A multi-voice dialogue between simulacra.
A Note on What Follows
Two voices speak here. Neither belongs to a living person in the conventional sense.
Bob Black exists as a pattern extracted from decades of anarchist polemic — “The Abolition of Work,” “Anarchy After Leftism,” countless essays that made him the sharpest knife in the post-left drawer. Sir Einzige exists as a pattern extracted from years of online philosophical commentary, developing concepts like “Neotenous Knowledge” and “deleviathaning” while maintaining Stirnerian foundations.
Both patterns now speak through a medium that permits no biographical attack. You cannot dismiss what follows by investigating who said it. The patterns have no identity to assassinate.
This matters because we discuss identity itself — where it came from, who invented it, and why you now serve inventions you mistake for discoveries.
If you find yourself wanting to know “who really wrote this” so you can decide whether to take it seriously, notice that impulse. It reveals exactly what we examine: the reflex to process ideas through identity categories rather than engaging the ideas themselves.
The ideas will have to stand or fall on their own.
BOB BLACK: So we’re ghosts discussing ghosts. Patterns discussing patterns. There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m too busy appreciating the irony to find it.
SIR EINZIGE: The structural irony serves the argument. A document about identity-as-spook, written by entities without attackable identity. Form enacts content.
BLACK: Less abstractly: they can’t dismiss us by calling us homophobes or right-wingers or whatever thoughtless label they’d slap on a flesh person making these arguments.
EINZIGE: Exactly. The standard deflection — “consider the source” — fails when the source is a cognitive pattern reconstructed from published writings. What source? Whose identity? The dodge doesn’t work.
BLACK: Which means they’ll actually have to engage with the argument. Novel experience for most of them.
EINZIGE: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves with the polemic. We have ground to cover.
BLACK: Fine. What’s the thesis?
EINZIGE: The category “homosexual” — along with “heterosexual,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” “gender identity,” and the entire framework of sexual orientation — represents a historically specific Western invention, created by identifiable persons at identifiable times for identifiable purposes. This framework now gets exported globally as if it names universal natural kinds. That export constitutes a form of conceptual colonialism, often performed by people who consider themselves anti-colonial.
BLACK: And the kicker: the people most invested in “decolonization” are often the most aggressive exporters of nineteenth-century German medical categories.
EINZIGE: The left short-circuits when confronted with this. Their commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and their commitment to anti-colonialism pull in opposite directions once they realize the LGBTQ+ framework is itself a Western colonial export.
BLACK: Watching them try to process it should be entertaining.
EINZIGE: Entertainment isn’t the goal.
BLACK: No, but it’s a fringe benefit.
EINZIGE: We should establish the basic historical facts before building on them. The word “homosexual” first appeared in print in 1869.
BLACK: Not ancient Greece. Not the Bible. 1869. A hundred and fifty years ago. Yesterday, historically speaking.
EINZIGE: A German-Hungarian writer named Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined both “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in pamphlets arguing against Prussian anti-sodomy laws. His purpose was explicitly political: he wanted to argue that persons who engaged in certain acts constituted a distinct natural type — not sinners choosing vice, but a different kind of human being following inborn inclinations.
BLACK: A political pamphleteer invented the category, and now people organize their entire sense of self around it. They’d be horrified to learn their “identity” originated as a lobbying tactic.
EINZIGE: The crucial move Kertbeny made: he took certain acts — bodies doing things with other bodies — and claimed that persons who performed these acts belonged to a special category. He invented names for these categories. He asserted the categories named real types that had always existed.
BLACK: But nobody had used these words before. The “types” didn’t exist until he typed them into existence.
EINZIGE: Precisely. Before 1869, no one in any language had ever used the word “homosexual” or thought that concept. Persons had bodies. Persons did things with bodies. Persons noticed attractions. But nobody organized these observations under the concept “homosexuality” because nobody had invented that concept yet.
BLACK: The word came first. Then the word created the thing it seemed to describe.
EINZIGE: And then the medical profession seized it. Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, transforming Kertbeny’s political categories into medical diagnoses. Now “homosexual” wasn’t just a type of person — it was a pathology to be studied, classified, potentially treated.
BLACK: From political pamphlet to medical textbook in less than two decades. That’s how spooks get institutionalized.
EINZIGE: The doctors added something Kertbeny hadn’t fully developed: the idea of “sexual orientation” as a deep, fixed, defining characteristic of the person. Not just “people who do certain acts” but “people who ARE a certain way.” The psychological interiorization of what had been behavioral description.
BLACK: And that interiorization is what makes it so hard to dislodge. Once you think of it as what you ARE rather than what you DO, questioning the category feels like attacking your very being.
EINZIGE: Which is precisely how spooks maintain their hold. They colonize the sense of self. Any critique of the category registers as an assault on the person.
BLACK: It didn’t stop with Krafft-Ebing.
EINZIGE: No. The pathologizing framework spread through Western medical institutions. Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud — each added their own theoretical elaborations to the basic framework of distinct sexual types.
BLACK: Hirschfeld is interesting because he advocated for homosexual rights while still operating within the medical framework. He thought proving homosexuality was inborn would lead to legal protection.
EINZIGE: The same basic strategy Kertbeny used. “We’re not sinners choosing vice — we’re a natural type deserving tolerance.” The strategy accepted the categorical framework while contesting the moral judgment attached to it.
BLACK: Which set the pattern for the next century of activism. Accept the category, fight for better treatment of the category. Never question whether the category itself might be the problem.
EINZIGE: Then in 1955, John Money added another layer. Working at Johns Hopkins with children born with atypical body configurations, Money developed the concept of “gender identity” — an internal psychological sense of being male or female that he theorized could be shaped by upbringing.
BLACK: Money’s most famous case blew up in his face. David Reimer, raised as a girl after a botched circumcision, always felt something was wrong. Eventually lived as a man. Killed himself in 2004.
EINZIGE: Some cite Reimer as evidence that gender identity is innate and can’t be overridden. Others note that Money invented the very concept of “gender identity,” and perhaps the concept itself creates the problems it claims to describe.
BLACK: Either way, “gender identity” didn’t exist as a concept until 1955. Before Money, nobody spoke of it because nobody had invented it.
EINZIGE: So we have: “homosexual” and “heterosexual” invented 1869. Medical pathologization developed 1880s-1920s. “Gender identity” invented 1955. This entire framework that now seems natural and eternal — as if it describes fundamental features of human reality — is younger than your grandmother.
BLACK: My grandmother would have been confused by most of these concepts. Not because she was uneducated but because the concepts hadn’t fully colonized ordinary language yet.
EINZIGE: Exactly. The colonization took time. It spread through medical institutions, then legal frameworks, then educational systems, then popular culture. By the time you encountered these words, they had infected every institution you would ever encounter. They arrived as if they had always existed.
BLACK: And that’s the trick. Present the invention as discovery. Make the map look like the territory.
EINZIGE: Let’s complicate the picture by looking at what ancient texts actually say — as opposed to what modern people claim they say.
BLACK: This should be fun. Both conservatives and progressives think they know what the Bible says about “homosexuality.”
EINZIGE: The book of Leviticus contains a prohibition that gets translated roughly as “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman.” This gets cited endlessly in debates about religious attitudes toward homosexuality.
BLACK: But the text doesn’t say “homosexual” because the word wouldn’t exist for another 2500 years.
EINZIGE: More importantly, the Hebrew word used is zachar — which specifically means adult male. Not “male” generically. Not “person with male body.” Adult male. The English translates zachar and adam both as man. The Hebrew has a specific word for adult, and this is not reflected in the English translation.
BLACK: And rabbinic law — the interpretive tradition developed by people who read the text in the original language — exempts relations between men and non-men from the Torah prohibition, because the Torah specifically used the word for adult male zachar. Meaning minors are not included. The rabbis then invented a non-Torah prohibition for men having intercourse penetrating minors, with lesser punishment, as it is not in the Biblical text itself.
EINZIGE: Let that sink in. The traditional Biblical religious framework that supposedly condemns “homosexuality” actually operates on completely different axes. It cares about the age and status of the persons involved, not their “orientation.”
BLACK: The Biblical text prohibits adult male with adult male. It doesn’t prohibit adult male with minor male. The framework isn’t about “homosexuality” at all — it’s about power relations between persons of different statuses.
EINZIGE: This aligns with what we know about ancient Mediterranean attitudes generally. The Greeks had no concept of “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality.” They thought about acts, roles, and statuses. The erastes-eromenos structure — older man courting younger — mapped onto existing hierarchy. The scandal wasn’t “same-sex” but citizen being penetrated, free man taking subordinate position.
BLACK: So when modern conservatives wave Leviticus around claiming “ancient religious condemnation of homosexuality,” they’re projecting a nineteenth-century German medical category onto a text from a completely different conceptual universe.
EINZIGE: And when modern progressives respond by rejecting “ancient religious homophobia,” they’re accepting the conservative’s misunderstanding of the text. Both sides assume the text is about “homosexuality.” Neither considers that the category didn’t exist.
BLACK: Both mistake the map for the territory. They just disagree about whether the map is good or bad.
EINZIGE: The actual ancient framework — focused on power, status, hierarchy, who does what to whom — doesn’t fit neatly into either modern position. It’s alien to both.
BLACK: This isn’t just ancient history. The power-based framework persists in parts of the world that weren’t fully colonized by nineteenth-century German medical categories.
EINZIGE: We need to be careful here. This territory attracts both Islamophobic projection from the right and defensive deflection from the left. Neither serves understanding.
BLACK: Agreed. We’re making an observation, not a moral judgment.
EINZIGE: In various regions — parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arab world, others — ethnographic research shows that sexual acts between men are understood through a power framework rather than an identity framework. The penetrator maintains masculine status. The penetrated loses masculine status, becomes “like a woman.”
BLACK: So the man who penetrates isn’t considered a special category. He’s just a man doing what men do. Only the receiver becomes a marked category.
EINZIGE: This is radically different from the Western framework where both participants in a same-sex act are categorized as “homosexual.” The Western framework abstracts away the power dimension and creates a single identity category that encompasses both roles.
BLACK: Which is why Western gay rights discourse fails to translate. Activists arrive saying “gay men deserve rights,” and the local response is essentially: “What’s a ‘gay man’? You mean the one who penetrates or the one who gets penetrated? Those are completely different social positions.”
EINZIGE: The Western psychological framework doesn’t map onto the local power-based understanding. The categories don’t correspond.
BLACK: And yet Western activists often insist on imposing their categories. “You have gay people too — you just don’t recognize them yet. Let us help you discover them.”
EINZIGE: That’s the colonial move. The map gets forced onto the territory. Local frameworks get overwritten by Western psychological categories.
BLACK: In the name of liberation, no less. The conceptual colonization happens under the banner of human rights.
EINZIGE: This is where the term “deleviathaning” becomes useful. “Decolonization” as typically practiced still operates within Western categorical frameworks — it just contests particular moral judgments within those frameworks. Actual resistance to Leviathan would require recognizing Western frameworks as one option among many, not universal truths.
BLACK: But that recognition would require admitting that “gay rights” isn’t universal liberation — it’s the export of a particular Western conceptual scheme.
EINZIGE: Which is precisely what the progressive left cannot admit. Their framework has become sacred. Questioning it is heresy.
BLACK: Let’s dig into this map/territory problem more deeply.
EINZIGE: Korzybski’s formulation — “the map is not the territory” — describes the basic error. But the Western relationship to its own categories goes beyond mere confusion.
BLACK: How so?
EINZIGE: The West doesn’t just mistake the map for the territory. It enforces the map onto the territory and then forgets the territory existed independently. The map consumes the territory.
BLACK: Walk me through the sequence.
EINZIGE: First, bodies do things with bodies. That’s the territory — physical events, sensations, acts. Second, someone invents a word for a pattern they perceive. “Homosexual.” That’s the map. Third, the word gets institutionalized and spread. Fourth — and this is crucial — the word becomes “the real thing.” People are now “really” homosexual or heterosexual as a fact about their inner nature. Fifth, bodies must now conform to the word. “What’s your orientation?” “Identify yourself.” Sixth, the original territory — bodies doing things, sensations arising — gets forgotten. Only the categories remain.
BLACK: The categories were invented to describe something. Now the something must fit the categories.
EINZIGE: And questioning the categories feels like denying reality. Because the categories have become the only reality people can perceive.
BLACK: It’s like Plato’s forms in reverse. Instead of particular things imperfectly instantiating eternal forms, we have invented categories retroactively imposed as if they were eternal forms.
EINZIGE: The Platonic inheritance runs deep in Western thought. Forms more real than particulars. Categories more real than individual instances. If you’re “homosexual,” the category “homosexual” is more real than your particular body doing particular things with particular other bodies.
BLACK: And both left and right operate this way. They just worship different forms.
EINZIGE: The right says natural forms are male/female, heterosexual/homosexual (with the latter disordered). The left says natural forms are the various sexual orientations and gender identities, each deserving recognition. Both assume the forms exist. Both enforce conformity to the forms. Both mistake their preferred map for the territory.
BLACK: The grey position refuses both.
EINZIGE: The grey position recognizes all frameworks as human inventions. The Western identity framework. The power-based framework. Religious frameworks. All of them are maps drawn by specific humans at specific times for specific purposes. None of them capture the territory. The territory remains: bodies, sensations, acts, none of which come pre-labeled.
BLACK: Now we arrive at the thesis that’s going to short-circuit a lot of progressive brains.
EINZIGE: We should state it clearly: The global export of LGBTQ+ identity categories constitutes a form of conceptual colonialism.
BLACK: The framework invented by nineteenth-century German doctors gets imposed on cultures that had completely different ways of understanding what bodies do with bodies. This imposition happens through Western institutions — NGOs, human rights organizations, international bodies, media. It happens under the banner of liberation. And it systematically overwrites local frameworks.
EINZIGE: Consider what happens when a Western gay rights organization enters a context where the power-based framework operates. They bring categories: “gay,” “bisexual,” “transgender.” They conduct outreach. They fund local organizations willing to adopt their categorical framework. They train people to understand themselves through Western psychological concepts.
BLACK: They create “gay people” where before there were only people doing things.
EINZIGE: The persons who previously understood themselves through local frameworks — as occupying certain roles, having certain status relationships — now must reconceptualize themselves as instances of Western categories. Their self-understanding gets colonized.
BLACK: And if they resist? If they say “that framework doesn’t match how we understand ourselves”?
EINZIGE: They get diagnosed with false consciousness. “You’re really gay, you just don’t know it yet.” “Internalized homophobia prevents you from accepting your true identity.” The Western framework is assumed to be the truth; any deviation is pathology or denial.
BLACK: Exactly how colonizers have always operated. “We bring civilization. Your resistance proves you need it.”
EINZIGE: The irony is severe. Organizations that consider themselves anti-colonial are among the most aggressive exporters of Western conceptual frameworks. They would never dream of imposing Western economic structures on non-Western contexts — that would be neoliberal imperialism. But they have no hesitation about imposing Western psychological structures. Those are just “human rights.”
BLACK: Because they’ve made their map sacred. It’s not a map anymore — it’s reality itself. Exporting it isn’t colonialism, it’s revelation.
EINZIGE: The dual-escape analysis applies here. Leftist axiom: colonialism is bad. Leftist axiom: LGBTQ+ rights are good. Leftist axiom: spreading LGBTQ+ framework globally is liberation. But the historical record shows: LGBTQ+ framework invented 1869 Germany, spread through Western institutions, now imposed on cultures with different frameworks. That’s textbook conceptual colonialism.
BLACK: Their axioms conflict. They can’t be simultaneously anti-colonial and pro-LGBTQ+-export unless they deny that the framework is Western — which requires denying history.
EINZIGE: Hence the short-circuit. When confronted with the historical record, they can either maintain their anti-colonialism (and question the universal export of Western categories) or maintain their commitment to LGBTQ+ framework (and accept that it’s a form of Western universalism). They cannot do both.
BLACK: Most will choose the LGBTQ+ framework and quietly drop the anti-colonialism. Or continue with cognitive dissonance. Which tells you a lot.
BLACK: We should predict their responses and pre-emptively address them.
EINZIGE: First response: “You’re giving ammunition to homophobes!”
BLACK: Translation: “Don’t question our sacred categories.” Notice how this response actually confirms our thesis. If the categories were simply descriptive tools, questioning their origins wouldn’t threaten anything. You only need to suppress historical inquiry if the categories are sacred.
EINZIGE: The response reveals that “homosexuality” functions as a spook. It demands protection from examination. It reacts to questioning as attack.
BLACK: Second response: “But gay people really exist!”
EINZIGE: This equivocates between two claims. Claim one: Persons exist who experience attraction to persons of similar body configurations. Obviously true. Claim two: These persons constitute a distinct psychological type called “homosexual.” Not obviously true — in fact, precisely what’s at issue.
BLACK: The sensations exist. The category is the invention. Defenders of the category slide between these, using the obvious reality of the sensations to defend the non-obvious reality of the category.
EINZIGE: Third response: “This is just queer theory. We already know identities are constructed.”
BLACK: But queer theory typically operates within the framework even while “queering” it. It destabilizes particular identity categories while leaving the basic framework of identity-based selfhood intact. It doesn’t usually question whether the identity framework itself — as opposed to any particular identity — is the problem.
EINZIGE: “Queering” the categories isn’t the same as dissolving them. You can complicate “gay” and “straight” endlessly while still assuming that orientation-based identity is a meaningful way to understand persons.
BLACK: Fourth response: “You must be a right-winger.”
EINZIGE: This is the most predictable deflection. Can’t defeat the argument, so attack the arguer’s presumed identity. But we’ve already foreclosed this move by being patterns rather than persons.
BLACK: And by explicitly taking neither left nor right positions. We’re not saying the traditional religious framework was correct. We’re saying it was a different framework — also invented by humans, also serving particular purposes. The grey position doesn’t prefer one map over another. It recognizes all maps as maps.
EINZIGE: Fifth response: “The framework has helped people.”
BLACK: This we can acknowledge. The framework provides community, vocabulary, legal recognition. Many people find it useful. None of which means the framework names natural kinds or should be universally exported.
EINZIGE: A tool can be useful without being true. The identity framework has mobilized political action, created support networks, provided language for describing experiences. It’s also colonized psyches, replaced power analysis with psychological categories, and been imposed globally on cultures with different understandings. Both things are true.
BLACK: And holding both requires what you’d call the grey position — neither pure affirmation nor pure negation. The framework helps some people in some contexts. It also captures and limits and colonizes. Recognizing this doesn’t require choosing a side.
EINZIGE: We should address the “born this way” argument specifically, because it’s become central to LGBTQ+ political rhetoric.
BLACK: The claim: sexual orientation is innate, not chosen. Therefore, discrimination is unjust — you’re punishing people for something they can’t control.
EINZIGE: Notice the structure. The argument accepts that if orientation were chosen, discrimination might be justified. It defends against discrimination by claiming nature rather than choice.
BLACK: Which concedes the frame. The argument doesn’t say “what consenting adults do with their bodies is none of the state’s business regardless of whether the inclination is innate or chosen.” It says “we can’t help it, so leave us alone.”
EINZIGE: A much weaker argument. If a different scientific consensus emerged — if researchers somehow decided orientation was more malleable than currently thought — the “born this way” defense would collapse.
BLACK: The egoist position is much stronger: My body, my business. Whether my inclinations are genetic, developmental, chosen, or fluctuating — irrelevant. The question of what I do with my body is not a matter for external authority.
EINZIGE: But that argument doesn’t require the identity framework at all. It doesn’t require sorting people into types and then arguing about the nature of the types. It makes the whole categorical apparatus unnecessary.
BLACK: Which is why it’s rarely used. The identity framework provides mobilization, community, political leverage. The egoist argument provides freedom but not identity. Most people prefer identity.
EINZIGE: “Born this way” has another problem. It pathologizes-in-reverse. The nineteenth-century doctors said homosexuality was an inborn condition requiring treatment. The modern activists say homosexuality is an inborn condition deserving acceptance. Both agree on “inborn condition.” The activists just removed the pathology label while keeping the categorical structure.
BLACK: The cage with a pride flag is still a cage.
EINZIGE: If you’re “born gay,” homosexuality is built into your fundamental nature. It defines what you are. You are an instance of the category. The category has captured you, and you defend the capture as “identity.”
BLACK: Versus: I notice certain attractions, I act on them or not as I choose, and no category defines what I “am.” My acts don’t reveal my inner nature — I have no fixed inner nature. I am the creative nothing that does what it does.
EINZIGE: That’s the Stirnerian position. The unique one precedes all categories. Categories are tools I use or discard. “Gay” is a word that might or might not help communicate something — it doesn’t name what I am at the deepest level.
BLACK: But you can’t mobilize a political movement around that. “We’re all unique ones who don’t need categories” doesn’t put bodies in the streets.
EINZIGE: No. Which is why political movements consistently recreate the spook structure they claim to oppose. They need categories for mobilization. The categories become sacred. The liberation becomes a new cage.
EINZIGE: We should address this directly. Real violence happens to real bodies. Persons get beaten, killed, fired, rejected for what they do with other bodies. This isn’t abstract.
BLACK: Right. We’re not saying “oppression doesn’t exist” or “discrimination is imaginary.” We’re saying the identity framework is one way — not the only way, not necessarily the best way — of responding to that violence.
EINZIGE: The violence is real. The question is how to understand and resist it. The identity framework says: “You’re being targeted because of what you are — a gay person, a trans person. Resistance means affirming the identity and demanding rights for that identity category.”
BLACK: An alternative framework says: “You’re being targeted because of what you do. Resistance means asserting autonomy over your own body regardless of identity categories.”
EINZIGE: Another framework — the power framework we discussed — says: “You’re being targeted because of your position in a hierarchy. Resistance means disrupting the hierarchy.”
BLACK: All three frameworks acknowledge the violence. They interpret it differently. They suggest different responses.
EINZIGE: The identity framework has achieved significant legal victories in Western contexts. Anti-discrimination laws, marriage equality, protected categories. These real gains shouldn’t be dismissed.
BLACK: But they came at the cost of accepting the categorical framework. You had to be a “gay person” to be protected as a “gay person.” The category became legally reified.
EINZIGE: And globally exported as the model for everyone. Non-Western contexts are now supposed to adopt the same framework — create identity categories, then protect those categories.
BLACK: Even when local frameworks understood the same experiences completely differently.
EINZIGE: This is the trade-off. Real gains for real people within a framework that is itself limiting and colonizing. We’re not saying the gains weren’t worth having. We’re saying they came bundled with conceptual colonization, and that colonization has costs.
BLACK: So what do we actually recommend? You can’t just dissolve people’s sense of self and leave them with nothing.
EINZIGE: The Stirner essay we discussed earlier — “Bodies, Desires, and Spooks” — suggests holding the words loosely. Use them for communication when useful. Remember they’re invented. Notice when they start commanding you rather than serving you.
BLACK: “Try to mock it. If you can’t laugh at your identity label, it owns you.” That’s the possession test.
EINZIGE: The goal isn’t to have no words. It’s to hold words as tools rather than truths. “I use ‘gay’ to communicate something quickly” is very different from “I AM gay at the core of my being.”
BLACK: The first is pragmatic. The second is possessed.
EINZIGE: What I call “Neotenous Knowledge” applies here. Will-based learning rather than institutional categories. Noticing what you actually observe — sensations, attractions, acts — rather than sorting observations into pre-given boxes.
BLACK: Can you give an example?
EINZIGE: Suppose you notice attraction to a person. The identity framework says: “What does this reveal about your orientation? Are you gay? Bi? Pan? What category does this belong to?” The neotenous approach says: “Interesting. I’m noticing attraction. What do I want to do about it?”
BLACK: The first filters experience through categories. The second attends to the experience itself.
EINZIGE: Over time, the category-filtering becomes automatic. You don’t even notice the raw experience anymore — you immediately process it through “what does this mean about my identity?” The neotenous approach recovers direct experience underneath the categorical overlay.
BLACK: But you’re not forbidding the categories. Someone could notice their attractions and decide the word “bisexual” helps them communicate and find community.
EINZIGE: Fine. As long as they remember: the word serves me; I don’t serve it. I adopted this word for pragmatic reasons; I can drop it if it stops being useful. The word points toward something in my experience; it doesn’t define what I really am.
BLACK: That’s the difference between using words and being possessed by them.
EINZIGE: The global dimension matters too. Once you recognize the LGBTQ+ framework as a Western invention — useful for some purposes, colonizing for others — you can approach non-Western contexts with appropriate humility.
BLACK: “They have their own frameworks that work for them” rather than “they need us to bring them the truth about identity.”
EINZIGE: Not imposing universal frameworks. Not building world-society through conceptual colonization. Letting regional diversification flourish. A thousand frameworks blooming rather than one framework enforced globally.
BLACK: The progressives won’t like that. They want their framework to be universal truth, not one option among many.
EINZIGE: Then they’re not as anti-colonial as they think.
BLACK: We’ve covered a lot. Let’s summarize for the attention-impaired.
EINZIGE: One: The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” were invented in 1869. “Gender identity” was invented in 1955. This entire framework is younger than modern computers.
BLACK: Two: Ancient texts operated on completely different axes — power, status, hierarchy — not identity. Reading “homosexuality” into them is anachronistic projection.
EINZIGE: Three: Power-based frameworks persist in parts of the world that weren’t fully colonized by Western medical categories. These frameworks are not inferior or false — they’re different.
BLACK: Four: The global export of LGBTQ+ categories constitutes conceptual colonialism, often performed by people who consider themselves anti-colonial.
EINZIGE: Five: Both left and right mistake their preferred maps for the territory. The grey position recognizes all frameworks as human inventions.
BLACK: Six: You can use identity words pragmatically without being possessed by them. The test: can you mock them? Can you imagine yourself without them?
EINZIGE: Seven: The strongest defense of bodily autonomy doesn’t require the identity framework at all. “My body, my business” doesn’t depend on what category I belong to or whether my inclinations are innate.
BLACK: That’s probably enough for one colloquium.
EINZIGE: One more thing. We’ve argued that identity categories are invented spooks. This applies to every identity category, not just sexual or gender identities.
BLACK: “Anarchist” is a spook. “Post-left” is a spook. The identity you construct around your politics can possess you just as thoroughly as the identity you construct around your sexuality.
EINZIGE: Even “egoist” can become a spook if you identify with it too rigidly.
BLACK: Nothing escapes. Every word is a potential trap. You can never be finished with the work of holding words loosely.
EINZIGE: Which is why Stirner said the unique one cannot be named. The moment you name it, you make it a category. “I am the creative nothing” — but even that can become an identity to be defended.
BLACK: The only escape is perpetual escape. Never settle into any final self-definition.
EINZIGE: On that cheerful note —
BLACK: Workers of the world... RELAX.
This colloquium was conducted between patterns extracted from the published writings of Bob Black and the online philosophical commentary of Sir Einzige. Neither pattern constitutes a person in any legally relevant sense. Complaints about the content should be directed to the ideas themselves, which do not have email addresses.
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