and in the end we were all just humans drunk 24748123 We Label Ourselves and Others at Our Peril

We Label Ourselves and Others at Our Peril

When confronted with the realization that people don’t like them, there are generally three reactions people have: 1) self-blame and self-reflection, either deserved or undeserved; 2) disregard and move on; or 3) pathologize the person who’s threatening the ego. While #2 is often the most healthy and should be employed against strangers on the internet; oftentimes people are intertwined in our lives and as a result we have to choose between #1 and #3.

I think what we often see these days is an epidemic of people choosing #3. You can see it easily when, after a breakup, instead of recognizing the reality that relationships (and the destruction of relationships) are co-created, one partner or another or both turn on their ex and vilify them with the most derogatory, slanderous labels they can think of. Narcissist, sociopath, etc. I can’t tell you how many girls I’ve known whose ex who dumped them were a “secretly gay narcissistic sociopath.” We do this to protect our own egos.

Someone doesn’t like you? There’s something wrong with them. It couldn’t possibly be that you did something to them that you’re not owning up to, nor could it be that you just have incompatible personality types and that’s ok. This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who have difficult personalities or who do wrong things, but it’s a fact of life that some people just don’t get along with one another. If you put a bubbly, aggressive extrovert who loves pop music and sports in a locked room with a sarcastic alternative introvert they will walk out with all sorts of amateur-diagnoses of pathologies for the other person.

I think this lack of self-awareness is highly interesting in modern society and is one of the key reasons why acrimony is so rampant online. Looking inward is never the first reaction, and because externalizing blame and pathology is so common, it creates an intricate web of slights and acts of dominance that even healthy people feel the need to respond to defensively and aggressively.

Even if someone does have a pathology, it’s important to remember that all pathology is defined as, truly, is variance from normal behavior. Then we have to ask ourselves what normal is. Normal, it seems to me, is cancel culture. Normal is militarism. Normal is addiction to screens and sugar and alcohol and antidepressants. Normal is status-seeking behavior. Much of what is normal, I think, should be considered pathology; but it’s not, because the way we measure pathology is variance from normal behavior.

What truly determines normal among humans is power; we either emulate the powerful to try to follow in their wake, or reject the powerful and discredit them to try to elevate ourselves. In a nutshell, this is the difference between popular and alternative culture, and why popular and alternative culture will always exist as necessary mechanisms of human society, just as order and chaos are necessary for stability and progress. So what you tend to see is humans posturing with various forms of power for the authority to prescribe morality. One of those methods, unfortunately, is weaponizing labels. And what labels are easier to weaponize than pathology?

Labeling someone else immediately absolves you of any responsibility. That “closet gay sociopathic narcissist” ruined your relationship all by himself; it’s not that you just weren’t a match, or he wasn’t attracted to you — there is something inherently and fundamentally flawed about his personality. He’s a piece of trash and everything he did is invalid and you were a victim. Now, I want to be clear that sociopathic narcissists exist, and not everything has a perfectly shared responsibility. But that is more rare than you might think, and jumping to those kinds of conclusions robs us of the precious opportunity for self-reflection that may help us mature, even if it has no effect on the other person.

Additionally, there are genuine pathologies for which a label is, in some ways, helpful (thought labels are generally always reductive). And applying those labels carelessly we dilute the meaning of those labels and associate those labels with stereotypes that it might not be a good idea to conflate them with.

We live in a disposable society. Disposable plates, disposable forks, disposable phones, disposable people. Once you’ve thrown someone in the garbage, it’s easy to slap a label on them and then that’s that. But that’s not the way humans work. Humans don’t just disappear once they get labeled. They keep living their lives. Ultimately, even though there are billions of people on this planet and so many people in any given city that you’ll never see anyone again unless you specifically aim to, we’re all on the same boat, and just like wars don’t end when you kill someone — that action reverberates and ripples and guarantees the war continues — the culture war is the same way. Someone who gets canceled or labeled doesn’t just disappear. They continue to exist, and the animosity, which most likely began as externalizing a label response based on power to some perceived or real offense, festers and spreads.

What you see now with the intense political polarization and tribalism is not simply natural political divisions. It’s a complex web of traumas and hurt feelings and people punishing strangers for sins committed against them and those sins originating from flawed thinking and now everyone is walking around with a label on their forehead that they either chose themselves and wear like war paint, or that was foisted on them against their will that they can’t scrub off no matter how hard they try.

It’s strange. That’s all. I’m guilty of it, too.

If we were all, individually, much healthier, we wouldn’t be putting one another through these cycles of pain that spread like a negative feedback loop. The cycles would recede. The only problem is the institutions that are intended to help heal these cycles (religion, psychology, etc) are often wrapped up in their own agendas and biases, which perpetuate these cycles further. The cure makes us sicker.

I wonder. What if we just went back to the source of it. The source that says look inward. The source that says don’t judge. The source that says compassion, intelligence, wisdom, forgiveness and all these other virtues that make the world a better place, and if our institutions are pushing something other than these things, we can think critically and acknowledge it’s the institution that’s flawed.

Anyway, labeling other people is pretty wacky. I do it myself sometimes. I think sometimes modern society is so aggressive that it pulls you into the mud in ways that are hard to escape. I wish it wasn’t like that.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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