THE DANGER OF LABELS by JC Moses

We all do it! We are all prone to Lazy thinking. We see a small news cast and we tend to believe everything is said simply because it was on Corporate News spoken by what we think is an intelligent News Reporters who lied so eloquently to an unsuspected public. We are told that if you are an Truck Convoy supporter than you are a Alt Right, Misogynist, Homophobic, Transphobic, Islamophobic, and Nazi. I guess the news station and politicians need to give reference to so many labels on communities they hate just to make sure that one of the labels may fit, if they were challenged by their ill judgements. If you are told that Palestinian People are Terrorist than we believe anyone from that Arab nations are Terrorists? If you are told that the Zionist are behind the New World Order than we should kill all the Jews? If you are part of the Monarchy than you are rich assholes who want to still control people? All the Chinese people are trying to take over Canada? If you are homosexual than you have AIDS? It is becoming confusing in this day of age of information to analyze or figure out what the Truth is. But critical thinkers from all sectors of Cultures and Nations usually don’t take things for granted, we understand that information and data come from Emotional Human Beings and data can be doctored or more prevalent today, simply don’t publish the data and keep it hidden to keep people in dark, like half of the Pharmaceutical Research done on certain prescription medications today.

Personally, I am story teller, whether the story is true or fiction, I pride myself in looking at the story from a Bird’s Eye View. Taking height on any story gives you a better perspective even while exploring the story on the ground. As a Creative Producer I listen to a lot of stories from Corporate Media to Internet Media, to books, newspapers and magazines. Why? Because I am a Creative Producer so looking at cool stories is often a part of my job. But it’s how we look at stories that matters. It is often a problem with our psyche to absorb so much information to make a decision on a culture or person for that matter. We are so quick to want a quick answer to a question? Why is that? It is because we have been conditioned to want quick answers. We live in a society that requires immediate service, immediate answers, immediate satisfaction, and immediate conclusions to satisfy our confusing minds with the mountainous immediate information provided to us on a daily basis. It is so easy to fall prey to lazy thinking, superfluous bias because we live in fear. Fear as caused us to become irrational in our thinking, fear creates a panic in our souls and thought patterns. Fear is the main reason why so succumb to such labels because it is easier to stick a label on a country, culture, government, or person than to soar to the heavens like an eagle to get a better perspective of what you are looking at. I remember well an author called Chuck Swindoll who wrote about Parrots and Eagles. Let’s us use these two birds as an analogy to Humans. A Parrot of all the Majestic Birds has a big flaw, when domesticated, it sits on its perch and eats the seeds you give it and repeats everything that anyone says without thought. An Eagle is a Bird that soars throughout the land in search of new pastures and places for its daily food. It does not repeat the same flight pattern or shall I say repeat the opinions of others, it depends on its own course of action be it wrong or good. But in the end the Eagle does not depend on any other majestic birds to survive.

We are conditioned to fear, I call our current Media today, fear huggers, instead of tree huggers. Fear Huggers create fear either intentionally to propagate ratings or to implement sinister agendas or simply react out of fear to protect their enterprise that they have worked so hard for. Can you blame certain Corporations to want to protect their investments after years of making the company grow, just to be overthrown by some truths that would devastate their whole purpose? Perhaps it’s because we don’t teach our children and adults the value and virtue of being wrong and redirecting our efforts into something profitable. It’s like the following paraphrased sticky story. A glue manufacturing company was trying to develop a glue that was supposed to be super duper strong… it was suppose to be the next best thing to crazy glue I guess. Unfortunately, the glue manufacturing produced a large batch of glue that was useless (millions lost so they thought) and the glue would not even keep together a stack of cards. I guess a mistake was made in its chemical mixing. Nonetheless, an employee was using the useless glue stick to stick notes on everyone’s desk for communication. Instead of feeling defeat and fear of losing everything with the bad batch of glue, the manufacture started to realize that Office Administrators everywhere can use this crappy glue for Post It Notes. Thus using what they thought was a defeat in producing substantial super duper glue and turned into a multimillion dollar product called Post it Notes.

Turning our fears into a different direction of thinking will keep us from making assumption and sticking labels on people. We need to be able to measure our bias on a daily basis, just has you exercise the body to keep healthy, so should you measure your biases daily to keep your mind healthy. Fear is an emotion that needs to be looked at and treated with respect because it’s an emotion that can either trigger greatness or tyranny.

Leonardo Da Vinci once said "People react to fear, not love - they don't teach that in Sunday School, but its true."

Frankly it's so true that we have forgotten the edicts of Critical Thinking, and rush many times to ill thoughts, judgements of others. The damage of sticking bad labels on people because of either lazy thinking or simply reacting to your fears can halter the development of a nation, culture, religion and more importantly each other. So next time you want to label someone with a sticky label, why not take a step back and consider the fact that you may be reacting to conditional fear based philosophy or simply falling into lazy thinking in your unaware biases.

The only label you should accept is your own label for you alone know thyself.