Please Take a Moment to Fill Out This Survey (Musings On Categories)

Kidding! I don't know about you, but I never fill out the never-ending surveys that arrive in my inbox after doctor and auto dealer visits and the like. Ostensibly their purpose is to "improve service." Um, bullshit? That might be their original intent, but I'm pretty sure they have devolved into a mechanism for making life miserable for some underling who got fewer than five stars for something, ammunition for some supervisor with low self esteem to hassle a person who's already overworked and underpaid. Most people suspect this, so everyone just selects five stars for everything, exposing the whole thing as a charade. If my Uber driver was especially good, I might give five stars and a tip, but that's about it.

I do like to fill out those surveys identifying your "political tribe," but they are basically stupid, premised on oversimplification. Here's an example, "rate from 1 to 5 your agreement with this statement (5 being the highest): In America, anyone can succeed." I absolutely believe that, so 5 stars, right? Well, I also understand that just because this success is possible, that doesn't mean that there aren't people who inevitably won't get a fair shake and will experience undeserved setbacks, especially among the poor. So does that mean I should select '3'? No, I fully believe both things simultaneously.

Then there's the related matter of how survey questions are worded. I've seen examples where surveys show nearly opposite results based on the phrasing and framing. Here's an example pertaining to contemporary "anti-racist" education derived from CRT, etc. "Do you believe children should learn about slavery and it's far-reaching impact in American society?" Yes! Now: "Do you believe children should be taught to primarily understand themselves and society through their group identities?" No! We're talking about the same educational philosophy, but emphasizing different aspects of it. Given the subjectivity of phrasing employed by too many either incompetent or biased pollsters, such opinion polls tend to be fairly worthless. Really they are just fancier, more respectable versions of what is known as "push polling." These are those "surveys" that arrive in a big white envelope from the Democratic or Republican National Committee, but which actually are tools for propaganda and fundraising. They include questions like: "Do you agree with Biden's plan to kill unborn babies?" I decided to fill one out once and answer 'yes' to all the scary questions. Since the return postage was prepaid, I just popped that sucker in the mail.

The same issues pertain to things like the Myers-Briggs personality test. I had to do one of those for an employer and quickly realized it made no sense at all. They want to know your default response tendencies to determine things like introversion and leadership. But I found that I couldn't answer anything confidently because the truth was always situational. In practice, I choose to speak and act one way in one situation or with one group of people and one way in or with another. I guess the idea is that if you know the intricate details of someone's personality traits you can tailor the office and people's assignments to fit. But that's just way too complicated. All you need is for bosses to find ways for people to play to their strengths (easily observable to the eye) and employees to be polite, diligent, and good-humored; and as long as work is getting done they should be given a long leash. 

In the end, the allure of surveys and polling will remain strong, because we long to understand ourselves. And we do this in public discourse and policy through the identification, parsing, manipulation, and prioritization of categories. Categories can be useful, but they can also be misleading. The main thing to understand is that while categories are suggestive and even sometimes helpful they are not reality itself, which cannot be captured. I don't mean in terms of scientific physical and chemical properties, though these too can get blurry at the outer edges or at quantum levels, but in terms of personal, interpersonal, and social experience, which are ever subjective and never fixed. Misunderstanding this can lead to all sorts of shenanigans and confusion and resentment. In the new "queer and non-binary" movement they got started down the path of identifying and categorizing every single internal thought or feeling relating to gender or sexuality and then assigning a name and a "letter" to it. Those letters are proliferating fast, aren't they? The alphabet people are legion! But whoever thought it was a good idea to put yourself in a box, even if it's a "progressive," social-justice-y one? Then you need to spend the rest of your life trying to wriggle back out of it instead of embracing life in its unknowable, unclassifiable glory, feeling free in the process. I guess that's why I find the queer-gender-sex movement so conservative.