

The partition of British India in 1947 demonstrates how political decisions to divide populations along identity lines produce cascading violence that transforms previously mixed communities into antagonistic nations.

Before partition, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had lived together in many parts of the Indian subcontinent for centuries. Whilst religious differences existed and periodic conflicts occurred, daily life for most people involved substantial cooperation, intermarriage, shared festivals, and integrated economies. The idea that these populations could not coexist peacefully was not self-evident reality but political construction.

The decision by British authorities to partition India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, announced in June 1947 and implemented in August, triggered one of history's largest refugee crises and mass killings. Historian Yasmin Khan's "The Great Partition" (2007) documents how partition unleashed violence that killed between 200,000 and 2 million people and displaced 10 to 20 million.

The violence was identity-based and often neighbour-on-neighbour. People who had lived peacefully together for generations suddenly saw each other as mortal enemies. Muslims in Hindu-majority areas fled toward Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs in Muslim-majority areas fled toward India. Villages that had been mixed for centuries became segregated overnight. The boundary between India and Pakistan, drawn by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe who had never visited India before, divided not just territories but communities, families, and individual farms.

What explains the explosion of violence? Identity had been weaponized through political mobilization. The Muslim League under Jinnah and the Indian National Congress under Nehru had, through years of political competition, constructed narratives of Hindu and Muslim as incompatible identities requiring separate nations. Once partition became reality, these identities became boundaries determining who belonged where, who could be trusted, who represented threat.

The trauma continues. Pakistan and India have fought four wars, maintain hostile relations, and spend enormous portions of national budgets on military forces facing each other across the border. Nuclear weapons make this rivalry one of the most dangerous flashpoints in contemporary geopolitics. The original decision to partition based on religious identity continues producing violence seventy-five years later.

Similar dynamics occurred in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Before collapse, Yugoslavia was multi-ethnic federation where Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, and others had lived together, intermarried, and shared neighborhoods. Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, was known for religious diversity with mosques, churches, and synagogues in close proximity.

Political elites weaponized ethnic and religious identities as Yugoslavia fragmented. Nationalist leaders—Milošević for Serbs, Tuđman for Croats, Izetbegović for Bosniaks—mobilized support through identity narratives emphasizing historical grievances, existential threats from other groups, and need for ethnic homogeneity. The result was series of wars lasting from 1991 to 1999, killing approximately 140,000 people and displacing 4 million.

The Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, where Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, illustrated how identity weaponization enables genocide. The perpetrators saw themselves not as murderers but as warriors protecting Serbian identity from Muslim threat. They systematically separated men and boys from women and elderly, loaded them into trucks, and executed them in mass shootings and burials designed to erase Bosniak presence from the region.

Research by political scientist James Fearon on ethnic violence emphasizes that identity conflicts are not primordial hatreds erupting inevitably but are typically manufactured by elites pursuing political power through identity mobilization. In Yugoslavia, Milošević deliberately inflamed Serbian nationalism to consolidate power as communist ideology lost legitimacy. Similar patterns appear across cases of identity-based violence: economic stress, political instability, and elite competition create conditions where identity mobilization becomes effective strategy for gaining and maintaining power.

Contemporary weaponization: Myanmar and the Rohingya

The persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar demonstrates how identity weaponization operates in contemporary contexts, using both traditional propaganda and modern social media to justify systematic violence.

The Rohingya are Muslim minority in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar. They have lived in Rakhine State for generations, yet Myanmar's government has systematically denied them citizenship, designating them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh despite historical presence dating back centuries. This legal exclusion created foundation for violence by defining Rohingya as not belonging, as foreign presence that threatens Buddhist Burmese identity.

In 2017, Myanmar military launched what it called "clearance operations" in Rakhine State following attacks by Rohingya insurgents. What followed was systematic campaign the UN described as genocide. Military forces and Buddhist mobs burned Rohingya villages, committed mass rape, killed thousands, and forced more than 700,000 people to flee to Bangladesh. Those who remained face extreme restrictions on movement, access to healthcare, education, and employment.

Facebook played documented role in amplifying hate speech and organizing violence. A 2018 investigation by Reuters and a subsequent UN fact-finding mission found that military personnel and Buddhist nationalists had used Facebook to spread dehumanizing propaganda portraying Rohingya as dangerous Muslims plotting to take over Buddhist Myanmar. Posts compared Rohingya to animals, called for their extermination, and coordinated attacks.

Facebook's algorithm, designed to maximize engagement, amplified inflammatory content because such content generates more reactions, shares, and comments. The platform had minimal content moderation in Burmese language and effectively no capacity to understand local context. Hate speech and calls for violence spread virally whilst Facebook profited from increased engagement.

A 2020 investigation by The Guardian revealed that Facebook had been warned about this problem years before the genocide but failed to take adequate action. Internal documents showed employees raising alarms about hate speech in Myanmar as early as 2013, but the company did not invest sufficiently in content moderation until after violence had occurred and international pressure mounted.

This case demonstrates how identity weaponization adapts to technological change. The psychological mechanisms remain constant—creating in-group/out-group boundaries, dehumanizing the other, framing violence as defensive—but social media provides new distribution channels that operate at unprecedented speed and scale. A rumor that might have spread through a village over days now spreads through millions of mobile phones in hours.

Moreover, algorithmic amplification means that inflammatory content receives disproportionate visibility. The marketplace of ideas operates not on truth or reasonableness but on emotional arousal. Content that triggers outrage, fear, or tribal allegiance gets promoted by algorithms optimized for engagement, not accuracy or social cohesion. This creates information environments particularly conducive to identity-based mobilization.

The neuroscience of empathy and its collapse

Understanding how ordinary people participate in identity-based violence requires examining how empathy—the capacity to recognize and respond to others' suffering—can be selectively disabled through identity framing.

Neuroscientist Tania Singer's research on empathy reveals that watching someone in pain activates similar brain regions to experiencing pain directly. This is the neural basis of empathy: your brain simulates others' experiences, allowing you to understand their states and respond appropriately. This capacity is fundamental to human sociality and moral behavior.

But empathy is not automatic or universal. Research by psychologist Lasana Harris shows that certain types of images can fail to activate these empathy circuits. When participants viewed images of homeless people or drug addicts, brain regions associated with social cognition and empathy showed reduced activation compared to viewing other people. Instead, regions associated with disgust and avoidance showed increased activity.

Identity-based dehumanization exploits this flexibility. When people are categorized as out-group, particularly as threatening or disgusting out-group, the brain's empathy systems can be suppressed. Brain imaging studies show that when people view suffering of out-group members, especially those they have been trained to see as enemies, empathic neural responses are reduced or absent.

Research by psychologist Emile Bruneau on empathy and intergroup conflict demonstrated that people can experience pleasure—not distress—when viewing suffering of out-group members. In studies involving Israelis and Palestinians, Arabs and Americans during Iraq War, participants showed reduced empathy for out-group suffering and, in some cases, satisfaction when out-group members experienced pain or failure.

This is not because these participants were inherently cruel but because identity framing had transformed their moral psychology. When you see someone as member of group threatening your group, their suffering can be interpreted as your group's success, as justice, as defensive victory. The same neural mechanisms that produce empathy for in-group members produce satisfaction at out-group suffering.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's work on moral psychology emphasizes that morality is fundamentally social. We do not have abstract moral principles that apply equally to all humans. We have moral emotions—empathy, shame, pride, outrage—that are calibrated by social context and particularly by identity. This is why the same person who would never harm their neighbor might participate in violence against members of different ethnic or religious group. The moral emotion system has been recalibrated to exclude the other from moral consideration.

Children and intergenerational transmission of identity conflict

Perhaps the cruelest aspect of identity weaponization is how it shapes children who inherit conflicts they did not create and trauma they did not deserve.

Walk through any refugee camp—Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh where Rohingya flee Myanmar, Zaatari in Jordan hosting Syrian refugees, camps in Lebanon where Palestinian refugees have lived for generations. You will see children who have never known peace, who have grown up surrounded by violence, loss, and fear, whose primary experiences of the world involve harm organized around identity categories they inherited at birth.

The Gaza Strip provides particularly stark example. Since Hamas took control in 2007, Gaza has been under Israeli blockade restricting movement of goods and people. The population of approximately 2 million lives in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth with severe restrictions on water, electricity, medical supplies, and economic opportunity. More than half the population is under 18.

These children have experienced multiple military operations. In 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and 2023, major escalations occurred, each involving Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket attacks. According to UN documentation, the 2014 operation alone killed more than 500 children. The 2023 escalation, triggered by Hamas attacks that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis including many civilians, resulted in Israeli military operations that killed over 30,000 Palestinians by early 2024, with children representing significant proportion of casualties.

Research by psychiatrist Raija-Leena Punamäki and colleagues studying Palestinian children found extremely high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. In some studies, over 70% of children showed symptoms of PTSD. These are not temporary effects—longitudinal research shows that childhood trauma from identity conflicts affects mental health, physical health, educational achievement, and economic outcomes throughout life.

Moreover, trauma is transmitted across generations. Research on descendants of Holocaust survivors, Armenian genocide survivors, and other groups affected by identity-based mass violence shows elevated rates of psychological distress even among those born decades after the violence ended. The mechanisms are both psychological—parental trauma affecting child development—and potentially epigenetic, with some research suggesting trauma may alter gene expression in ways that affect offspring.

Children in conflict zones also receive political socialization that perpetuates identity divisions. Israeli children grow up learning that Arabs are security threats. Palestinian children grow up learning that Israelis are occupiers. Serbian children learn about Croatian crimes. Croatian children learn about Serbian crimes. Each side teaches its children a version of history that emphasizes their victimization and the other's aggression whilst minimizing their own group's violence.

Developmental psychologist Ervin Staub's research on the "roots of evil" emphasizes how children learn through observation which groups are considered human and deserving of moral consideration versus which groups are considered threatening and excludable. These lessons are absorbed through family conversations, media representations, school curricula, and observation of how authority figures treat different groups.

The result is reproduction of identity conflicts across generations. Children who grow up experiencing violence organized around identity learn that the world is divided into us versus them, that the other is dangerous, that violence is necessary for group survival. When these children become adults, they carry these lessons into politics, reproducing the very conflicts that destroyed their childhoods. This is the final cruelty of identity weaponization: it creates the conditions for its own perpetuation.

Identity politics in democratic societies

Identity weaponization is not limited to authoritarian regimes or societies in civil war. Democratic societies also experience identity mobilization, though typically in less violent forms. Understanding these dynamics reveals how identity operates as political tool even in contexts with strong institutions and democratic norms.

Political scientist Lilliana Mason's research on partisan identity in the United States documents how political affiliation has become identity that rivals or exceeds other social identities in importance. In "Uncivil Agreement" (2018), she demonstrates that Democrats and Republicans increasingly see each other not merely as political opponents but as fundamentally different kinds of people—threatening, immoral, dangerous to the nation.

Survey research shows this intensification. In 1960, about 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be upset if their child married someone from the other party. By 2010, those figures had risen to 49% and 33% respectively. This represents transformation of political difference into identity boundary comparable to religious or ethnic divisions.

Mechanisms of identity weaponization operate similarly in democratic contexts as in authoritarian ones, though consequences differ. Political parties and media outlets cultivate in-group loyalty and out-group hostility. They portray the other side as existential threat to values, way of life, even survival of the nation. They emphasize grievances and victimization narratives. They promote distrust and fear.

Social media amplifies these dynamics. Research by political scientists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow on polarization and social media found that platforms like Facebook and Twitter create echo chambers where people are exposed primarily to information and opinions confirming their existing beliefs whilst being shielded from or trained to dismiss contrary evidence. Algorithms optimize for engagement, which means amplifying content that triggers strong emotional responses, particularly outrage and tribal affiliation.

The 2016 US election illustrated this dynamic. Russian intelligence operations, documented in the Mueller Report, deliberately inflamed identity divisions through targeted social media campaigns. These operations did not invent divisions but exploited existing ones, using sophisticated understanding of American identity politics to amplify racial tensions, religious conflicts, and partisan hostility.

The operations created fake social media accounts posing as activists from various identity groups—Black Lives Matter supporters, conservative Christians, immigrant rights advocates. These accounts posted inflammatory content designed to deepen divisions, organized actual events where opposing groups confronted each other, and generally worked to increase identity-based polarization that would weaken American democracy.

Brexit in the United Kingdom followed similar patterns. The campaign to leave the European Union mobilized British national identity against perceived threats from immigration, EU bureaucracy, and loss of sovereignty. Sociologist Eric Kaufmann's research showed how immigration and cultural change created conditions where nativist identity politics became electorally powerful, overriding economic considerations for many voters.

Across Western democracies, right-wing populist movements have gained support by weaponizing identity—national identity against immigrants, Christian identity against Muslims, white identity against racial minorities. Whilst these movements operate within democratic systems and do not typically advocate violence, they employ same psychological mechanisms as more extreme forms of identity mobilization: emphasizing threat, cultivating grievance, dehumanizing others, promising restoration of group status.

Why systems exploit identity when stressed

Identity weaponization follows predictable pattern: it intensifies when political and economic systems face legitimacy crises. Understanding this pattern reveals identity politics as symptom and tool of systemic dysfunction rather than cause of conflict.

When economies stagnate, when inequality increases, when governments lose capacity to deliver services or security, populations become anxious and angry. This creates political problem for elites: how to maintain power when the system is visibly failing to serve most people's interests?

Identity politics offers solution. Rather than addressing underlying economic and political problems—which would require challenging powerful interests and making difficult structural changes—elites redirect popular anger toward identity others. The economy is failing not because of exploitation by elites but because of immigrants taking jobs. Your community is declining not because of capital flight and deindustrialization but because of cultural change imposed by out-groups. Your nation is threatened not by its own policies but by foreign enemies and internal traitors.

This analysis draws on political scientist Arlie Hochschild's ethnographic research with Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, documented in "Strangers in Their Own Land" (2016). Hochschild found white working-class Americans experiencing genuine economic decline and social dislocation. Manufacturing jobs had disappeared. Environmental degradation from petrochemical industry was severe. Upward mobility had stalled.

But rather than blaming corporations or politicians whose policies produced these outcomes, many channeled frustration toward identity others—immigrants, minorities, liberals, government bureaucrats supposedly favoring these out-groups over "real Americans." This misdirection served elite interests by preventing class-based solidarity that might threaten their power and wealth.

Historical analysis supports this pattern. The rise of fascism in 1920s-30s Europe occurred in context of economic crisis, political instability, and loss of faith in liberal democratic institutions. Rather than communist or socialist revolution that threatened elite power, fascist movements mobilized national and racial identities against designated enemies—Jews, communists, foreigners—whilst preserving capitalism and actually serving corporate interests.

Similarly, the intensification of Hindu nationalism in India under the BJP correlates with periods of economic stress and political competition. When economic promises fail to materialize, when inequality increases, when rural distress intensifies, mobilizing Hindu identity against Muslims becomes more attractive strategy for maintaining political power.

Sociologist Karl Polanyi's analysis in "The Great Transformation" (1944) argued that when market forces disrupt traditional social arrangements too rapidly, populations seek protection through political movements that emphasize tradition, community, and identity. These movements can be progressive or reactionary, but when elites control political discourse, identity mobilization typically serves their interests by dividing populations that might otherwise organize around shared economic interests.

This explains why identity politics intensifies during periods of systemic stress. It is not that populations suddenly become more tribal or irrational. It is that elites systematically exploit identity divisions to maintain power whilst avoiding accountability for systemic failures. Division is cheaper than reform. Blaming others is easier than redistributing wealth or power.

The trade between identity and individuality

Every society navigates tension between individual autonomy and group belonging. Identity provides the framework through which this navigation occurs, but the balance determines how much space exists for individual thought, choice, and development apart from group expectations.

Recall from Chapter 3 the discussion of masks and performed identity. Those performances become more rigid and totalizing when group identity becomes weaponized. You cannot express doubt about group beliefs. You cannot form friendships across group boundaries. You cannot pursue interests that conflict with group expectations. Deviation risks exclusion, and exclusion from identity group often means loss of social support, economic opportunities, even physical safety.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim's work on social integration provides framework for understanding this trade. Durkheim argued that societies require sufficient integration to prevent anomie—the rootlessness and normlessness that produces psychological distress. But excessive integration produces what he called "altruistic suicide," where individual loses autonomy to group demands to the point where self-sacrifice for group becomes expected or required.

Identity weaponization pushes toward excessive integration. The group becomes totalizing. Its demands override individual judgment. Its survival becomes paramount value justifying any sacrifice. Individuals cease to exist as autonomous beings and become instead instruments of collective identity.

This produces what political philosopher Isaiah Berlin called "positive liberty" taken to destructive extreme. Positive liberty is freedom to fulfill authentic self, to actualize potential, to live according to values. But when identity becomes the sole source of authenticity, when the group defines what authentic self must be, positive liberty transforms into tyranny of collective over individual.

The psychology of this transformation has been studied extensively. Solomon Asch's famous conformity experiments demonstrated that people will deny evidence of their own senses to conform to group consensus. Stanley Milgram's obedience studies showed that people will inflict harm on others when authority figures command it. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment revealed how quickly people adopt roles and identities imposed by social situations.

These experiments demonstrate human susceptibility to group pressure, but they also reveal something more disturbing: how easily moral judgment can be outsourced to group or authority. When identity provides all answers, individual moral reasoning becomes unnecessary and potentially dangerous. You do not ask whether the group's demands are just. You ask only whether you are loyal to the group.

The cost of this trade is not merely individual freedom but collective wisdom. Groups make better decisions when members can express dissent, when diverse perspectives are considered, when doubt is permitted. Identity weaponization eliminates these corrective mechanisms by making disagreement equivalent to disloyalty. The result is groups that cannot learn from mistakes, that double down on failing strategies, that pursue collective self-destruction whilst celebrating group solidarity.

Connection to previous chapters

Identity weaponization represents culmination and integration of mechanisms explored throughout this book. Each previous chapter examined psychological or social dynamic that identity politics exploits.

Consciousness (Chapter 2) creates the existential anxiety that makes belonging necessary. The burden of awareness includes fear of isolation, of meaninglessness, of death. Identity promises relief from these fears through inclusion in something larger than self. When weaponized, identity exploits existential vulnerability by threatening exclusion—which feels like existential death—for those who refuse to conform.

Masks (Chapter 3) become mandatory performances when identity is weaponized. You must perform appropriate identity constantly. The gap between private self and public performance widens. Authenticity becomes impossible when expressing genuine thoughts risks group exclusion. The psychological cost is constant self-monitoring and suppression of aspects of self that conflict with group identity.

Crowds (Chapter 4) demonstrate how individual moral judgment dissolves into collective behavior when identity boundaries are activated. The crowd psychology Gustave Le Bon described—reduced individual responsibility, emotional contagion, susceptibility to simple narratives—intensifies when crowd is unified by shared identity and directed against identity others.

Indoctrination (Chapter 5) provides the content of weaponized identities. What counts as legitimate member of identity group, who counts as other, what narratives explain group status and justify group actions—all this is taught through indoctrination processes beginning in childhood and reinforced throughout life. The more total the indoctrination, the more resistant individuals become to information challenging group beliefs.

Early belief systems (Chapter 6) created templates for identity formation through religion, which provided first comprehensive frameworks distinguishing believers from unbelievers, saved from damned, chosen from others. Modern identity politics secularizes these religious patterns whilst maintaining their psychological and social functions.

Capitalism (Chapter 7) creates conditions of insecurity and competition that intensify need for identity-based belonging whilst simultaneously producing inequality that makes identity divisions politically useful for elites. Economic anxiety makes populations susceptible to identity mobilization as explanation for their distress and enemy against whom frustration can be directed.

Hypernormalisation (Chapter 8) describes the state where systems are visibly failing but populations cannot imagine alternatives. Identity politics thrives in this condition by offering simple explanations and clear enemies whilst system-level problems remain unaddressed. Rather than confronting systemic dysfunction, populations are mobilized around identity conflicts that change nothing fundamental.

Control without violence (Chapter 9) operates partly through identity by making group membership necessary for survival and making conformity to group norms the price of membership. You police yourself to maintain belonging. Identity becomes mechanism of control that appears voluntary whilst being structurally coerced.

What remains when identity is stripped away

Beneath every identity label—every nationality, religion, ethnicity, ideology—there exists the biological reality of human consciousness. This is not mystical claim but observable fact. Every person, regardless of identity categories, possesses nervous system capable of pain and pleasure, fear and hope, suffering and flourishing.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach to human rights emphasizes this shared vulnerability and potential. All humans share certain capabilities—sensation, emotion, practical reason, affiliation, play—that require support and protection regardless of identity differences. When identity is weaponized, these shared human capabilities are denied to out-group members through dehumanization that claims they do not feel pain as we do, do not love their children as we do, do not deserve moral consideration as we do.

Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer's work treating infectious diseases in Haiti, Peru, Russia, and other settings demonstrated shared human vulnerability to suffering and disease regardless of cultural differences. In "Pathologies of Power" (2003), he documented how structural violence—poverty, inequality, discrimination—produces suffering that manifests in bodies in ways that transcend identity categories. A child dying of treatable disease suffers identically whether that child is Christian or Muslim, rich or poor, citizen or refugee.

This recognition—that consciousness and vulnerability are shared whilst identity categories are constructed—does not require denying that identities matter. They obviously do. Religious and cultural traditions provide meaning, community, and frameworks for living that are genuinely valuable. National boundaries organize political communities. Ethnic identities connect people to histories and practices worth preserving.

The problem emerges when these constructed identities are treated as more fundamental than shared humanity, when they become weapons that justify harm, when they override moral consideration for those categorized as other. This is the transformation from identity as tool for belonging to identity as weapon for exclusion.

Resisting this transformation requires maintaining awareness that identity boundaries are historically contingent and politically constructed rather than natural or inevitable. The Hutu-Tutsi distinction that justified genocide was institutionalized by colonial authorities. The Hindu-Muslim division that produced partition violence was amplified by political mobilization. The boundaries that separate "us" from "them" in any context are typically more recent, more fluid, and more manipulated by power than they appear from within identity frameworks that treat them as eternal truths.

Conclusion: the choice to see people

The most dangerous sentence in human history is "They are not like us." Everything that follows—dehumanization, exclusion, violence—becomes psychologically possible once this sentence is believed. And every system that benefits from division knows this and exploits it systematically.

But recognizing how identity is weaponized creates possibility for resistance. You can observe when political leaders or media figures are deploying identity rhetoric. You can notice when you are being encouraged to see people as categories rather than individuals. You can question narratives that present identity others as threatening whilst ignoring how power benefits from the division.

This does not require abandoning identity or pretending differences do not exist. It requires maintaining awareness that identity serves human needs but can be exploited by power, that boundaries are real but constructed, that someone's membership in different identity group does not negate their humanity or justify their suffering.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton's research on genocidal behavior emphasized that participation in mass atrocity requires what he called "doubling"—the psychological process of maintaining two selves, one that commits violence and one that remains a loving parent, a moral person in other contexts. This doubling is enabled by identity frameworks that segment moral consideration: full humanity for in-group members, reduced or absent humanity for out-group members.

Resisting identity weaponization requires refusing this doubling, maintaining integrated moral awareness that recognizes shared humanity across identity boundaries. This is psychologically difficult because it means accepting discomfort of complexity, ambiguity, and moral responsibility that identity frameworks conveniently eliminate.

When you encounter someone from different identity group, you face choice. You can see them through lens of category—Muslim, immigrant, conservative, liberal, whatever label applies—and have ready-made judgments, reactions, and emotional responses based on group stereotype. Or you can see them as individual human being whose inner experience, despite different life path and beliefs, shares fundamental qualities with your own—consciousness, vulnerability, need for meaning and belonging, capacity for suffering and flourishing.

The first option is easier. It requires no effort, no empathy, no revision of existing beliefs. It allows maintaining simple narratives about who is good and who is threatening. It provides psychological comfort of belonging to right group whilst others belong to wrong groups.

The second option is harder. It requires effort, imagination, willingness to see complexity and contradiction. It disrupts simple narratives and comfortable certainties. It creates moral responsibility where identity frameworks provide moral permission.

But this harder choice is the only one compatible with reducing identity-based violence. As long as populations can be mobilized through identity against designated others, as long as political power can be maintained through division, as long as empathy can be selectively disabled through dehumanization, the patterns documented in this chapter will continue producing suffering, particularly for children who inherit conflicts they did not choose and trauma they did not deserve.

Understanding identity weaponization does not automatically prevent it. But awareness is prerequisite for resistance. You cannot refuse what you do not recognize. The mechanisms described here operate partly through invisibility, through feeling natural rather than constructed, through appearing as inevitable tribal conflict rather than as political strategy serving power.

Making these mechanisms visible, recognizing when identity is being weaponized, maintaining awareness of shared humanity across constructed boundaries—these are not complete solutions but they are necessary foundations for any solution. Because the alternative—continuing to allow identity to be weaponized whilst populations tear each other apart over divisions that serve elite interests—is not merely tragic but unsustainable.