Who Told You Who You Are?

Who Told You Who You Are?

A Wake-Up Essay on the Madness of Inherited Identity

Ed Reither, Beezone

“Rome gave the world the abstraction of law and the idea of the individual as a legal personality, stripped of inner character, reduced to property and contract. In doing so, it divorced the soul from the state, making the person a unit of dominion rather than a bearer of spirit. This ‘freedom of the ego,’ detached from concrete individuality, laid the groundwork for a world governed by identity without depth, rule without wisdom.”
— Adapted from Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History*

 

Introduction

Stories, myths, traditions, beliefs, religions, and other forms of inherited identity are not only necessary but crucial to the survival, cohesion, and creative flourishing of individuals, communities, and civilizations. They provide meaning, continuity, and belonging. They are the scaffolding of culture and the roots of spiritual aspiration.

But when these stories are taken literally, uncritically, or used as rigid markers of identity, they become dangerous.

To not understand the foundations of one’s identity is to be enslaved by it. It limits personal growth, fosters conflict, and distorts the very wisdom these traditions once sought to embody. Worse still, when these stories are passed down without reflection or renewal, they calcify into ideologies and exclusions—fueling prejudice, nationalism, religious supremacy, and even war.

This essay is not a rejection of tradition. It is a call to wake up to its deeper purpose: not to bind us to the past, but to liberate us into a more conscious and compassionate future. To do so, we must examine how ancient narratives—of Abraham, Noah, Ishmael, Israel, and others—continue to shape the modern world. And how, if misunderstood, they may also destroy it.

*This framing reinforces one of the essay’s central insights: that inherited identity—whether tribal, religious, or national—becomes hollow when it detaches from inner development, from true subjectivity, from spirit. Hegel’s observation about Rome’s legal-political abstraction applies equally to how we now live inside the shells of stories that no longer nourish our consciousness and only give us myth.

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Who Told You Who You Are?

A Wake-Up Essay on the Madness of Inherited Identity

There’s a madness walking silently through the human story. It hides behind religion, nation, culture, and blood. It whispers into our bones before we can even speak:

“You are who your ancestors were”

This is not THE truth.
It’s a myth of identity—an inheritance not of wisdom, but of division.

We live in a world still haunted by tribal ghosts. People today are fighting, legislating, and dying over myths wrapped in flags and scriptures—stories that claim to go back to Abraham, to Noah, to Ishmael, to Moses, to ancient cities like Ur and Egypt, as if these names are property deeds rather than symbols. These stories were born in oral tradition, not documentation. Their function was memory, not history. Their authority came not from factual accuracy but from shared meaning.

But the painful truth is this:

All of it—every lineage, every claim, every “divine right”—is based on old stories. Not facts. Not history. Stories.

And stories are not inherently dangerous—until they are mistaken for blueprints of reality.

 

The Prehistoric Roots of Belief

Long before any verse was carved into stone or parchment, long before the Torah, the Qur’an, or the Bible, people told stories.

Stories of great fathers, sacred lands, cosmic floods, divine messengers. These myths functioned as maps for understanding the world, and one’s place in it. But they were never meant to become rigid identities passed down like genetic traits.

Noah saves the human race from water (Genesis 6–9).
Abraham leaves Ur and becomes the “father of many nations” (Genesis 17:4–5).
Ishmael is cast into the desert and becomes a great nation (Genesis 21:13,18).
Isaac is chosen to carry the covenant line (Genesis 26:3–4).
Out of these stories come people—Jews, Christians, Muslims—each claiming the narrative, the bloodline, the blessing.

But let’s be clear:

These figures are not historical in the modern sense.
They are archetypal—symbols encoded with meaning, not passports or land claims.

We’ve confused myth with geography. We’ve taken metaphors of the human journey and turned them into military justifications, immigration policies, border walls, and theological exclusivity.

This process—the solidification of fluid stories into hard identities—is what underlies so much of today’s spiritual confusion and political violence.

(See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, 1963, on the sacred narrative as the structuring device of social order.)

 

The Weaponization of Identity

What began as oral traditions—myths passed down in tents, by fires, in deserts—eventually hardened into religious identities:

  • Jew

  • Gentile

  • Israelite

  • Arab

  • Muslim

  • Christian

These are not eternal truths; they are constructs, invented over time, revised, retranslated, fought over, and weaponized.

  • The word Jew arises post-exile, derived from Yehudi, denoting someone from Judah (see 2 Kings 16:6; Esther 2:5).

  • The term Gentile is from Latin gentilis, translating the Hebrew goy, meaning “nation” (cf. Genesis 12:2, Deuteronomy 32:8).

  • Israelite referred to members of the twelve tribes descending from Jacob (Israel), most of whom were lost after the Assyrian conquest in 722 BCE (see 2 Kings 17).

  • Semite is a 19th-century linguistic term coined by European scholars like August Ludwig Schlözer, derived from “Shem” in Genesis 10, and later racialized in political ideologies.

  • Ishmael, though loved and promised greatness, is interpreted variably across traditions (cf. Genesis 21:17–18; Qur’an 2:125–129).

These categories grew from scripture but were institutionalized by politics, colonization, and the need for group belonging. We have mistaken narrative categories for existential truths.

(See Mark G. Brett, Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity, 2000; and David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, 2013.)

 

Ancestry as Destiny: The Oldest Lie

What lies at the heart of all this?

There is a persistent belief that your bloodline defines who you are—your identity, your sense of belonging, even your purpose and worth.

That because you descend not only from apes but (supposedly) from Abraham, Ishmael, or Noah, you are considered chosen—or entitled, oppressed, a victim, or a hero.

This belief has outlived empires.
It has colonized the soul, generation after generation.

We are trained to internalize our ancestors’ traumas, victories, and divisions as if they were spiritually genetic. We carry flags and passports imbued with sacred weight, never questioning the legitimacy of the boundaries we inherit. But spiritual realization doesn’t flow through blood. It flows through conscious awakening.

And the confusion between the two is utterly, tragically insane.

(Compare Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, 1983, on how national identity is built on imagined historical continuity.)

 

The Nation Is Just a Tribe with a Flag

If you think we’ve evolved past tribalism, look closer at the modern nation-state.

We like to think our countries are built on law, rationality, and civic values. But beneath the surface, every nation is a myth in bureaucratic clothing. Our modern borders are the bones of old stories, dressed up with paperwork.

  • Founding events (exodus, independence, wars)

  • Chosen peoples (manifest destiny, Zionism, Arab ummah)

  • Enemies of identity (infidels, heretics, outsiders)

  • Sacred centers (Jerusalem, Mecca, Washington D.C.)

The nation is a modern altar where identity is sacrificed for belonging, and myth is enforced by law.

Zionism, Christian nationalism, pan-Arabism, Islamic caliphate dreams, American exceptionalism, European purity myths—all trace their roots to the ancient need to mythologize group identity.

And we still pretend it’s rational.

But people don’t fight to the death over GDP.
They fight for identity. They fight for stories.

(See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples, 2003; and Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” 1882.)

 

Scripture as Inheritance, Not Awakening

We no longer read these stories to awaken.
We read them to reinforce who we think we already are. To justify the tribes we’ve inherited.

But the scriptural figures say something deeper:

  • Noah invites renewal, not legacy (Genesis 9:1).

  • Abraham walks into the unknown (Genesis 12:1).

  • Ishmael survives and is blessed outside the chosen line (Genesis 21:20).

Jesus said: “Do not say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Matthew 3:9).

Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring” (Galatians 3:28–29).

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said: “God does not look at your appearance or your wealth, but rather He looks at your hearts and your deeds” (Sahih Muslim, Book 32, Hadith 6220).

These voices—when heard beyond religious dogma—are invitations to transcend identity, not reinforce it.

 

So Who Are You, Really?

You are not Jewish because your mother was.
You are not Arab because your uncle was.
You are not Gentile because some rabbi called you that.
You are not blessed because a book says so.
You are not cursed because a prophet supposedly cursed your ancestor.

You are who you choose to become—now.
And if you can’t become something beyond your inheritance, you’re not free. You’re still in Egypt.

Real identity is not something you inherit.
It is something you awaken to.
And that awakening cannot happen while you are still clinging to the names, wounds, and claims of the past.

 

Time to Wake Up

We are not what we have been told.
We are not our ancestor’s myth.
We are not the shadows of Ur, or the deserts of Arabia, or the temples of Jerusalem.

We are here. Now.
And the stories we choose to believe will either bind us to the past or set us free to become human again.

It is not too late to wake up.

But it will be, if we keep mistaking the voice of our ancestors for the voice of the Divine (or that which gives you breath).