I hate binary thinking

“Hate is a strong word”, my mother used to say. The irony of my choice of post title isn’t lost on me. Here I am writing about the dangers of reducing the world to simplistic opposites, and I’ve deliberately given this post a title that does exactly that. There were gentler alternatives. “I dislike binary thinking” would have been more accurate, but considerably less clickable. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. I have three or four different posts sitting in my drafts folder and, on reflection, they all amount to the same thing. They circle around the same idea from different directions before arriving at the same destination: the tendency to treat our own opinions as truth and every alternative as false. This black-and-white view of the world has always bothered me, but it’s taken several abandoned drafts to realise that binary thinking isn’t really the problem. It’s the symptom. The underlying problem is a loss of intellectual humility. Confidence tells us we have the answer.…