Pimping My Identity: Challenging Entrenched Lenocracy

For the past four months, my content - video and written - has focused largely on gender-affirming surgery. I wrote a retrospective leading up to travel to Thailand for surgery. I filmed a daily vlog documenting the process as it occurred. After returning to the United States, I processed the life-altering lessons surgery brought.

My single-minded focus makes sense. Gender transition, and all its subsequent benefits, has been the single most significant event in my life, second only to our son being born.

An obvious connection exists between the two events: our son's birth led inexorably to my gender transition. However, both events are important to my life for different reasons.

When our son was born, I forced myself to bow to social expectations. I allowed an external entity define my identity as a parent.

On the other hand, when I transitioned gender, I reclaimed my sense of self. I began to live in a way consistent with the person I know I am, regardless of social expectations.

In one event, I immersed myself in a lenocracy of identity. In the other, I cast off the chains of lenocracy to define my identity on my terms.

Governance by pimps

You are unlikely to find the word "lenocracy" in the dictionary - at least, not yet. John Michael Greer coined the term to describe Western society - specifically Western government.

Briefly, the word "lenocracy" comes from Latin: "leno" meaning "pimp," and "cracy," meaning "governance." A lenocracy is governance by pimps. Although the definition is a bit crass, Greer's comparison of government red tape to pimps is eerily accurate.

When a customer wants the services of a sex worker, he typically interacts with the pimp, not the sex worker. The pimp is not only unwilling, but frequently unable, to fulfill the needs of the customer. Instead, the pimp acts purely as a go-between, ostensibly for the benefit of both sex worker and customer.

Although the pimp adds nothing to the experience and services the customer purchases, he must be paid as well, and it is the sex worker's service that pays him. Because two people are now paid with the work of one person, the pimp dilutes the value of the sex worker's services.

As a result, the feasible number of pimps in the system is limited. Only the sex worker provides valuable services to the customer, and Greer predicts that lenocracies inevitably reach a level of interference where the goods and services offered by the workers become insufficient to support the entire structure of pimps and workers, at which point it must collapse on itself.

Greer uses the example of pimp and sex worker as social commentary. He observes Western governments have added many layers of go-betweens who provide little, if any, value to citizens, yet must be supported by those who do the work.

According to Greer (and, presciently, the supercomputer Joshua in the movie "Wargames"), the only winning move in a lenocracy is not to play. Greer suggests we seek to fulfill our needs on our own, with as few go-betweens as possible: by purchasing local food, making money in self-employment, worshiping deities in personal relationship, and so on.

As above, so below

Greer's purpose is to consider survival in a declining empire - the United States. We currently experience the pain of having installed layer upon layer of pimps in government who barely understand, let alone speak for, those they claim to represent.

My purpose, of course, is smaller - the individual and our identity. But as the Hermetic axiom "as above, so below" demonstrates the macrocosm within the microcosm, I find significant parallel in Greer's article and my current work.

Previous articles describe identity in Western society as a string of pathologies, not a conscious, ongoing discovery for an individual. Doctors, psychologists, and nerds in labcoats are set up as arbiters of identity.

According to Western medicine, we don't know what we feel. If we can identify that we feel, we don't know what it means. And by no means do we have the expertise to determine the contents of our own heads.

What I described is a lenocracy - relinquishing our agency to discover ourselves in our Origin of Identity to receive prescriptions from people unqualified to determine its contents. There is abundant precedent for the practice - I don't blame the human species.

Abrahamic religions have taught their adherents they can't reach their god on their own for centuries. Politicians have weaponized science to control their constituencies for centuries. It's not new - we are taught not to trust the voice inside, but to submit to people who pimp its meaning to us. A lenocracy of identity.

My own private lenocracy

When our son was born, I believed I would serve the greater good of our family best by denying everything I knew about myself and playing a role I had never chosen even to try out for.

Fortunately, I discovered techniques to help manage my anxiety and distress: meditation, running, my spiritual path, among others. Every technique was effective - at least for a while - but each layered another pimp on top of the role.

The structure could only be supported by my continued belief all the pimps of my identity were useful. If ever I discovered it was my effort that held up the very structures that suffocated me, the structure would collapse. Much of my effort and energy was devoted to keeping the lenocracy secret…especially to myself.

As Greer predicted, the lenocracy got a bit too big for its purpose. It became unwieldy, and my effort alone was insufficient to scaffold it. At the end of 2021, the structure collapsed, and I was in the unenviable position of learning what it took to survive in the decline of the previous empire I had built.

The choice of action was obvious: I must take my identity into my own hands, build a relationship with myself, and begin again. The path forward, however, was terrifying.

How precisely does one build a relationship with a person we are supposed to know intimately, yet barely recognize in our daily lives?

Personal sovereignty

A lenocracy is not necessarily evil. How much easier is it to find a label in the supermarket that reads "Certified Organic" than to grow vegetables in a home garden?

That said, what does the label mean? Does the label guarantee quality? Does the label serve the consumer of vegetables, the farmer of those vegetables, or the government that developed the label and employs thousands of workers busily inspecting farms for compliance, filing the paperwork, and mailing the certifications for farmers to apply to their products?

In the case of identity, however, any lenocracy is too much. Accepting another person's label as a foundation of your identity can only end in tears: your tears, not those who create labels to apply to yourself. Identity begins by looking within, not by looking at a social environment and choosing where the least friction will occur.

To be sure, choosing your own path is difficult - far more difficult than agreeing with somebody else. The battle for who we are - what Jhenah Telyndru calls "personal sovereignty" - is lifelong and bloody.

The effort seems difficult to justify when we could simply slap a label on ourselves somebody else defined. I could stand here: "Certified Amethysta" - given a title and permission to exist as my pimps would have me.

But we must accept and fight for the understanding none of us requires permission to exist. Each of us has an Origin of Identity that contains all knowledge of who we are. While we must mediate our knowledge of who we are with our safety within our social environment, the cost of delegating our identity to others is too high.

In my case, it cost 52 years of my life, 22 years of my relationship with my wife, and 11 years of my son's life before I recognized all of us were best served by my personal sovereignty.

As above, so below - reclaim what is yours to define and escape the crumbling empire of other people's labels. Negotiate your best life on your terms by first looking within to discover what that means for you, not for others.