Permission to be (or not to be)

The power of words is a long tradition in the history of humans. Among them, Christians believe that the Word of God existed before anything else and even created everything. Prayers and enchantments are also an integral part in most cultural traditions. Others rely on words inscribed on the walls or in little pieces of paper embedded in the clothing. And all around the world words are the machinery that inspire love, start and end wars, move the philosophy forward.

Among the many types of words, some common to all languages, others exclusive to a particular one, the most powerful and most common are the names: the words used to designate things or groups of things, ideas, people, objects in your pocket, colors, feelings. Everything has a name and, in fact, when something cannot be named (that is, when it cannot be identified) it becomes a mystery, a problem.

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Proper names are even more powerful than regular names, because they designate a single individual instead of any member of category. Indeed, there is a common trope whereby knowing the true name of a being gives you some amount of power over it, as is the case of Rumpelstiltskin, where knowing his name would save you from having to give up your firstborn child. In other set of beliefs, mentioning the devil (or just an evil character) can summon it to make you feel its wrath or at least bring bad luck. That is the case of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, who is referred to as "he who must not be named", the Candyman in the homonymous horror series, or Sauron in the Lord or the Rings.

In everyday life proper names are also very powerful. Just think how important it is to know the name of the place where your are going when you ride a taxi: if you do not have the name of the place it is almost as if it did not exists. The same applies to phone numbers (a different kind of "name", but a unique identifier anyway): it does not matter how many phones someone has, if you do not have one of his numbers you will not be able to call them, just as if they did not exist.

Sadly, a similar situation happens with the failure to identify a disease. Think about these people who suffer under an unspecific set of symptoms and, after visiting the doctor (or several of them), they go home empty handed, without a diagnostic, just knowing that they are not well but feeling like fools because their ailment has not been pinned down and they are simply dismissed a whiny and hypochondriac. Once again, a disease that does not have a name just does not exist.

Surprisingly, many people these days know their names well enough but they keep trying to understand who they are, as if they did not know their true name. And I can only wonder why it important to hang labels from yourself, as if the number of tags that hang from a person would increase their value. Is your work better or worse just because you are a member of a bowling club? Do you love your children more or less because you attend a certain temple? I do not think that membership (a.k.a. identification) of any group changes our intrinsic values of itself, so why the need to find names for ourselves?

I have com to the conclusion that the identification with a group can fulfill two independent needs. The first one is the need for belonging: both feeling as a member of the majority (being "the normal") or a minority (where you are few but not alone and that pulls you closer together) covers the intrinsic loneliness of humans as immortalized by the famous quote by Orson Welles. 

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

The second reason for self identification is legitimating our own acts or omissions: if you are Czech and Czechs drink a lot of beer that allows you drink a lot of beer, because you are one of them; conversely, if they do not drink wine you are pretty much exempt from drinking it, because nobody expects it from you. Of course, if you are a gourmet as well you are expected to enjoy wine, so you will have to "switch hats" depending on the situation to behave like a Czech or like a gourmet. In principle, for a self-assured person this kind of legitimacy should be unnecessary: if you feel like drinking beer or wine at a given time just do it, there should be no need to find excuses for it.

The problem appears when these actions are, in some way, socially inadequate or frowned upon. If a girl loves running around and climbing the trees instead of fulfilling the socially vetted stereotype of calm and obedience she will be tagged by her parents as "a very active girl" so as to make the unusual behavior more palatable for the neighbors or the grandparents. I personally find it a bit sad that, rather than accepting people the way they are, we insist on shoehorning them into a number of preformed molds, which carry different degrees of acceptance. Particularly because of the self-fulfilling prophecy effect: once you put a person on a category based on a small subset of the typical traits they might be compelled to "fill the shoes" by adopting all the other traits that they did not have before. Think of the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, where a smart but impolite child that snarks at the teacher, gets dubbed as "problem child" and is sent to detention, only to pick other anti-social behaviors from the peers.

So I leave you today with just a reflection on self-identification. Do you identify yourself a lot or just occasionally? Do you do it for a sense of belonging or for legitimacy? Asking perhaps for permission to be the way you are? I hope that, whatever the answers, you have a great evening.