This sounds a lot like the argument in Natan Sharansky’s latest book, Defending Identity. Basically he says that in the Gulag, those who had no identity were more easily turned by the interrogators than those who had a strong identity. He used religious identity as an example, and thought that people find meaning in it to live their lives their own way. He criticized many Russian intellectuals for believing they could find a more pure existence in science or academics, and create a post-identity. Unfortunately while they were busy building a more pure existence, others were hatching plans to send them off to Siberia.

John Lennon was killed by a man with a gun. In this case, the man killed him because the demon ADH$Ebfd4ydfksdf told him to, or whatever. He was insane. But imagine Lennon was killed by an ordinary mugger after his wallet. He might have talked to the mugger about root causes and the brotherhood of man, nothing to kill or die for. But I am sure a mugger would be unimpressed, and Lennon just as dead. Whoever said that a conservative was a liberal who had been mugged, made a clever observation.

However many Liberals and Conservatives and Post Identities and Nation States we have, now matter how many Root Causes are addressed, I am sure that humans will always, always have people unwilling to play by the rules. We will always have crime. We will always have conflicts, even wars. You can’t wish that away with “post identity” or anything else. We are an imperfect and imperfectable species, and thank goodness for that.