The Crafty Use of Labels
By Louis-Dominique Dubeau
Hello everyone, I am going to write a little bit about something I have noticed recently. I have started seeing how I use labels about myself as way to explain my behavior. What I’m talking about are excuses like “yeah my desk is a mess because, you know, I’m lazy” or “I can’t help having more cake because, you
know, I just love sweets”. It is not whether the statements are conventionally true or not which is the problem here, but how I found myself using the labels like “lazy” and “just love sweets” as means to keep habits intact. (It would be possible to say that I used the labels to justify my behavior but it is not really a matter of being justified or not.) These labels just provide a way to solidify the self: if my behavior is such and such, it is because there is a set of static properties which are such that I behave this way. In other words, by using the label “just love sweets” I am claiming that when I have another piece of cake, I could not possibly behave otherwise. It is not a matter of choice because the static property “just love sweets” is responsible for my behavior. The use of labels like this is a neat way to exclude some behavior from the eye of awareness because the conclusion about the origin of this behavior is foregone.
It seems to me it is possible to acknowledge a situation–”yes, my desk is messy,” “yes, I’m having more cake”–without having to provide a pseudo-explanation in the form of “I’m lazy” or “I just love sweets.” And if there are no labels to explain the behavior, whence does the behavior arise?
