Mark Zuckerberg is a Dummy on Personal Identity

Although I’ve a great deal of respect for bright Gen-Yers like
Mark Zuckerberg, a quote of his tells me that when it comes to personal
identities, Zuckerberg is not too bright. You may have read his quote in
Time: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of
integrity.” Like a number of techies, he’s dumb about people. Michael Zimmer,
a well-known information ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, put
it this way: Zuckerberg has a history of speaking his mind . . . and
what he says is often “fraught with problems, ignorance, and arrogance.”
Like a few others I know in the tech field, Zuckerberg needed that
Harvard liberal arts degree to learn how to think beyond bits and bytes.

But his attitude toward personal identity is a very common mistake.
Indeed, I suspect that his belief on personal identity, what the
unwashed herd calls the “real me,” is widely held. I’ve had numerous
conversations with those, even PhDs, who thought you could peel back the
layers and find out who you really are. But if you’re looking for an
analogy for peeling back the layers, the best one for us all is the
onion. Eventually, when you peel back far enough, you’ll find there’s
nothing there. To quote Gertrude Stein, there is no there there.

If we only have one identity, we’re in luck if business needs that
identity. But when that identity is no longer needed, we’re in deep
shit. And, by the way, that’s exactly what’s happened to millions of
single career American workers. It shouldn’t take much to figure out
that the notion of a single identity (which, I assume, equals a single
career) is not just damaging. In today’s economy it’s liable to leave
you out on the streets

It’s not that I’m trying to be cute about all this. But as Curt
Sittenfeld put so well in his opinion article, Zuckerberg believes we
should all be the same in every context. He’s got to be kidding. I’m not
the same person to my kids, my wife, or my neighbors, much less that
monstrous variety of friends and clients. 

So let’s think a bit deeply about personal identity. And here, once
more, I’m going to throw caution to the winds and dig into the sacred
muck. Herminia Ibarra has summarized it best:

First, your working identity is not
a hidden treasure (a passion) waiting to be discovered at the very core
of your inner being. Rather, it is made up of many possibilities: some
tangible and concrete, defined by the things we do, the company we keep,
and the stories we tell about our work and lives; others existing only
in the realm of future potential and private dreams. Second, changing
careers (for example) means changing ourselves. Since we are many
selves, changing is not a process of swapping one identity for another
but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of
possibilities. These simple ideas alter everything we take for granted
about finding a new career. They ask us to devote the greatest part of
our time and energy to action rather than reflection, to doing instead
of planning.

This issue continues to surface regularly and in a number of forms. In a previous blog,
I spelled out the research of Stanford’s Hazel Markus, and indicated
that the notion of a true self–of a single identity–has been
thoroughly dispelled by research. Several previous blogs call my readers
to think twice before they follow their passion.  But the passion issue
has a lot of staying power, and seems stuck in the 1960s, even with
bright guys like Mark Zuckerberg.

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