4. Saving that Shröddinger’s Cat

(for an impersonal you)

How do I know who I am? Sometimes, I just listen to what people say in my regard and accept it. Why not? 

Categorical thinking can be useful unless you start directing your judgment at everyone. In my humble opinion, it should be something private like the basement of your house. You don’t usually invite your guests into the basement; you bring them into your living room.

Classify people around you deep down inside your mind to pave the way for communication with them on your own. When you start summoning like-minded people in your basement, it can bring you more harm than good. And that’s why👇

A categorical judgment seems irrevocable and peremptory: cats are cats and dogs are dogs. Things are as I see them and that's it! Your mental basement accomplices will help you put everything in the boxes on shelves, convincing you even more of the solidity of your judgment. You are okay now. There is nothing wrong with you in your eyes.

However, look around and see how many buildings there are in your area: each structure has a basement where you can be placed in a box on a shelf. Oh, yes! You are a cat for someone else’s mindset, settled in a CATegory box. 

Why should I care? You might ask me. First, it’s an action for self-awareness. What claims do they have against me and are they worthy of consideration? Secondly, a toxic mechanism of repulsive and unflattering tags can covertly infect my image. I should find the courage to face it.

Unfortunately, there are very hurtful labels uncompromising people hand out thoughtlessly, and I must accept their judgment as it is for it shows the educational level I will have to deal with. I’m curious about what they mean and all the adjectives they attribute to the category they say I belong. It will inform me of biases I may wish to work on. My curiosity will help me deny belonging to a category or confirm it inside my mind. If they say I am a perfect, respectable, and considerable individual, what’s not to like?

In my view, “curiosity killed a cat” means that if you examine a category, you find the details that explain the situation better than somebody's judgment assumes. 

After considering all the pros and cons of the category, I can establish my identity autonomously and try to answer the question of who I am by myself. Can I?

Categorical thinking simplifies our lives, but it also can place us in the category of imperceptive people. Superficial categorizers start their public reasoning with typically negative affirmations about a certain group of people: (all) men, (all) women, (all) rich/poor people, blah, blah, blah.

Let me also become a categorizing observer for a while. You judge me, I judge you, so, canonically, we are even. Let me go down to my mental basement and open your cat box: will the integrity of your goods be compromised and will your goods be considered of the best quality so far? Why did Schröddinger have a cat in the box: neither a common mouse nor a lizard? Cat stands for a category, as I see it. If you categorize a phenomenon as dead silly, you stop paying attention to it and get annoyed. This is very unclever of you.

As long as you are an observer you can change the situation. If you are a cat in the box, you are vulnerable—the observer can decide your fate. He can say you are dead, walk out of the room, leaving you in the box, and sooner or later, you will be dead, or he can save you.

Besides, each observer is a cat, observed by the other mental basement allies who keep their measuring scales to themselves, so the observer doesn’t know he is a cat. The universe is loaded with observers. It can’t be otherwise because this world is mindful of its survival.

The simplest way to find out if the cat is alive is to meow at the box, using the cat's language. The cat can also save itself by meowing aloud. Cats are unfit to deliver a speech to protect their right to life, and this is the basis for the ease with which they can be placed in a box with a deadly mechanism so that people look at the box and assume whatever they prefer. Will there be a brave soul in the crowd who will ask, what are you doing here? Come on, free our fellow citizen Cat!  Will a Cicero appear or not? Who knows. 

Nothing will be clear without classification: uncategorized things cannot be studied. To categorize myself well is to tell the world how mentally strong I am. Unlike self-identification, self-categorization involves the number of topics I am ready to discuss. Am I prepared to discuss universal laws or talk only about cooking? If you are available to discuss socks only, you estrange people who discuss gloves, thus limiting yourself to a single category of topics.

Let’s suppose I say, I can't accept a closed-minded person's point of view (I can when they are field experts) because they usually tend to generalize everything out of their competence, demonstrating incoherence and loss of reason. In that case, I activate an abolishing mechanism such as disregard, which erases people addicted to generalization from my consideration. In other words, I put them into a mental box with the "Categorical thinking" sticker and seal it. But before doing that, I have to listen to what they say, because I normally don’t generalize (sometimes, I do).

Since I created a box, generalizers now exist in two states for me, both dead and alive: they exist but I disregard them until I’m forced to communicate with them.

If someone's thinking puts me in a category box, it can also get me out of there, I just have to prove them wrong about me, unless I’m satisfied with a cozy pillowcase of bias with a low-quality label. It frees me from having to prove something to anyone because proving a point is difficult. 

Establishing my identity as a worthy individual is hard. Period. I must do the preliminary work. Categorizing people is based on the mindset of both observers and cats. 

I must classify observers to understand why they put me into a category box. And I shouldn’t allow them to measure my narrow-mindedness. 

It's important because, most of the time, the observers observe to hand out what they have in abundance, and that is not only catnips and carrots but sometimes also sticks and stones. I prefer to classify them by the level of approachability. Do they know how to communicate with different mindsets? Do they understand the importance of positive public feedback? If not, I’d better leave them to their own devices and see how long they will be afloat while I learn to embrace more inclusive viewpoints.

People don't keep comfortable shoes in a box: they wear them. You don’t necessarily have to be spineless, but you shouldn’t be too tough or tight either.

Can we ever become mutually convenient? That is the question.