Identity politics, as it has come to dominate contemporary discourse, presents itself as a movement dedicated to recognizing, affirming, and empowering marginalized identities. It claims to champion the voices of those historically oppressed by granting visibility and political weight to group characteristics—race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other categories of social being. Yet beneath this surface lies a profound paradox: the more rigorously identity politics insists on the primacy of collective identity, the more thoroughly it undermines the very possibility of authentic individual identity, erodes the foundations of individualism, and negates the reality of free will.

I. The Ontological Ground of Identity What is identity in its deepest sense? Ontology asks not merely who we are but what it means to be a self at all. Human being is characterized by a fundamental duality: we are both determined and indeterminate, both given and self-giving. On one side stands the facticity of existence—our thrownness into a body, a history, a social world. We did not choose our biological sex, the color of our skin, the language spoken in our childhood home, or the economic conditions into which we were born. These elements form a horizon of givenness that shapes experience and limits possibilities. Yet on the other side stands transcendence—the capacity to surpass, reinterpret, and recreate what is given. A human being is not exhausted by facticity; rather, the self emerges precisely in the tension between the given and the projected. To be a person is to be a project, an ongoing act of self-definition that refuses total closure. The self is not a static substance but a dynamic movement: it exists as the perpetual surpassing of its own determinations. This existential structure reveals why authentic identity cannot be reduced to any fixed set of attributes. If identity were nothing more than the sum of pre-given traits—race, gender, class—then the human being would be ontologically indistinguishable from a thing, a mere instance of a category. But persons are not instances; they are singularities. Each human life enacts a unique synthesis of facticity and transcendence, producing a self that cannot be subsumed under any universal type without remainder. Individualism, properly understood, is simply the political and ethical recognition of this ontological singularity. It insists that the primary unit of moral and political concern is the irreducibly unique person, not the group. The liberal tradition, at its best, safeguards the space in which each individual can freely negotiate the meaning of their own facticity. Freedom, in this sense, is not license but the ontological power to posit ends for oneself—to become, through choice and action, something more than what one was given.

II. Identity Politics and the Triumph of Essentialism Identity politics inverts this ontological structure. Where authentic identity arises from the free surpassing of the given, identity politics absolutizes the given, elevating group membership to the ultimate horizon of meaning. The individual is no longer understood as a singular project but as the bearer of a collective essence defined by historical oppression or privilege. This move is deeply essentialist. It posits that certain attributes—most often race and gender—are not contingent facts but constitutive essences that determine consciousness, values, interests, and even moral worth. One’s position in the hierarchy of identities is said to fix one’s perspective irrevocably: members of oppressed groups possess an epistemic privilege rooted in their lived experience, while members of dominant groups are inherently suspect, their viewpoints tainted by power. The consequences for individuality are devastating. The singular person disappears behind the group label. A woman is not primarily Maria or Sofia, with her particular history, aspirations, and contradictions; she is Woman, representative of a collective experience of patriarchy. A black person is not primarily James or Aisha, with unique talents and struggles; he or she is Black, embodying a shared narrative of racial oppression. The richness of individual existence—the idiosyncratic synthesis of influences, choices, and accidents—is flattened into a standardized script. This reduction is not merely descriptive; it is prescriptive. Identity politics demands that individuals align their speech, thought, and behavior with the putative interests of their group. Deviation is punished as betrayal—“acting white,” “internalized misogyny,” “false consciousness.” The individual who refuses to conform to the group narrative is accused of inauthenticity, as though authenticity consisted in conforming to an externally imposed essence rather than in freely creating oneself. Thus identity politics achieves a remarkable feat: it claims to affirm identity while systematically denying the ontological conditions that make authentic identity possible. By freezing the fluid interplay of facticity and transcendence into rigid categories, it transforms the human being from a self-creating project into a pre-programmed role. The politics that promises recognition delivers, instead, reification.

III. Individualism Undermined Individualism, as the ethical correlate of ontological singularity, holds that persons should be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to collective goals. It defends the right of each individual to define their own good, to associate freely, and to speak without deference to group orthodoxy. Identity politics erodes these foundations at every turn. It subordinates the individual to the group in both theory and practice. Political demands are framed not in terms of universal rights but in terms of group equity: representation must reflect demographic proportions, resources must be distributed according to historical disadvantage, speech must be regulated to prevent harm to marginalized identities. The logic is collectivistic through and through. Outcomes are judged not by individual merit or universal principle but by statistical parity between groups. When disparities persist, they are attributed not to the complex interplay of individual choices and circumstances but to systemic forces that must be counteracted through group-based remedies. The individual becomes a site of intervention, a vector through which collective justice is to be achieved. This collectivism manifests most clearly in the phenomenon of standpoint epistemology. Knowledge itself is said to be situated within identity categories: only members of oppressed groups can truly understand certain forms of injustice. The implication is that individuals are epistemically trapped within their group position. A white person cannot fully grasp racism; a man cannot fully grasp sexism. Universal reason—the shared human capacity to transcend particular perspectives through dialogue and evidence—is dismissed as a myth perpetuated by dominance. The result is a profound anti-individualism. The ideal of a common human reason, capable of adjudicating disputes through argument rather than power, gives way to a war of standpoints in which truth is measured by identity rather than evidence. Individuals are discouraged from thinking beyond their assigned category; to do so is to “center” oneself inappropriately or to engage in cultural appropriation. The liberal public sphere, premised on the free exchange of ideas among autonomous individuals, fragments into separate echo chambers defined by group membership.

IV. The Negation of Free Will The deepest ontological violence perpetrated by identity politics lies in its implicit denial of free will. Free will, understood existentially, is the capacity to transcend determination—to choose otherwise than what one’s circumstances, desires, or social position would predict. It is the power through which the self becomes a cause rather than merely an effect. Without this power, human existence collapses into pure facticity: we are nothing but the product of forces beyond our control. Identity politics relentlessly expands the domain of determination. Social structures—patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity—are portrayed not as contingent historical formations but as quasi-ontological realities that saturate every interaction. Individual actions, thoughts, and even unconscious biases are traced back to these structures. The language of “complicity,” “privilege,” and “systemic power” implies that individuals are thoroughly shaped by forces they cannot escape. In this framework, agency becomes illusory. Members of dominant groups are said to benefit from privilege whether they intend to or not; their good faith is irrelevant. Members of marginalized groups are portrayed as constrained by trauma and oppression, their choices limited by internalized dominance. Both sides are positioned as effects rather than origins of action. The therapeutic vocabulary that accompanies identity politics reinforces this determinism. Concepts like “trauma,” “triggering,” and “safety” suggest that certain identities are inherently fragile, requiring protection from challenging ideas or experiences. The implication is that individuals lack the resilience to confront disagreement or to revise their beliefs in light of new evidence. Freedom is replaced by safety; the open future of self-creation gives way to the closed circuit of protection from harm. Most insidiously, identity politics fosters a culture of performative conformity in which genuine choice is supplanted by strategic alignment. Individuals learn to signal allegiance to the correct positions, not because they have freely arrived at them through reflection, but because deviation carries social cost. The public self becomes a mask tailored to group expectations, while the private self—atrophied by lack of exercise—fades into irrelevance. In this way, identity politics completes its inversion of human ontology. Where authentic existence requires the courageous assumption of freedom in the face of facticity, identity politics offers the comfort of absorption into the collective. The anxiety of self-creation is replaced by the security of pre-given meaning. But this security is purchased at the price of being itself: the human subject, once a singular project open to the future, becomes a determined instance of a type, forever fixed in its assigned role.