Consider a WhatsApp group that nobody designed. There  is no mandate. It begins as neighbours, colleagues, old classmates — people thrown together by circumstance. Over months, it develops a character. Political posts get traction. Neutral messages vanish. Members who push back fall quiet or leave. The group has become, without anyone deciding this, a political group. A pattern emerged and then defended itself.No one mandated that everyone should post only political matters. Indeed other types of posts do come.But politics dominate.

When the most vocal political members leave, the character persists. New members absorb it. The pattern has acquired independence from the individuals who created it.

This is not unusual behaviour. It is the normal behaviour of identity — at every scale.The whatsapp or telegram group may acquire a political character ,a gossip centre ,a stock tip exchange platform or some other thing—whats important that it now has a character .A character that’s independent of the members coming in or leaving.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim called phenomena like this social facts: collective patterns ,real in their effects, coercive in operation but irreducible to any individual or rven a group of individuals. A mob has a psychology no single member chose. Markets panic. Nations mourn. These things emerge from individuals and then act back on them with a force that feels inevitable.They have a character and presence independent of individuals and can coerce them into acting in certain ways( sell your stocks when there is a crash or get back your money in case there is a news of a bank collapsing).

What has received less attention is that the same logic operates within a single mind.

Ego — the narrator who says I am this kind of person — and then is governed by that same narration is, structurally, a social fact of one. In a group, the pattern forms across members. In an individual, it forms across beliefs, memories, and habits. The scale differs. The mechanism is identical: a pattern forms, feedback reinforces it, independence is acquired, disruption is resisted. Ego and social fact are not analogies of each other. They are the same phenomenon at different scales.

To understand how this works, think of identity not as a thing but as a weighting mechanism — a filter that runs before thinking even begins.

Ego or Identity does not just bias decisions. It determines which decisions are even considered.

When a policymaker identifies strongly as left-wing, equality of outcome is heavily weighted, individual incentive discounted — not through conscious choice, but because the filter precedes the analysis. Solutions outside the weighted frame simply do not appear. A company whose identity is its quarterly profit statement pre-selects which variables count; long-term resilience becomes invisible until crisis forces it into view. A parent carrying a fixed image of their child will systematically amplify confirming evidence and minimise the rest — not out of malice, but because the image governs what gets seen. And for the child ,if he identifies himself as ugly or beautiful ,loved or unloved ,it affects his thinking ,even before the thought arrives in his mind.Identities are sticky.

Here is the mechanism that makes identity sticky.

Once a pattern forms, deviations are damped. In the WhatsApp group, non-political posts get silence; political ones spark engagement. The differential reinforces the pattern. In the mind, thoughts that confirm the self-image are accepted fluently; thoughts that challenge it trigger discomfort and are discarded before examination. The system is biased toward its own continuity.

This is inertia means  — not physical inertia, but feedback resistance. The system has entered a stable state. Small perturbations are absorbed. The pattern reasserts.The system goes back to its stable state.

A whatsapp group may not be able to recognise it because it is not conscious. But as human beings we can But intellectual insight alone rarely dissolves ego. You can understand that your self-image is a construction — and watch it reassemble within the hour. In the Indian epic Mahabharata ,the villain Duryodhana tells Krishna  that he understands whats moral and whats immoral ,but such knowledge is useless to him because he is coerced by his mind to act in certain ways.

The understanding  sees through the  narrative. However It does not reach the feedback structure underneath. The groove is still there, still pulling.The muscle memory makes you go back to your habits. If you think you know that your bank balance is down ,and paying for a feast on your son’s birthday might have to be financed by an unwise loan ,there is a good chance that you will still go along. Afterall society recognises you as a wealthy man and you have a reputation to keep. Ego ruins people .Even intelligent people. Kings and presidents cant stop wars out of ego(they have their macho reputation to maintain) ,Billionaires lose all their wealth in disastrous competition etc etc

The Vedantic tradition has a name for these grooves: samskaras — latent tendencies that shape cognition below conscious thought. The systems account offers a structural interpretation: samskaras can be understood as persistent bias structures, weighted constraints that survived prior dissolution and continue to pull the system toward familiar attractors. They are the cognitive “loads” that bias the system. Just like a load can bias a otherwise fair dice ,the samskaras do so too. They are why patterns re-form even after disruption.

What breaks the loop?

The key is not what inputs arrive but how they are evaluated. Call this the processing orientation: when inputs are assessed through identity — does this confirm who we are? — the loop runs. When inputs are assessed independently of identity — is this true? is this useful? — the loop is interrupted.

The WhatsApp group that genuinely deliberates across its own political character has shifted its processing orientation. Agreement no longer flows only to the in-group. The feedback structure changes. The pattern loses its reinforcement. This is also, incidentally, a reasonable description of what contemplative practice attempts: not suppression of thought, but interruption of the identity-weighting that thought normally passes through.To watch the thoughts as they pass through the mind and not attach oneself to it ,thus taking away its stickiness --the stickiness that made pulled the mind to a particular groove. You no longer identify yourself with your thoughts ,or the grooves your thoughts tend to attract you to. You can see the thoughts and the grooves and are independent of them. You can deliberate across ideologies ,across genders,across class or race.

But a correction must be made here.

Loosening identity does not yield perfect rationality or a complete view. It yields reduced distortion — a wider search space, less defensiveness, less filtering of information that threatens self-continuity. Significant. Not omniscience.

And at the extreme, identity dissolution is not desirable. A system without any anchoring identity loses coherence — it cannot maintain goals, track progress, or act consistently. The salt doll that steps into the ocean to measure its depth dissolves completely, and takes its measuring capacity with it.

The great mystic Shri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa understood this precisely. He reached states in which ordinary identity dissolved entirely — and found himself unable to function. He retained, deliberately, a thread of individual identity: not because full dissolution was unreal, but because engagement with the world requires a minimal self-structure. He kept just enough ego to remain a person.

This gives the shape of the full model.

Identity is a stabilising constraint that enables coherent action but introduces systematic distortion. It takes us to certain stable states and makes decision making possible ,but at the same time reduces the vision of the solution space and distorts it towards certain pre-filtered angles. Rigidity increases the distortion — the more fixed the weighting, the narrower the search space. Loosening identity reduces distortion and widens the space of possible responses. Complete removal opens up the full solution space but collapses stability. The optimal zone is flexible identity — a self-model that can update, that does not require constant defending, that can hold competing frames without experiencing this as threat. A person in this zone does not become indecisive They become, in a specific sense, more accurate — because less of their processing is diverted to protecting the sanctity of the pre-ordained grove his thoughts were biased to.

This account converges, from a different direction, with Advaita Vedanta.

The tradition describes ahamkara — the individual self — not as an ultimate entity but as a constructed layer that identifies with roles, thoughts, and experiences, assigns disproportionate weight to self-confirming interpretations, and resists what threatens its continuity. The vasanas and samskaras are the residue of this process — cognitive stones  that pull the system toward familiar patterns—thinking groves . Moksha is not the acquisition of something new. It is the dissolution of these constraint structures: when identity no longer governs processing, perception becomes less distorted, action less constrained by self-preservation.

The systems account does not prove any of this. But it offers a structural interpretation arrived at independently — through feedback, constraint, and distortion rather than through scripture. That the two routes converge is, at minimum, worth noting.

Return to the WhatsApp group.

A group that can genuinely deliberate across its own political character has interrupted its feedback loop, loosened its identity constraint, expanded its search space. This is not Moksha. It is the same move at a smaller scale, with lower stakes.

The Gita's instruction to Arjuna is structurally identical: stop processing the situation through the lens of who you have decided you are. The warrior identity, the family identity, the need to be judged well — these are the constraint structures producing paralysis. What Krishna points at is not detachment from action but detachment from identity-weighted processing as the basis for action.

The freedom is not freedom from the world. It is freedom from the systematic distortion a rigid self-model introduces into perception — at every scale, in every kind of system, from a WhatsApp group to a person sitting very still beside a river.