The Value of a Name

A name is everything. It's how everyone else knows who you are and what you are. Your name, aside from your dreams and hopes, is the most important part of your personhood. If there is one thing that gives a person individuality and supersedes any typecast or category it is the fact that we all have names.

Names are greater than numbers. Names, more often than not, have meaning and history that goes beyond what a number can give something. There is a difference between "Josh" and "human #4636" My name has more value than a number, primarily because it has more meaning. It's a value that you can't put a monetary worth on. If you only number people, that makes them more of a product with quantity than people.

It's the same reason why cattle ranchers don't name their cattle. They number them. A name would give them more of a personhood that would make it harder to kill them. It creates emotions and sympathy toward the animal.

When someone goes to prison in parts of the world, or what it was like in concentration camps in World War 2, people were given numbers and the numbers took precedent over their names. This substantially reduced the value of the person in the eyes of that system, sometimes stripping their value and humanity to nothing.

So I took this picture of the floor in my building. They were a bunch of black bubbles. Pretty much all the same. Same size. Same shape. Same dimensions. Same formation. They are all of pretty low value and there are thousands of them on this floor. Since they are all the same, if I destroyed one, there would be thousands more. They are not very useful either. As a result, as individuals their value is low. So low that they all are expendable.

But if I name them, and named them each a unique, beautiful name I have suddenly turned them into individuals of intrinsic, priceless worth. Even though they share the same nature as each other I have given them a sort of personhood even though they aren't conscious or sentient, and I've turned them into individuals with unique identities.

That's often what happens when you name something a unique name. You essentially give it a personhood even if its inanimate. All the sudden I've turned a bunch of expendable unvaluable things of high supply into individuals that are now irreplaceable. That's what individuality does. It makes everything that is individualized of priceless worth because they are each one of a kind.

That's a power that naming things can do. It can individualize things that are typically cast in categories. With a name, you can have both categories and individuals exist simultaneously in a system.

If you prioritize the categories, you'll devalue the individuals within them.

If you prioritize the individuals, you'll devalue the categories.

Since our personhood as people is defined by our names, imagine the complexity of everything having its own unique name. Even individual particles across the universe having their own unique names. That's quite the unfathomable number of names for sure

Who knows, the Bible says God named the stars their own names. There are a lot of stars. Who knows what else he named.