Former football coach Chris Petersen, who coached for Boise State University and later, the University of Washington, became well known for analytical thinking when it came to studying footage of his and opposing players. It’s never as good as you think, Petersen claimed, nor is it ever as bad as you think.
Petersen used this mantra on everything from calling plays to blocking schemes and fell back on it repeatedly in post-game press conferences. Even amidst players and fans reveling in euphoria after a big win, Petersen often warned that there was more work to do.
It was this attention to detail in part that propelled him to unparalleled success in the world of college football.
One of my favorite sayings, for which I take full credit, posits that “Only a fool claims to know everything, while a wise man asks, ‘what can I learn today?’”
American Author Brene Brown once related that “Faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism. If you’ve got all the answers, then don’t call what you do ‘faith.’”
Our national mindset has over the years drifted into starker division, where people believe one extreme or the other—even to the detriment of their own interests. With this tendency to label others comes great peril. When we label others by attempting to fit them all into one box or another, we lose sight of what makes that person truly human and distort his or her identity. Breaking everything down into one extreme or the other limits the amount of thought needed to debate on complex issues. In this country, we shouldn’t attempt to govern based on bumper-sticker slogans and easily-derived labels.
It is easy to blame our leaders for this failure of logic, but in a democratic society, everything falls back to the people.
In a blog post titled Thinking in Grey: The Value of Seeing the World in Shades of Grey, on Medium, Thomas Oppong writes, “Most people are binary thinkers and instant in their judgments—they immediately categorize things as good or bad, true or false, right or wrong, black or white, start or finish, success or failure, friend or foe and so on—these slogans become substitutes for critical thinking.”
Indeed, the world doesn’t exist in black or white, but in shades of grey. It is safe and easy to dump everything we encounter into one of those extremes, but fallacious at best.
“Thinking in black and white,” Oppong continues, “can create a distorted picture of reality and restricts the range of our thoughts and emotions. When we look at every situation through a binary lens we are bound to miss essential details and make bad judgements.”
The tendency to box others into these false ideas seems to dominate the national discourse these days. We label others with whom we disagree as ‘communists’ or ‘Nazis’ because it is easier for us to assume the worst about someone than to attempt understanding and reasoning with that person. That isn’t to say that communists and Nazis don’t exist. Some people do inhabit the most extreme ideologies.
Much like religious extremism, political extremism seeks to divide our population into segments that make the whole more manageable. When all one hears are those extreme viewpoints, it is easy for one to become radicalized. This type of binary thinking, if left unchallenged, can become dangerous. It can lead to catastrophes like the horrific shooting last year in El Paso, Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing, or even 9/11.
Few of us are truly all the way one direction or another. That would be like saying that the volume settings on a stereo can be adjusted to either one or ten.
In order to challenge the tendency to label others this way, we need to think of life as more like a spectrum. For instance, autism, I have recently learned, is diagnosed on a spectrum. The disorder affects individuals in a range of ways and to varying degrees.
Life, religion, and especially politics should be examined the same way. We can’t all agree on left or right, but we also cannot forget that there is an in-between, to which I believe more of us should gravitate. It becomes nearly impossible to see the value in another’s ideas, or even observe the truth of his or her humanity when we shove them into one of two camps. Political discourse rarely involves that ‘somewhere in between’ crowd, but progress can scarcely be achieved without it. I firmly believe that the problems in our nation demand more ideas rather than fewer.
We can’t eliminate most of our people from the solution and still pretend to represent them. Considering only conservative thoughts or liberal ideas fails because it has left out more than half of those affected and establishes a sort of totalitarian control that can dismantle every tenet our founding forefathers envisioned for our future.
Binary thinking tends to distort our perception of reality, allowing conspiracy theories to rise up and dominate the conversation. These distortions destroy communication and ruin any chance at solving the problems that affect us all.
We may not fully agree one with other on the direction our nation should take, who we love, or what God we choose to serve. Yet, as with almost every facet of life, it’s never as good or as bad as you think.