Welcome to the Pigeonhole

One of the things we humans love to do in varying degrees is label things – especially each other. If your skin is a certain color, it’s assumed that you behave or think a certain way. The same goes for where you live or come from. We've been eagerly pigeonholing since ancient times.

I often joke with friends about astrology, and one reminded me this week that it’s not scientific. I was born near the end of August, and top astrologers can’t agree whether I am a Leo or a Virgo. That makes me a bicuspid, I guess, LOL. But it assumes I have certain personal characteristics. The interesting part is that the sun actually appears to cross more constellations in the universe than astrology gives it credit for, like Cetus the Whale. Including Cetus would really bollox up the works, and all those professional astrologers who have us neatly classified might be out of jobs.

At one time, I did a radio talk show. Of all the heavy and controversial subjects we dealt with, no guest generated more calls than the numerologist, who could tell people what their characteristics were just by knowing their birth date, from which she derived the numbers that influenced their lives. My primary number is 5, she said. I have forgotten what that means.

The Elizabethans had “humors.” You were either sanguine, coleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic, and through such classifications they could tell you what bodily organ governed you, and even why you were healthy or unhealthy, as well as your general temperament.

We have more modern systems, but I wonder how different they really are. An especially popular one is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by a mother-daughter team of psychologists during World War II, mainly to determine what kinds of jobs would be most comfortable for all the women entering the workforce while men were away fighting the war. It was derived from the work of Carl Jung, and it is still in use in the shrink world. One I consulted some years back desperately wanted me to be an INFP, but I took the test a bunch of times, and it became fairly clear I was an ISTJ, although a good friend who knows about these things calls me an INTJ, which I took as kind of a compliment. I’m not going to explain all this -- it would take too long.

Another friend once invited me to lunch at a fancy restaurant. A few minutes into the meal, he shoved a clipboard at me with a multiple-choice MBTI test on it, which I dutifully filled out. He told me he was doing this to all of his friends.

This next comes under the heading of “things I should have said when I had the chance but didn’t think of until later.” I would have said, “Fred, don’t you think it would be nice to simply experience another human being without filtering the encounter through some artificial matrix to give yourself the illusion of control over it?” But I’m glad I didn’t say that. He was, after all, paying for lunch.

I think I have learned, sometimes the hard way,  that human relations are a lot messier than we’d like them to be – and that maybe they’d be deeper and more satisfying if we learned to put up with a little mess now and then, and leave the classifications on the shelf.