The Dualistic Distortion

Day and Night. Black and White. Left and Right. Wrong and Right(Ok, that’s enough rhyming). Chocolate and Vanilla. Happy and Sad. Optimist and Pessimist. Fate and Free Will. Body and Soul. Yin and Yang. Logic and Emotion. Arts and Sciences. Male and Female. Mine and Yours. Holy and Profane. Human and Inhuman. Man and Nature. Liberal and Conservative.

Us and Them.

Humans have a problem, which we’ve  ingrained in our cultures, and therefore, in most of our ways of thinking; we are addicted to binaries. Whenever we find a topic that has two significant components, it takes very little for most people to begin thinking of those two components as the only components.  Or at least the only ones that “matter”. So if “you” disagree with some element of “my” opinion then “you” automatically become associated with the other camp. Never-mind that maybe “my” experience is outside of your sense of absolute binary.

As I am writing this, I heard about the Orlando Nightclub Massacre which happened last night. Like lots of things along these lines, and maybe more than some others, the media frenzy and on a more personal level the human reactions to this are going to intersect with a whole lot of dualistic perspectives.

People are arguing over whether this was a hate-crime or terrorism(personally I don’t see a lot of difference). It’s being blamed on “Islamic extremism” and he’s being called a “monster” which are just different ways of making him into the dreaded “Them”; “The Other”. Except he was an American citizen, and he was the friend and family member of many people, who are also horrified and shocked that this happened. We need to look further to understand what really happened.

He was a human being with emotions and ideas that were as real as any others, and those are what drove him to commit this terrible act. In using the “Us/Them” duality we distance ourselves from understanding his motivations as a human being. It’s uncomfortable for us to realize that this is a very human act, and that any one of us is capable of being a “monster” in some way or other, because that potential exists in any human being. Which is scary and can make us confront our own biases and the evil within our own hearts.

And because understanding the underlying causes(not just the superficial motivations) behind such things is a necessary first step to confronting the problems with our culture and our society, that Othering that comes with a sense of dualism is actively harmful.

Another thing that is (very reasonably) being brought up is gun control. This is another incredibly dualistic issue where again, it shouldn’t be. For some reason this, like many other political issues, devolves into an extreme binary very quickly. “We need to take guns away from everyone so this can’t happen anymore!” says one side, while the other basically says “We should give as many people guns as possible so when something like this happens, someone will be able to stop it!”

Both of these positions are incredibly naive, and based on an instinctive reaction to take a “side” based on which mistaken extreme seems more reasonable to the individual making that false “choice”.

To those who want to arm “good guys with guns” it needs to be pointed out that without proper training in how to handle a gun, especially in high pressure situations, it’s very likely you’ll do more harm than good, with friendly-fire and the like. That’s not to mention how many people fail to follow basic safety procedures with guns. I say this as someone whose life was actually saved by a properly trained “good guy with a gun”(a friend of mine with his concealed carry permit who protected a group of friends from an armed criminal).

To those who want to start “taking the guns away” it seems pretty painfully obvious that black markets for guns will always exist, and that mass shootings happen even in countries that have fairly strict gun-control laws. Maybe not as often, but they still do.

I think we desperately need more flexible and nuanced ways of approaching things. The perspective that treats “compromise” on political issues as heresy is only a couple of steps away from the one that condemns gay people to death because their existence doesn’t jive with their religious or personal perspective.  Never-mind the political fact that compromise is the only thing that gets anything useful done in political democracies!

But I digress; this post isn’t directly about politics, because the fucked-up nature of our binary political system is a secondary problem. The arguments over abortion, over gender and sexuality, the arguments over gun-control, over big government versus small government, over use of military force versus pacifism, etc, etc, etc… they are all based on the fundamental cultural error of thinking that there can only be two real choices or opinions for most things. The same applies to arguments about religion(“our religion” v “everyone else’s”), international politics(“us/our allies” v “our enemies”), interpersonal/relational conflict(“men” v “women”), race (“black” and “white”)and more.

We do this even though, on some level, we know better. We know that categories like this are mental stereotypes that trick us into thinking we understand a vastly oversimplified reality. If a person takes a minute to consider what it would actually take to convince them(rather than some abstract Other person)that they should go and mass-murder a bunch of people, it will quickly become apparent to them that it would take a complex interplay of negative influences and bad experiences through life for a person to get to that point. People aren’t born “monsters”; even if humans have some negative predispositions, we have to grow into them to do something so fundamentally horrific.

The same goes for people who are less blatantly destructive, like politicians or the corporate psychopaths who are perfectly happy to bomb or starve those weaker than them for their own benefit, because their binary thinking lets them dehumanize others and value money/power as the measurement of “success” v. “failure”.

Or for that matter the parent who harms their child by teaching them that “boys don’t cry” or “only sluts dress like that” or “participation ribbons are for losers” or “only our religion is correct” or pressure them to follow the parent’s conception of “success”. This list is long, and these sorts of things all have underlying binary dichotomies that teach children to think in those terms, and whether they eventually accept those exact concepts or not, they are often trapped in that thinking.

So why do we fall into these ways of thinking? What is it that makes binaries so appealing anyway?  Should we try to reprogram ourselves as a species? Can we even do it?

Well a lot of these issues are touchy ones themselves in academic circles. Thankfully I’m not an academic, so I don’t mind just speaking my mind without hiding behind academic double-speak and technical language that’s about as clear as mud! [note: comment if you think I do this; I want to be easy to understand!]

So it really boils down to this: as humans, we’ve used binary judgements of situations and people to help us survive since we first developed rudimentary critical thinking skills(Academic writing warning!). All animals have some basic wiring that is tied into a “safe” v. “unsafe” binary judgement. Lots of us also have the “beneficial” v. “unhelpful” judgement as well. It(mostly) helped our species, and occasionally even individuals can do pretty well with it. But nature/evolution is a heinously cruel parent and doesn’t really give a shit about individuals; lots of people get screwed over by “survival of the fittest”, depending on what traits are most useful in the moment.

So we instinctively apply these fundamental dichotomies when it comes to food and mates. Which is all well and good(maybe)? And because we are extra-complicated animals, who have developed creativity and critical thinking, we’ve taken these tendencies a few steps further. We’ve gone and mutated them to “help” us make more complex judgements that aren’t as “simple” as, say, who we should have children with……

In other words, that instinctive use of binaries is a simple throwback to other basic binary decision systems from our deep evolutionary past. As I’ve already pointed out, they clearly aren’t capable of handling the complexity of human society, but people keep trying to instinctively use them anyway. And it’s not as though humans haven’t developed a couple of different methods for understanding and decision making. Plenty of those have mistaken binary ideas about reality also, but from a critical point of view, those can and should be broken down so that our decisions are more nuanced and reflective of the complexity of reality than simple dichotomies.

So to me it seems that if we can, we should. Since we have methods of approaching reality that are more reflective of that reality than dualistic “this or that” choices we should use them! If, in teaching change, we can prevent one person from going on a shooting rampage, or bombing an abortion clinic, or even just committing suicide, we should do whatever we possibly can as individuals to make that change happen!

What we need then is to make an effort, as individuals, as parents, and in whatever institutions we participate in, to teach and influence ourselves and those around us to be better thinkers and actors. Whether it is about the man who murders people at a gay nightclub, or about awful presidential candidates, or an acquaintance or friend who expresses an idea that seems distasteful, we need to try to understand them. And in understanding them, try to help the people we interact with(friends, family, children) to confront and bypass their own binary biases.

Only each of us working within our own spheres can change culture. It has to start like a snowball rolling down a blanketed mountainside, culture change happens with a few people compounding their influence through others and butterfly-effecting all over the world.

Certainly, there is always the temptation to boil things down because, unfortunately, lazy-thinking is comforting and easy.

But it can be interesting to break down and overcome binaries too. Once you start looking for binaries that don’t really make sense, you find them all over the place. And breaking out of them can really help in life; a clearer view of reality is just comprehensively useful, but it also means you avoid the stress of cognitive dissonance that crops up when binary thinking is confronted with situations that “don’t fit”.

And beyond self-interest, we owe it to our children; it is the one thing we can each do to help make the future a less-judgemental and partisan place.

It will probably even help prevent a few massacres and maybe even wars! So, maybe worth the cost of a little effort of self-betterment, and confidence that we can change the world?

I think so. Let’s do it!