My Name is Bernard Marx: How We Judge Others

      Labels are an everyday facet in our society. We use them to determine the quality of a brand of clothing. We use them so we can know what processed ingredients we're packing our bodies with. Heck, I even have to use them on this blog post so my professor can identify it as one of mine and grade me on it. Needless to say, labels are pretty important.

But they can also be a form of predestination, just like the kind we see in Brave New World.

      Rather than being an “Alpha” or a “Beta,” which would determine our status in life, we—and sometimes other people without our knowing it—assign labels to ourselves and others whether we know it or not. Obviously, this leads to judgment of others, which is something we all do (you can't deny it, sorry). It also leads to others expecting certain things from you, just like society expects poor old Bernard Marx to be a perfect Alpha.

      I'll use myself as an example, using the judgments I have been subjected to in the past. I am a Christian, and to some (if not many) people, that makes me a homosexual-hating hypocrite who watches Fox News, is a rabid conservative, a Bible-pounding-fire-and-brimstone inelegant debater, an idiot who has the audacity to believe in Creationism while mainstream science contests its reality, and a person who—in the end—will eventually deny the facts if they conflict with the point I'm trying to make.

      In reality, I love homosexuals no less than I love any other of my fellow man; I do my best not to be a hypocrite, acknowledging the fact that I will occasionally mess up really bad; I loathe partisan news channels, and I attempt to avoid the news altogether; I have a solidly moderate political stance; I (at least) think that I can debate rather well, using facts and figures and saving the fire-and-brimstone stuff for when its really needed; I've extensively studied Creationism versus Evolutionism and the science behind both, and while I am a Young-Earth theorist, I strongly hold to the existence of microevolution; and whenever I encounter an obstacle in an argument, I often research, study, and think (even to the point of losing sleep) about it until I can make a decision.

      But those people didn't know me, and they didn't want to know me. For them, the label is all they needed to see.

      These labels make life so easy, but they're so restrictive and binding and destructive!

      I think an utopia ought to be a place where labels do not give people an opportunity to judge others based on a title or a name. Needless to say, our society is a far cry from this utopian vision.

      Hello. My name is Bernard Marx. I hate labels, and like the back cover of Brave New World puts it, “I want freedom” from the judgments associated with them.