Identity and Lifestyle: The Forces That Drive the World

You build your lifestyle around your identity. Your identity is your fate. You are what you do, and you do what you do because of your identity. What you do constitutes your lifestyle. Most people are so busy with their lifestyle that they fail to consider whether or not their lifestyle is helping them or hindering them. You optimize yourself through having an optimal lifestyle, but how do you decide what lifestyle is best? Most people drift into lazy, easy, convenient lifestyles - acceptable to their peer group - that guarantee they will fail in life.

Changing your lifestyle involves changing your identity, and that is the most difficult thing possible for all average people. They just don't have the will, courage or determination. Most fat people who go on diets end up putting on weight over the longer term. They haven't changed their fat identity, their fat lifestyle. They have just made token gestures that soon dissipate. After a temporary alteration to their habits, they soon revert to normal service, to business as usual. Their will to change has exhausted itself.

It's lifestyle rather than ideology that changes the world. The lifestyle is the medium for all ideas, and the medium is the message.

We are not in a world of clashing cultures and civilizations, but in a world of clashing identities and lifestyles. Any Reformer has to deal with these before doing anything else. The Reformer must create a new identity and lifestyle that seduces the masses, or he must disrupt all mechanisms for perpetuating existing identities and lifestyles. As Nietzsche said, he who would be a Creator must first be a Destroyer. He must bring to an end old values. He must revalue everything.

How many people are ready for the revaluation of all values? This entails the replacement of all existing identities and lifestyles.

Don't bother talking about changing the world unless you are in the business of destroying old identities and lifestyles, and creating brand new ones. As soon as you try to change a person's "sacred" identity, you are at war with them. People never change identity voluntarily. Are you ready for the mother of all wars?