"You Might Say We're Never a Non-Playable Character to Ourselves"

"But when you fully apprehend an identity as an identity, you can see it is something historically mutable and contingent: not less powerful, but perhaps less permanent—perhaps something you might join with others to try to renegotiate. If we do this, we can be subjects of an identity without being wholly controlled by it, precisely because we recognize it as a version of something that others have, too. We can live it from the inside while also seeing from the outside. We can learn to think in the third person."

Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Washington Post calls for "sponsoring a habit that philosophers call fallibilism."