Labels
It's an interesting world in which we exist, a world where many of us live in relative luxury, our lives defined by the contents of these city walls with these same grey buildings looking down at us and that same grey sky looking down at them. I can stroll down the street at my leisure and point things out, instantly recognising objects and items from around the world and able to put a name too them. I see things that not along History would have deemed as witchcraft, sorcery or work of the Devil. How times change.
We have our own magic today, we just don't call it that. It's not too different from magic after all: most normal folk will encounter it but they'll be damned if they know a thing about it. Even if the wizards and mages who conjure up this dark magic of the new dawn don't have full understanding on what they unleash. How interesting that we all apply labels to what we see today and even label their functions rather than take the time to learn what they really do.
Take the automobile for instance. To the layperson this is a "car". They don't care about its history or specifically what it is, they're just generalising. To them it's function is simply one of transporting them for their own purposes. Some may know that this is not its actual function and they may have some inkling of how the various parts work together in harmony and of the mechanics but even they mostly ignore this. Transport is the result of the functions, not the function itself.
People can't understand this modern day magic, the witchcraft of machinery. Or perhaps that is not entirely true, many have the capacity to certainly understand and acknowledge a certain area but they choose not to. If people can't handle machines, something their fellow man built and instead must rely on generalisation and simplification for such reasons as "ease of use" and stating that "they don't need to know" then it should come to us as no surprise that humans and other animals, living beings that have a much greater complexity and diversity, are also labeled and simplified, victim to over-generalisation.
We label things to make our own lives easier, to aid with communication and the ability to understand one another better via shared, simple perceptions that we can mostly agree on. However, this comes at the cost of losing understanding of the item in question and growing lazier, trying to generalise further. Why have so many complex different makes and models of car and think about it when we see that they are similar enough to be grouped under a larger banner, a larger, even simpler label that again makes things easier at the cost of specifics, of individuality, of depth.
Now all things considered as we apply this to objects, plants and perhaps even animals the costs still seem small. But...
What happens when we label our fellow people?
What happens when we judge people based solely on the large, near-meaningless labels that we have decided on for them?
Why should we bother to get to know the person when we can take an absurdly small amount of data (maybe even just a few seconds of them in our sights), decided on a label to classify that person and then not have to worry about getting the intricate details that makes this person unique or testing if our suspicions are valid?
When do we take it too far, when do we just glance at someone and immediately label them as inferior, when do we begin to hate and claw and spit and fight and shout all because of the label WE assigned to them in our minds?
I am not my job. I am not my hobby. I am not my age, nor my nationality, nor gender or skin. My voice does not define me. My physical appearance does not define me. My knowledge, customs or beliefs do not define me.
I am myself, just as you are yourself and all the people we judge with little reason are their own people. The pieces mentioned above are just that: pieces. Small little pieces, little cogs in the unthinkably complex machine that is human life. Would you judge your food by appearance alone, without taste or smell? Would you judge an entire neighbourhood as rotten due to one piece of litter on the ground? Would you...judge a book by the cover?
If you truly think that you aren't prejudiced, you're lying to yourselves. We all generalise, we all stereotype, we all label things. We all judge based on what data we have and if that is limited, we must fall back on the common stereotypes. The difference is that some people fall back as a last resort in their judgements, whilst others jump in straight away. I do believe that this is part of a survival mechanism, to draw upon past experiences, word of mouth and over-simplifications to make our decisions.
Consider early mankind, a race of social creatures who made simple tools and had primitive language skills. A hunter comes across a large animal that is mostly unmoving but appears to be alive. The hunter has heard from other members of the tribe that this animal, or one similar to it, once killed one of their own and is dangerous. The hunter uses this past knowledge of what another animal did, regardless of if they're actually the same species or not or if something provoked the first animal and decides to avoid this one. As it happens this animal was sleeping and was of a different, less violent species so even without the knowledge the hunter would have survived.
To generalise in such a way and treat all similar creatures as such threats in the future may be a good way of ensuring survival back in those early days but this is a completely different time, one where such simple and flawed methods are no longer applicable in the same way. This is the Information Age. We are taught from a young age, are surrounded with the technology the wise (and most unwise) wizards have studied and developed upon and knowledge is at our fingertips. The world is closer connected than ever before and variety truly is the spice of life.
This is not the time for caution and ancient survival instincts. This is the time of unity and exploration, of progress and averting disaster. This is the ongoing age of discovery, of change, of power that was once solely in the domain of the Prince of Darkness. What need do we have for outdated and often false labels when the information we seek is often so close at hand?
And besides...
Labels are for the supermarket, not for people.
Topic: Labels (Read 1182 times)