THE IGNORANCE YOU FAIL TO REALIZE EACH TIME YOU LABEL A PERSON

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” ~ Harlan Ellison

As humans, we’re often defensive or even scared of things we don’t understand, know little - nothing about, or things we will never understand because we aren’t affected by them directly nor indirectly. The only way out is to unlearn our prejudices and learn to be accepting of others if we truly care about ourselves and want to get the best out of others. Labeling others can make us feel more superior, but that’s not a good habit to get into.

In utmost simplicity, the term "LABELING" means to incompletely describe someone or something by using a word or a short phrase to highlight one particular trait of that person over their other traits. For example, describing a person as "toxic" and negating other positive truths about them. 

Researchers began to study the cognitive effects of "labeling" in the 1930s when linguist Benjamin Whorf proposed the linguistic relativity hypothesis. According to his hypothesis, the words we use to describe what we see aren't just idle placeholders; they infact determine what we actually go on to see.

We humans naturally use labels because there’s so much information in the world that we can’t process every piece of it individually, hence, we group things together and we put labels on them in order to keep us from being overwhelmed and maintain our sanity.

However, the downside to labeling is that people and things can get put into the wrong group. For example: In labeling someone as a loser. What if we don’t really know much about the person and in our interaction with them things didn’t turn out right? This doesn’t make them a loser – it only means that things didn’t turn out right in that particular interaction. Unfortunately, our natural tendency is to quickly label them so that we don’t have to expend extra effort trying to understand them in more detail (because there are so many other things demanding our attention).

When we label a person, it allows us to simplify the way we represent them in our mind, no doubt, it’s useful but it’s also dangerous because labeling is based on some subjective characteristics used to pass judgement regarding things or people we know little - nothing about. Judgement can be positive, but are more often negative because study reveal that it's human nature to see and complain about what we don’t like, than to appreciate what we do love. 

Labels can be very lethal, and since labels are related to judgement, they can create: stereotypes, stigma, fears, hearsay, bias, and the inability to separate a person from the label itself. This is detrimental to the global society; because by ignoring the context of situations and blindly making judgement on groups of people or probably just an individual, we thereby discredit their life's journey. This is the beginning of discrimination and “hate culture” because we slowly begin to dehumanize people to nothing more than just a label.

The bias that is created changes one's reactions to people, which usually isn’t always a good thing. We fail to look at the bigger picture and this hurts the individuals we attach to a specific label. This creates mental health stress as people feel the pressure of having to live up to something, feeling trapped or not good enough, and sadly It is very common for people to begin to internalize their labels as well. Words hold power, and we seem to forget that time and time again.

In conclusion, be careful with the labels you put on people because they control a large part of how we interact and communicate with that person. The label controls the things you will do, the things you will say, and how you will interpret the things they do and say. People don’t belong in a box, our species are complex and to label individuals or groups of people is simplifying a world so diverse and beautiful. Humans are not items in a supermarket that need to be slapped with labels, so let's allow ourselves and others to be free to be who we truly are, imperfect but yet wonderfully unique. 

Don’t let anyone’s ignorance, hate, drama or negativity stop you from being the best person you can be. ~ Book Of Chris