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I remember
reading Thomas Huxley's words, "Terribly early in life I discovered
that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a
man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police
do an unmuzzled dog." Those words took
on a lot more meaning when I was working as an administrative assistant
to Mayor A.L. Bender and he said to me one day, "If a man can
predict you, he can control you." Suddenly this
little light came on! I could see that if people can label us, to some
extent they can control us. A label tends to put us in a manageable
category and once we are part of a category, they can move us around
like a pawn on a chessboard. Look at religion.
We have fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. We have evangelicals
and traditionalists. We have Baptists and Catholics. On and on. Each
label puts us in a nice little predictable box and then politicians and
advertisers control us by feeding us what our category predicts we will
eat! Same in politics.
As long as we are polarized into Democrats and Republicans or
Conservatives and Liberals, speechmakers know exactly how to make us
dance to their tune. What if we just
said, "I am a thinking human and my goal is to use independent
judgment to arrive at decisions." How can you control
"thinking humans" and "independents"? You may be
able to come up with some general guidelines to try to control
independent thinking humans, but it is crystal clear that
control-oriented people would have a much more difficult job in
controlling them. I have always
been drawn to radically independent and unpredictable people. Many of
them are among my most valuable friends. I learn more from them than
from all the highly categorized people. Isn't learning from friends one
of the most important reasons to select them? If you let it be
known you are a strong liberal/conservative, everyone who thinks they
have a candidate or product that group is likely to like will send you
junk mail. What would happen if you answered them all, "I am one of
the most radically independent-minded humans on this planet. Give me
some facts, figures and ideas to support what it is you want me to do or
don't write/call again"? That would
paralyze the control freaks and give us a little free breathing space in
our lives. Suddenly life would be fun again and we could cut some of the
strings of the puppeteers who live to make us dance to their tunes. Everytime you get
rid of a label that puts you in a Pavlovian storage bin, you will gain a
measure of personal freedom. I like the Bible
verse that says, "For freedom's sake, he set us free." In
other words, freedom has inherent, free-standing value. And we can never
be free as long as we are iced down in someone's storage bin. Check out Dalton's
website at www.daltonroberts.com.
His writings are gathered at www.ipsfeatures.com.
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