Difference between revisions of "Abstractions of categorism"

Revision as of 23:11, 26 August 2014

While facets are how the categorism is done and foci are what categorization it is done by, abstractions are problems with the categorization itself: Ways in which categorization can be used to create or sustain categorism. While categorization as such is necessary, each particular categorization made by human beings is a more or less arbitrary social construct. That which is categorized in a certain way can always be categorized in another way instead. Such choices are made for better and worse. When categorization creates or supports categorism, it becomes abstractions of categorism. Below follows ten examples of such abstractions.

1. Co-definitions, used as Guilt By Association or Association By Guilt

Two concepts that don't fit all that well together are defined as being the same thing. One of the concepts is a category of people. The other is an action that is considered bad, or a category of people defined as those people who do that bad thing.

For example, a preacher who want to paint gay people in a bad light may fight for a discourse where unprotected sex with strangers is included in the very definition of homosexuality. Either that, or simply use a concept of “sexual deviation” where homosexuality, pedophilia and self-destructive forms of promiscuity are defined as being inherently the same concept.

2. Distinctions, used as Guilt By Disassociation or as denial of rights:

Two concepts, one of them being a category of people and the other something completely different, are defined as being incompatible. For example defining being a “Muslim” as being a priori incapable of wanting democracy and human rights.

3. Equivocation

Why settle for one set of bad definitions, when you can use several at once? Any position can be glued together by using overlapping and conflicting definitions of the same concept at the same time.

4. Incomprehensibilization of the categorization

Making the categorization hard to comprehend. The lines of who is or isn't included and on what basis people are included or not bay be fuzzy, mystic, self-referring, or simply undefined. Either way, it may be taboo to discuss – complete with a whiff of conspirationalism: “If you question the concept of this category of people, it's probably because you are secretly one of them”.

5. Categorization by Narrativism

If “truth” is whatever makes a good story, we only need to know that the bad guys are the bad guys. Definitions and categorizations are secondary, and does not need to be comprehensible. To even try to analyze them would be to ruin the good story. Which may be something that only one of the bad guys would do, anyway.

6. Dichotomism

The idea that a person is either one category or another, as if the categories were the real thing and the humans only examples of them, rather than the humans being what's real and the categories being crude attempts to get an overview.

7. Zero-category

A lack of intersectionality goes well together with making the normative category invisible. It thus becomes easy to talk about “women” as a concept that actually refers only to white heterosexual women, “people of color” or “muslims” as a concept that actually refers only to heterosexual men of that wider category, and so on.

8. Loosely defined Abyss-category.

Having defined a certain category to be The Evil, anything that feels bad can be squeezed into that concept. For example, the word “fascism” often refers to any political position the user of the word happens to dislike. This usage of the word is unfortunate not only because it's often unfair, but also because it makes it harder to criticize actual fascism.

9. Categorization by emotional bias

People you dislike are exempt from categories with positive connotations while people you like are exempt from categories with negative connotations, and vice versa.

10. Termism and the “No true Scotsman” fallacy

The idea that stereotypes are always true, because people who don't fit the stereotype doesn't count: If they were truly part of the category, the stereotype would fit.