LABELS HAVE THEIR USES

2013 January 31 LABELS HAVE THEIR USES

As a general rule I’m not overly fond of labels, but they do have their uses. 

They’ve gotten a bad rap over the years because all too often nobody bothers to look past the label to the actual PERSON.  That, my friend, is just flat out all the way wrong.  Behind every label is a real live person who has thoughts, feelings, dreams, goals, challenges, and all the rest of it.  I’m a person.  You are a person.  Every single solitary one of us is a person in our own right. 

That said, labels exist for a reason and that reason is identification.  Not IDENTITY.  Identification is what we as individuals do every second of every day, every waking hour of our lives.  We identify everything around us all the time.  We paste labels on everything automatically.  If it’s a hundred degrees in the shade we label the day ‘hot’.  If we burn our fingers we identify the sensation as ‘pain’.  We use labels.  They’re useful.  Colors, sounds, smells, taste, touches are what we live by; they are our five senses and we register their input and plop an immediate label onto whatever it is. 

We experience ourselves and our world via our senses, labeled with the language that goes along with them, and most generally we each find it absolutely necessary to confirm with our own senses whether or not we want to use a certain label for a certain thing.  If someone tells us that something tastes nasty, we might possibly take their word for it, if they’ve proven reliable in the past.  More likely, we’ll have to confirm it for ourselves, taste the nasty stuff, and probably agree with them.  That’s just the way we are. 

Some labels can tell us things about ourselves.

Height, weight, eye color, hair color, gender, body shape are all labels. 

There are a plethora of physical tests to further refine the labels.  Someone may ‘have a bad heart’, or their BMI might be 17 or 20 or whatever, or they may be physically disabled in some way, say they have a bum leg.  The tests are innumerable; so are the labels. 

For the less physically apparent characteristics, tests have been developed and we are labeled according to how we score on the tests. 

IQ tests measure our native intelligence; we are labeled by our cognitive abilities in problem solving and how well we comprehend concepts.  Expectations based on these scores can impact us and everyone around us.  If someone scores a 90, for example, nobody expects them to perform to the same standards as someone who scores 140.

The MMPI is one test that can give us indications as to the health of our psyches, our minds (conscious and unconscious, or subconscious).  Performance results correspond to diagnostic possibilities and can be a guide for treatment plans.

MBTI testing is a way of labeling us according to our personality type.  It can identify how we focus attention and get our energy, how we perceive and take in information, our decision-making processes, and how we orient ourselves to the outside world.  The information regarding those four things is correlated and another label is plopped on us.  Me, I’m an INFJ so I don’t really expect anyone in the general population to be able to understand how I work or why I do what I do.  It’s useful that way.

Labels are required on just about every last thing we buy in our lives.  Some of us refer to them more than others when deciding what we want to buy, but they’re there. 

The world we live in is filled with labels of every description and we all use them every day.  All they do is aide our comprehension, give us definition, and help us identify things. 

In and of themselves labels do NOT constitute the be all and end all of any particular person or thing.  They can be used to indicate the make-up of what does constitute the contents of any package, be it animate or inanimate; they cannot BE those contents, only represent them.  A label does not create anything except perception in the person who interprets it.

That’s my point here. 

Labels exist because we could not exist without them.  They are to be used to help us to understand the world we live in and each other, not as a means by which we can figure out who to pick on next.