Less than a year ago I read the Eckhart Tolle book “A New Earth” and talked about it here. Now I’m reading what is considered his main text, “The Power of Now.”

Tolle’s main point—one that hardly originates with him—is that “egoic” thinking is the source of a lot of unhappiness. Egoic thinking is “I” thinking. For example…

“I am a millionaire and so I am awesome.”

“I have a beautiful cat therefore I rule.”

“I wrote a great piano sonata therefore I am the best.”

But it’s not just affirming statements, it could be…

“I have an IQ of 45 therefore I am stupid.” (Frankly, 45 is such a low IQ I doubt the idiot would even be able to form that thought.)

“I lost my wife to a better looking man therefore I am a loser.”

You get the drift. Who thinks this way? Pretty much everyone. Tolle argues this way of thinking is so built into our culture that most people are unaware that there even are other ways to think. Certainly I am guilty of this kind of thinking, though I am trying to do less of it.

I struck me today that there’s something sort of anti-progressive about Tolle’s argument. (By progressive I mean politically progressive: vegans, Mother Jones, Move On etc.) The progressive movement, at least its academic component, is very tied up in identity politics. “I am a gay, African American/Latino from a third generation middle class family” …that sort of thing. Borrowing from Marxism, progressivism is, well, frankly obsessed with defining people via classifications. Even though Tolle is associated with fringy, peace loving, new age types, I see a certain conflict between the two belief systems.

Frankly, plenty on the right are obsessed with individual classification too. “I am a God fearing conservative from Alabama” and what not. But you don’t get the sense the right is focussed on gender, race, class etc. to the degree the left is.

Oddly, this reminds me of my recent article on the 80s kung fu flick, “The Last Dragon.” I argued that Leroy, the African American hero of the film, essentially redefined himself as asian–he took on a new racial identity.

This kind of cultural switcheroo might just sound like a gag played for cheap laughs but I think it really is the “soul” of the film, arguing—just as your college sociology professor would—that race is a social construct, one we are free to dismiss when we find an identity more to our liking. Granted, the embrace of blackness by the Chinese trio seems a little phony—a desperate grab at hipsterdom—but Leroy’s comes across as real; even though he’s from Harlem, he finds a path and identity in the East.

Tolle would probably argue that Leroy should dispense with any racial identification (and as I think about it, maybe that is what he really does.) But the movie does address the impermanence of these kinds of egoic constructs.

I am awesome.