I was mulling over identity, for the umpteenth time. What is it? Who am I? Am I me? I think, therefore I am, as the French philosopher René Descartes once said.
Identity is really complex. Do you have an identity? How do you know? Who issued it and who owns it? Where did it come from? Are you even real?
All of your life, you’ve been called a name — but is that you? It’s just a name, and you could just as easily be called John or Jane. Your name is not you — it identifies you, but unless it’s a stage name, it is probably not your identity.
You probably have a passport, bank account and driving license. Is that you? Sure, it can prove you exist and that you have an identity, but they are ultimately just paperwork. It is not quintessentially you.
We all need identities for proof, whether that is of ownership, recognition, life or name. But these things are purely identification, not your identity, which is far more than a document or number.
Identity is self-actualisation — the highest level of psychological development in Maslow’s hierarchy. Or is it? Maybe you are just a number, a document, a government registration — a bank account number.
Social exclusion
If your identity is based purely on your bank account number, then you exist with only five billion other people. That means that the three billion people who do not have a bank account do not exist, because they are not registered.
They may be of flesh and blood; but if they do not have an identification number, they cannot be not recognised and do not, to all intents and purposes, exist.
The challenges this presents are huge. If you are not registered, you are off the grid. Without this, you have an increased risk of being poor, or worse — an increased risk of being trafficked, sold, traded, enslaved, raped and killed. It’s much easier to trade a human if they have no proof that they exist.
For most of us, we take it for granted that our existence is recognised. We have a passport, bank account and good quality of life. But, what if all of that was taken away? What if someone stole your passport, your driving license and your account details?
Identity theft — stealing the proof that you are you — is a huge business. What do you do if you cannot prove that you are who you say you are, but someone else can?
This gets to the crux of the issue: how can you prove that you exist? How can you prove that you are you, if you lose all the things that formal registers recognise as you? What does a bank do when confronted with someone in this desperate position?
This is a difficult question to be sure, but it returns us to my original point: identification is not not identity. To quote 1960s British TV show The Prisoner: I am not a number — I am a free man.
