Taxonomies are immensely valuable in helping us categorise things and form mental shorthands to understand reality. They can also be immensely misleading and constraining when we forget what they're actually for.
Taxonomies -- literally 'the arrangement of names' -- gives us frameworks, lenses, boxes into which to sort things. (They are also a tool, per yesterday's post, by which the state can more effectively control the world -- which is both a desirable and undesirable thing.) But, also per yesterday, taxonomies are not themselves the world. The map is not the territory
This legibility disaster pattern repeats itself across many domains. Scott gives us dozens of examples spanning urban planning, agriculture, census-taking, more. The failure follows a Procrustean pattern:
Make a map to accomplish systemic goal
Reality is too complex and refuses to fit into map
Remake reality in the image of map
Systemic collapse
The more we treat taxonomies like they are the territory, the more we err into decisions (personal and systemic) that push towards systemic collapse. The more we become averse to the messy complexity that is life itself, the more we cleave towards simple solutions as seeming more appealing (because complexity is hard; but It's Complicated).
This all sounds very governance- and systems-focused, but consider how this applies to, say, gender or sexuality. Taxonomies ('labels') are useful for specific things, but when we treat them like they are reality rather than a handy abstraction of it, we run into serious problems. Also, we must also remember that taxomies are inevitably created by people. Lots of these are just those that we happen to have inherited from previous people, often startlingly recently. And because they have been part of our milieu growing up, we treat them as if they are somehow foundational parts of reality itself.
I think this also impacts the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The taxonomies and labels that we accept tend to limit our imagination -- or our ability to really listen to the story someone else tells about themselves, instead tripping over its representation in simple terms. See: New Deep Narratives: we need new stories of what it means to be human, which I linked back in Imaginations of Politics and Governance.
It's also representative of how we view and engage with the world more broadly. James Bridle talks about this cogently and interestingly in Ways of Being.
(I actually wrote a poem last month, largely by accident, and inspired by my reaction to a few things, Ways of Being being one of them. I'm still figuring out what to do with it, so it's not available anywhere yet. But this post's title is drawn from it.)