You and Your Dependent Identity

This is the first part in a four part series called The Road to Consumer Nationalism. Part 1 2 3 .

Here’s a question for you: what happens if no woman ever founds a Fortune 500 company? 

This isn’t a sexist question: the New York Times itself declared The End of the Girlboss after Emily Weiss “stepped away” from Glossier. Before that, the best chance was Elizabeth Holmes.

Progressive Western culture believes, foundationally, that women would have created all the same things as men if not for millennia of misogyny. So we work to level the playing field. We implement policy reforms (like compelling boards of directors to include women), economic reforms (like paid maternity leave), and biological reforms (like funding employees’ abortions). 

At the end of all this, the idea is that the historical abacus will be corrected. Weiss and Holmes are seen as stepping stones—failures to launch, sure, but sooner or later we’ll get this thing off the ground. Without toxic masculinity, an equal number of women will found unicorn startups. Boards of directors won’t need to be diversified by force. Workplace sexism will be ameliorated. The Fortune 500 will be half male and half female and the next Steve Jobs will be a woman. The same thing is supposed to happen with math and science, philosophy and religion, chess and video games.

This all may very well be true, but it isn’t true yet. Moreover, it has never been true—not when founders were Hellenic conquerors and not when they were Enlightenment scholars. Movements, feminist ones but also others like Montessori, are founded by women, but not world-dominating enterprises. There are no female-founded Fortune 500 companies today. The fundamental narrative of contemporary Western culture—in fact our civilization—is thus based on the absolute belief that something will occur that has never occurred before, if only the conditions are correct. 

So I ask again: what if even after another hundred years of social engineering, a woman still hasn’t founded a Fortune 500 company? What then? Does the whole thing fall apart? Do feminists admit they were wrong? Does the West back sheepishly into the bushes like the Soviet Union did?

Passionately proclaiming the potential of something occurring that has never occurred, and may never occur, is a good organizing force for any society. Many theocratic communities promise the return of a messiah or the entry into an unseen afterlife; both seem to work pretty well. It strengthens adherence, reduces conflict, and keep eyes focused on the future. The difference is that those communities know they are religious: adherents base their membership on a leap of faith. Whereas Western civilization believes it’s rational, if nothing else. We’re engineering an ideal society in the present day; using facts, science, and reason to correct the injustices of the past and maximize utility for all.

But if the West was really acting rationally, the sudden doubling of the labor force in just half a century—the effect of feminism—should be seen as an economic cataclysm worthy of endless study and debate. Yet the universities barely touch it. It’s never analyzed in the mainstream. Why? Why has the West gone to such great lengths to enshrine the belief—a brand new belief by historical standards—that women in the workplace can and should be identical to men, when we have so little concrete evidence to support that belief? It seems highly irrational.

The real answer is money. “The future is female ” is the ruling class’ messianic promise designed to invoke not just ideological buy in, but literal buy-ing. The listless bankers controlling Western institutions need women to buy stuff—women make 70-80% of all purchases. They need women to work for low wages—women are willing to do the same work for 30-50% less than men. They need women to obey—women are more likely to conform to “group norms” than men. In order to do all this, they need women to “identify” with their most useful role.

In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, famously broke the taboo against women smoking by re-framing cigarettes as feminist “torches of freedom.” Bernays didn’t sell women cigarettes. He sold them an identity. 

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The successful brands of the future won’t worry about branding or advertising—they’ll worry about speaking. They won’t hide behind meaning or purpose. They won’t hide at all. They’ll expose every aspect of their insides and we’ll love them for it. People will connect around them and gather through them, make consumption their ethos and reason for being. The future is consumer nationalism.

The mechanism of consumer nationalism is identity. A particular kind of identity. Namely, fake ones. Identities as products. Feminism+.

On an episode of his podcast Caribbean Rhythms (103), Bronze Age Pervert dissects political identities manufactured for consumption. These are “not [authentic] ethnogenesis, but fabricated state identities.” These fake “neologisms” will “break apart fast at the first sign of trouble.” They are “fast food trick versions of peoplehood and belonging,” from a state whose purpose is to “dispense acceptance and validation of life choices.” He goes on to condemn identitarianism at large, white nationalism included.

While BAP is mainly focused on newly-fabricated political identities—the Palestinian, the Ukrainian, the wignat—I see the pattern in the corporate/marketing/branding spheres as well. I believe these two spheres will continue to converge until they’re more or less the same thing. The convergence point will be their shared ability to sell new identities. New identities that depend on constant consumption to maintain. 

From the perspective of CEOs and rulers respectively, what trait would the ideal consumer and the perfect citizen share in common? The answer is life dependence. An asthma patient is taught to believe that without a lifetime of monthly medical purchases, they will literally die. A feminist must consistently buy at least birth control, if not much more. A transgender person signs up for lifetime patienthood, requiring continual treatments to “affirm their identity.” Expeller pressed food replicas are marketed to another newly minted identity: the obese.

Toy Story 4 features a character called Forky who, pieced together from a plastic fork and pipe cleaners, has an existential crisis about whether he’s a real toy. He sports a rainbow sticker on his foot, what I perceived to be a reference to LGTBQ+ identities as something previously questioned, but now, with the power of Disney, made real. Whether you’re a state or a merchant, a dependent identity makes an ideal subject.

Today’s merchants have discovered that the most valuable type of customer is the subscriber. Content consumers of AppleTV+, Disney+, NFL+, Paramount+, Daily Wire+ are drawn in by a promise of +. Beyond language, it’s the vague promise of a citizen-like lifetime relationship, monthly dues exchanged for rights and privileges—original content, exclusive merch drops, branded events, access to a community of fellow fans. One can’t help but notice that the + convention started with LGTBQ+, but the practice is apolitical; perhaps the most enthusiastic dependent identity is the right wing Costco subscriber.

In science fiction and fantasy, there’s often a population of expendable, zombie-like low-level bad guys controlled by the chief antagonist. They’re often gray-colored and attack in endless waves. They’re easy to dismember, but keep on coming as long as the antagonist fuels them. In Tolkien, they’re called “Orcs.” In Power Rangers,  “Putties.” In The Hunger Games, “Mutts.” In Game of Thrones, “Wights.” They’re basically NPCs with one thing in common. They’re created by or fueled by the substance of their overlords. When the power of the antagonist is interrupted, they drop dread. 

The tendency towards + identity is the Orc-ification of the consumer. The consumer yearns to intermingle itself with the substance of its master; to addict itself to it, to consume the master’s substance and thus run on his same power. And lest you think this is a critique only of rainbow-flag waiving development banks , consider what Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and Sol Brah shill: oral supplements that make their followers just like them. 

To return to our original question—what if despite all the birth control and affordable childcare and frozen eggs in the world, a Fortune 500 female founder simply never arises? What if the promises of global progressive monoculture never come to pass? No one knows the answer, but in asking the question, we reveal the West as not the rationalist maximizer of utility it used to be, but something closer to a messianic theocracy. But instead of recruiting souls in exchange for salvation, it recruits citizens, that is to say taxpayers, in exchange for identity.

This is the first part in a four part series called The Road to Consumer Nationalism. Part two is here .