Nothing is ever all one thing or all something else. Everything sits on a spectrum with infinite variation along the spectrum’s path. While intellectually we accept this fact, we nonetheless love binary thinking.
Nothing comforts our brain more than being able to reduce complexity into a simple this or that. Our success as a species was partially because of such mental heuristics that allowed us to out-compete our competition. It’s not that our brains are lazy—it’s that they are optimized for efficiency. And so the mental tricks that were useful from an evolutionary perspective are now a liability to our growth.
Simplistic binaries—us/them, good/bad, right/wrong, left/right, gay/straight, man/woman—have come to dominate the way we view the world. This reduction gives us an artificial and distorted worldview and denies ourselves the richness that makes life worth living in the first place.
It’s not entirely our fault: bad actors have since time immemorial exploited this tendency and tried to sell us on their vision of the world. It’s a fine way to sell us something or win our vote. Over time, though, the bad actors have gotten a lot better at manipulating us to think this way and we haven’t gotten much better at embracing complexity. The bad actors have been so successful in doing so, in part, because of the impact of modern media and technology. After all, there is little money to be made by telling people “hey, actually life is really complex.”1There are some exceptions where companies deliberately bombard us with complexity to throw us off. I’m thinking of insurance or investments or other services. Instead we get told “hey buy this product or your family will spontaneously combust,” or “those people in that other country hate us and want to eat our toes, so ya better vote for us.” Tactics that work stick around and be used again and again, regardless of the underlying ethics of the approach.
While we do not shoulder the blame here, we can resist. The way forward is both simple and also quite difficult.2Which is how these things always tend to go: finding a romantic partner, losing weight, learning a language, etc. They are all simple things that can be very difficult to actually do day in, day out. But just as they are important, so is trying to appreciate reality’s complexity and resist black and white thinking.
The greatest way of defeating binary thinking is to be aware. Awareness is so often the path to being just a little bit better at this thing called living. Notice when you reduce something to a binary. And then ask yourself, is this an accurate or fair way of seeing that thing? Are you really the worst person ever because you forgot your friend’s birthday, or are you just a human suffering from that terribly tricky thing called existence? Every time you catch yourself making these black-or-white judgments, stop and be curious as to whether there is more to the story. It’s not about judging yourself, so much as it is about simply noticing.
Awareness is a useful intervention in and of itself. If you do nothing else and simply notice how often you—and others—slip into the trap of binary thinking, you’ll be so far ahead of almost everyone in your life.
Next, embrace complexity. Try to sit with the fact that life is complex. It’s a feature, not a bug. There are no easy answers to important questions. And so see complexity as something to celebrate rather than resist. Indigenous and Queer people (and queer Indigenous people, of course) are naturally inclined towards this way of thinking: of embracing the inherent complexity of life, and the fact that nothing is ever straightforward. If you’re neither Queer nor Indigenous, try listening to someone who is when they talk about the world.
An initial way to test the waters of complexity is to be curious about the factors that make up your sense of identity. Despite how we are told to think about ourselves, these bits that make up the story of who we are never are black and white, and they always exist on a spectrum. Recognizing the complexity that sits within us is a useful way to identify and be comfortable with the complexity that surrounds us.
Another step is to embrace curiosity and humility. Be curious about the views of others. Seek to understand them—not as the first step in demolishing and rebutting their pathetic, incorrect claims—but as the path of coming closer to better understanding the situation in the first place. Equally valuable is to remind yourself that you may be wrong, even when—especially when—you are convinced you are right.
We can’t build a better world by continuing to act from our existing playbook. If we want to defeat hate, simply hating back has been shown not to work.3I cannot deny that hating back has a seductive quality, and the balm of righteousness can be a comfort when we feel powerless. Yet it is a cold and empty comfort that can distract us from finding a solution.
Instead, we defeat hate by listening and understanding and finding ways to be compassionate. This is necessary even when those people hold views that feel inimical to our core identity. To be clear, this isn’t advice to hug, platform, or tolerate Nazis. It is advice to understand that such divergent views are a function of the complexity of the world and of our own nature as humans. Simply put, there will always be people with views that we find challenging. We cannot wish those people into nonexistence, try as we might. And so we have to confront reality as it is, rather than as we wish it to be. Given this, we might get further in helping people grow and develop their views if we do so from a perspective of curiosity and compassion than outright judgment and condemnation. Life is simply far too complex to act as if we have all the right answers.
It’s an unexciting prescription, and I admit it feels almost comically naive to suggest. And yet in the face of globally unprecedented levels of hate, conflict, and despair, I’m not sure what else is open to us. It is clear what we are doing is not working. The first thing, then, that we need to change is no longer thinking of everything as black or white. Then we can begin to approach the day’s problems with a different mindset.
And that is hopefully a mindset that is a little more open to seeing reality for what it is: messy, diverse, wonderful, inconsistent, chaotic, joyful, terrifying…
Notes
- 1There are some exceptions where companies deliberately bombard us with complexity to throw us off. I’m thinking of insurance or investments or other services.
- 2Which is how these things always tend to go: finding a romantic partner, losing weight, learning a language, etc. They are all simple things that can be very difficult to actually do day in, day out. But just as they are important, so is trying to appreciate reality’s complexity and resist black and white thinking.
- 3I cannot deny that hating back has a seductive quality, and the balm of righteousness can be a comfort when we feel powerless. Yet it is a cold and empty comfort that can distract us from finding a solution.