Mere Classification

I enjoy the point of life I’m at. I’m, at least for now, through with trying to prove myself. I know it’s a boastful language to use, but at least today I feel very much so. I’ve spent the last quarter century delving into my identity, and finally at last, I feel that myself is my own. I’m feeling quite comfortable with myself, and the role that I myself play in this universe. I’m no longer a person vying for some sort of attention nor projecting myself as someone else. I no longer have anything to prove nor am I at a juncture where finding my identity means really that much to me. Truth be told, I could laugh at knowing how much time I’ve wasted in those modern ventures of no substance.

Knowing that we’re still in an age of knowledge, still being only 300 years on the tail end of the Enlightenment, I understand the need for the knowledge of this tangible and ever growing universe. However, I feel there is a definite negative converse to this search for both knowledge and understanding. I know I’ve alluded to this thesis before, but I believe in this state of human interaction it is of dire importance for us as cognizant beings to hopefully take notice of this. With this being the biological age and technological age and the humanitarian age and so forth, the ideals of classification have taken on a new high. When it comes to the dealings of science and theoretical understanding it’s of high importance to be able to look at something and to be able to know what and how that thing affects the world around you and me. I think we all understand that. Our powers of analysis and deduction accrue us the ability to look at something and say that this thing over here according to its certain attributes holds a certain value and the same is true for that other thing over there. Now with these two items being in some matter of one accord, joined by some similarity, we can take this knowledge and now classify these two separate items and join them together. Bridge the wide gap of differences and start in a direction to deconstructing what makes whatever those two things “those two things” and better understand the roles of those two things in our ever-expanding universe. It makes sense in the dealings of Anatomy and Biology and Mechanics and so forth. It works at least theoretically and maybe just a bit temporally.

However, this is the point I feel that needs reiteration, when it comes to human interaction and deviance, this classification system is a very fine line. When you classify something, human logic--which has grown a tiny fraction over time--lends us to find a name for these things. The name is based on a system of understood values, or at least a value system of compromised understanding, in which the title can give value to the group and its members. However, humans and there interactions are quite individual to that of the single being and its interactions, that it is so very dangerous to universally classify them. I walk a fine line here, because the more I seem to learn, the more I understand that humans are less individual on a broad scale and do walk a similar road as the rest of their air-breathing counterparts. Again though, me beating this nail into the ground hard, I believe that individually, no man or woman, has lived the same, and no man nor woman, living or non-living, has had the exact same interactions as the next. Furthermore, no man or woman can say that biologically, and whatever that entails, and/or psychologically, and whatever that entails, can be or will be born and live the same. We are so individualistic, in a sense, that a classification system of our animal can do a horrible damage or a horrible wrong to all those of humanity.

At least for most of my semi-adult life I’ve been a bit rebellious in my living and tried to be indefinable. Not completely that rebellious “anti” teen, but the kid who has said, “You don’t know me, and you will never define me.” And maybe that little fact right there is what gives me the prudence for this understanding (maybe it lends me to be more of an imbecile). But when you classify, meaning take away the individuality of the being and turn him into an aggregate whole, you are disrupting the nature of what it means to be human. So even more so now than ever I deviate away from any sort of classification. I don’t want to be called a Christian, rich/poor, an Atheist, a Vegetarian, a liberal, an Indian, an American, a heterosexual, a writer, an epicurean, a Republican, a smoker, a thinker, etc, etc, etc. Well it’s not completely that; it’s that I can’t just be thought as one of those things singularly. I don’t think many people can or could or will put up with that. When you call me some “thing” or think of me as some “thing,” my defense is that myself coupled with that of my life are far too complex to be considered just one “thing.” You can classify an bonobo a bonobo or an engine an engine, but when it starts becoming a heterosexual is just a heterosexual or a conservative is just a conservative or a teenager is just another teenager, you’re taking so much of the value of a person’s life and cheapening it into just one word. You and I are no longer complex living thinking beings, but we become a mere number or a terse term disengaging us from our multi-tiered existences.

I figure we’re so far into this that it’s downright ridiculous to expect people to rid themselves of this somewhat counterintuitive classification system. I mean I guess I just ask of people, the smart thoughtful type, to think reasonably before applying classifications to their fellow humans. Again, I want to state that by no means do I say that this is an easy way of life nor is it an easy ethos to live by, but again life and its choices are what define your journey, and there my friends when you look back are where you get all the fleeting value that makes you who you yourself are.


Be Relentless,
Peace
Remoy