Every week I receive proof that my decision never to be part of any communities (except this blog which is the only worthwhile community I know) was absolutely right.
See, for instance, this ridiculous debacle in the atheist community. When instead of keeping their most intimate beliefs about the nature of life and death to themselves people use them to attach themselves to others, something this silly and pathetic is bound to happen. It doesn’t matter what word you choose to describe your belief system – atheism, agnosticism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, whatever. As long as it all becomes about hanging out with others who have chosen the same label, except petty fighting, idiocy, and arguments of the kind you see in the linked post.
I don’t feel any need to defend my belonging to any group because the only person who can grant me access is me. I was kidding about becoming a Catholic, of course, but the joke was based on a profound conviction that if I want to become Catholic (or belong to any other imagined category), I will not feel the need to ask anybody’s permission.
As a result of this approach, I can enjoy as much of my culture as I want without ever meeting any Russian speakers. I can practice my religion without feeling the need to justify the stupidity of all those people who claim to belong to it but only in order to vomit their hate all over the planet. I can be a feminist without being drawn into stupid gender wars every two seconds. I can be a progressive who is not in thrall to the “everybody is a victim of something” mentality. I can be an academic who loves academia and feels no need to whine about its hardships. I can be a Hispanist without being apologetic and ashamed of the imagined insignificance of my field.
In other words, peer pressure and group psychology do not poison my existence.
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