Recently, at my son's urging, I watched In and Of Itself, a filmed stage performance by Derek DelGaudio. For a large portion of the performance, it seems as though DelGaudio is making a salient point about labels, the ones we accept from those around us and the ones assign ourselves as a means of self-knowledge.
If you squinted at the screen it would have looked for all the world that he was heading in a very interesting direction- but then it all grinds to a fairly uninteresting stop. He pulls out a deck of cards and begins doing trick shuffles, conjuring echoes of Rickey Jay (and his Fifty-Two Assistants). At this point, it becomes clear that, in spite of appearances, this is not a one man show about his struggles with past mistakes and the identities he has created or been forced to accept. It is, to be more than a bit unfair, a magic show. All the stuff about personality and reductive labels, objectively the most interesting part of the show, was just a misdirect. In And Of Itself is a magic show coupled with a terrific performance wrapped in a half-formed idea.
I don't mind being fooled or even manipulated when the effect is entertaining, and in this case I'd be lying if I claimed it wasn't. What I do mind is the half-formed idea.
This becomes most evident at the end of the show when, after more than an hour of advising us to be suspicious of these labels, DelGaudio walks through the audience identifying people by the identity cards they picked up on their way to their seats. One after another, he calls them by these names, nouns based on roles or self-identified brokenness, and one after another they nod meaningfully or begin to weep. The sudden rush of being seen like that, especially in a public forum, is enormously emotional for many people and, of course, enormously, even comically, manipulative.
By this point in the program, you wouldn't be blamed for wondering what DelGaudio is attempting to communicate with viewers or audience members. What is the point of reinforcing the embrace of these labels we should regard with so much suspicion? Is there any point at all? Probably not, sadly, since the purpose of the exercise was to serve as the climax of a magic act. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, other than the crime of wasted potential.
Just before that climax, DelGaudio tells the old story of the blind men and the elephant. It's an allegory to underscore the ideas related to identity, ideas that he seems to abandon at the end the show. Along with his halting, perfectly believable earnestness, he adeptly drives home the idea that, in our youth and throughout our daily lives as adults, we are labelled by strangers who don't really know us. Worse still, we accept those labels- even when they are nonsensical or inconsistent with what we know about ourselves.
As extended analogies go, it's a pretty good one, I think. He guides us through about 60% of the point he seems to be making but drops it suddenly before actually making the point. If you'll permit me, I'd like to substitute his analogy with another one.
Imagine that you are in a room with a candle. You can see people in the room as they come and go, and you can interact with them, but when they speak to you they address your shadow only because that is all they can see of you. Their reaction to you, their instant assumptions or judgments about you, are all based on the shadow they see, a two dimensional projection of the three dimensional person who is you.
These people have no doubt whatsoever that the shadow is the real you and that they understand it (and you) even though such understanding is utterly impossibly within the limits of their (and your) two dimensional imaginations. All the same, they will assign attributes to your shadow: tall, short, good, bad, pius or sinful. They will tell you that you are beautiful, that you are ugly. They will take ten BuzzFeed quizzes and tell you which Sex and the City character and Hogwarts house you are and believe with concrete certainty that these labels, silly and arbitrary, are real and binding. They will beg you to take tests "scientifically" designed to inform you and everyone else just what number you are, what color, what four letter acronym. They will take your shadow and further reduce it, and by extension you, to a word for the sake of convenience and claim that they know you better and that you now know yourself better.
As you move around in the room, the shadow behind you changes slightly depending on your position and orientation relative to the candle. You are completely unaware of this, but the people who come to speak with you will see a different shadow and will react accordingly. To some, you are a leader. To some you are a burden. To others you're nothing at all. This is confusing for all involved, of course, because even if you are the lucky sort who knows that you are a three dimensional entity and that others see a distorted two dimensional slice of you, you cannot observe your shadow directly or see yourself in the mirror.
Naturally, the other people will appear to you as shadows as well. When you speak to them, you are engaging with their shadows. Every once in a while you will see one of them rotate in the light of the candle and see a bit of what their 3D self might look like, but it's so brief and so vague that you never know for sure if even that tiny bit of insight was correct. The rest of the time, you will make the same accidental and unkind assumptions and presumptions about the people around you as you operate in the dark just like everyone else.
You can see how this situation, however hypothetical, can be quite frustrating. Even so, it's a more or less livable one. You could quite easily and happily get along in this kind of sci-fi dystopia if it weren't for one thing: the tendency to accept those labels.
You may even be aware that those around you are describing your shadow and that the tags and attributes are largely meaningless, but the pull of the label is intense. The appeal of confirming is enormous. We recognize behavior in ourselves and others when they align with the labels and shun people with social neglect by choosing not to recognize behaviors that do not align. When you don't act like a 7 or an ENFJ or a Purple or a Samantha, you worry that people will think you're "not acting like yourself," when, in fact, the "yourself" in that statement refers to a reduction of a shadow of you, at least two levels removed from anything you should worry about.
When we accept those labels as our core selves, we can do a great deal of damage to ourselves as well as the world around us. We use our labels to excuse antisocial behavior. We use our labels to continually punish ourselves, to attach past embarrassments or mistakes to us like Jacob Marley's ghostly chains. The worst of it is that there's no point. The person you're excusing or punishing doesn't even exist.
Again, you cannot see yourself or even your shadow. You have to take someone else's word for it, and that can be quite dangerous. These labels and judgments can be strongly colored by their world view as well as the awful things they may have been made to believe about themselves. Worse still, they can just lie to you. They can construct complex schemes, insidious messaging to tell you who you are relative to their product or ideology and manipulate you into spending your money, your time, and your entire self-concept on their behalf. And if you think your label is your shadow and your shadow is you, you might be helpless to this kind of thing.
In this tortured analogy, every once in a while you may sneeze and touch your face. Oh, I've got a nose here. Not small but not large. A medium nose, I guess. And over here I've got some disappointingly large ears. The people around you may see you as someone with small ears and a large nose, for example. You may be so familiar with those descriptions that you don't believe your own hands. How can I have big ears if the world says they're small? Am I a living a lie?
Probing your face gets confusing and messy. It's far easier and fun to take a test to quiz you who you are. We use personality tests and other labels and roles as a means of defining ourselves because, in this hypothetical scenario, we can't see who we are. We think of the resulting numbers or colors as a diagnosis, a scientific declaration of our true selves.
I'm a seven, so that explains all that stuff I do. Of course, I took the test again and was a four, so I don't know if that's good or bad. I'll assume that it's good, which is just what a seven would do!
We assign so much meaning to these tests that it's sometimes hard to shake the notion that these quizzes explore only the surface of our personalities and often consist of only a handful of questions. Even the truly fancy ones used by large businesses are embarrassingly simple. Hiring and placement decisions can be based on a quiz consisting of 30 words to click about how you see yourself then another list describing how others see you- i.e. your shadow and your 3D self. But since your shadow changes the one list seems meaningless, and since your self-perception is often polluted by labels just like the ones this test will generate, the value of the other list is also highly suspect. In other words, take enough of these tests and it will change how you see yourself enough to produce a similar result on the next one, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The term "plausible result fallacy" isn't a real thing. I made it up just now to describe our often misplaced trust in algorithms to know the unknowable or, at the very least, unknowable in the context of a 30 question quiz. If we put the data into the machine and out a plausible result pops out, we don't think twice about it. We buy it all. If a consultant issues a report based on unsound methods, we completely accept it if the result is something we expected. More and more we rely on technology to tell us who we are, a question only we can answer and only after years of work. We put the data in and trust the result because, sure, I seem like a seven. Or was that four?
We look at this as a way of knowing ourselves, even when the results seem to point us away from genuine self-knowledge. We trust these labels implicitly. We treat the labels as if they represent us, as if they are us. We do this even though they hold no more meaning than our Twitter avatars.
In spite of what I see on the other wall and what I hear from the other shadows, I know that I'm different things to different people not because I'm duplicitous but because some circumstances bring out parts of my personality that are muted at other times. It's all part of a three dimensional whole. And while I may never fully understand the whole, I recognize that pretending to understand through these reductive techniques is both dangerous and counterproductive. So, no. I do not wish to take your personality quiz.
And If I were filing into the auditorium to see DelGaudio's show, tasked with selecting an identity from the finite list of reductive labels on the wall, I suppose I'd pick the card that says, "I'm just here for the card tricks."