4 June

Re-posting this from inside another thread. This, to me, is another big disease of our age. Binary thinking. And as the article says, driven by one thing mostly - anxiety. Anxiety about ambiguity, although I think maybe just plain anxiety too - people are less tolerant of ambiguity when they're anxious. You could think of so many examples of things that get split into binaries in our life. Lefties versus Right. Homosexuals versus heterosexuals. Men versus women. Science versus religion. Climate change versus no climate change. You could keep going with this list all day I think... I also often see what I think is probably the wrong response to this, and that is to say that everything is a 'moderate' mixed amount of each of the two extremes, in a binary. That's back-to-front, the binary artificially split the playing field into two halves in the first place, mixing a moderate amount of the two extremes together won't undo the split. Moderation in that meaning would be like believing in climate change from Monday-Wednesday, and then not from Thursday-Sunday. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/empathy-and-relationships/201701/when-binary-thinking-is-involved-polarization-follows