Either/or thinking

What it is and how it holds us back

Either/or thinking is one of the most pervasive mindsets keeping our societies divided, angry and confused.

It can take three main forms:

• concerned with truth: true vs false (more on that here)
• concerned with ethics: good vs bad / right vs wrong
• concerned with identity: us vs them

Whether we call this binary thinking, black-and-white thinking, thinking in silos — we have a tendency to dismiss it as conceptual nonsense or jargon.

But — as I hope this piece can convince you — it is so deeply rooted that it is difficult to ignore — and a quick exploration of how and why we think in this way can lead us to some interesting conclusions.

The origins of binary thinking

In his book “Black and White thinking,” Dr Kevin Dutton argued that homo sapiens evolved to interpret the world in binaries, which was crucial for survival. Berries were either safe or unsafe to eat; when we saw a dangerous animal we had to choose either fight or flight — there was little room for nuance or argument.

From here we developed a “categorisation instinct.” While it served as well as homo sapiens fighting to survive, it is less useful in the complexity of today’s world.

The development of language coded and reinforced these binaries. Many adjectives come in pairs of opposites — you can try picking a pair and looking for a word that codes for the middle ground. What is that word we find between rough/smooth, sick/healthy, wet/dry, dangerous/safe? It can be surprisingly difficult to find.

Even when language does not suggest a binary, we often misinterpret it as doing so. We interpret reports that “there is no evidence that X is dangerous” to mean “the evidence suggests that X is safe” taking a statement communicating uncertainty and turning into something more clear.

We are wired in such a way that uncertainty brings significant discomfort. Often there is no time to talk ourselves into sitting with this discomfort — our brains have already clicked into the fight or flight mode perfected by millennia of evolution, and our judgement has been made.

Looking at the illusion below is one of way of experiencing what these feels like. Most of us can see the old lady and the young woman, but it is very difficult to see both at the same time. That is our categorisation at work — our brains defaulting to clarity and resisting uncertainty.

No third possibility: the power of exclusion

This biological instinct was reinforced through the emergence of epistemology — the philosophy of truth. Aristotle pioneered the use of binary thinking through the “law of the excluded middle,” perhaps best remembered with the example:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Having established the first two premises, the third statement is objectively and necessarily true. Any other statement about Socrates mortality would be objectively and necessarily false. The law is known in Latin as principium tertii exclusi — there is no third possibility, and became the basis of Western logic for generations to come.

Dividing things into clear categories was an obsession for Aristotle — he wrote a whole book called Categories arguing that everything in life could be put into one of ten different boxes. This obsession had a pernicious side; Aristotle believed that humans were also divided into two categories — slaves and non-slaves.

This was the binary logic of true vs false, applied to the question of us vs them, and extended to the question of right vs wrong. According to Aristotle, Socrates was a man and therefore objectively and undeniably mortal — but slaves belonged to another category that justified the horrific violence wielded against them. That is the power that comes with setting binary premises upon which rational thinking often depends.

During the Enlightenment, logic and science overtook religion as the key sources of knowledge of truth. This fuelled technological development, economic growth, and a boom in literature and philosophy that laid the foundations of European democracy. Philosophers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire were based in Europe, but revolutionaries in the Americas from George Washington to Simon Bolivar were heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinking, and the US Constitution was founded on these ideals.

The Enlightenment also had a darker side that we are more reluctant to talk about. European “progress” was inseparable with the enslavement of black Africans as part of the triangular Transatlantic Slave Trade. The trade was personal and not just political or philosophical; Voltaire wrote of the suffering of slaves in Candide, and yet identified as a “merchant philosopher” who funded the French India Company that was heavily involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Enslavement so obviously and brutally violated Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and so on. The only way it could be justified was through the construction of racism — the argument that black Africans were not fully human. This was argued by proponents of religion and science, through twisted interpretations of the Scripture (the Curse of Ham being the best-known example), and scientific racism, which falsely claimed that the skulls of black people were smaller and therefore inferior. This construction of racism is one of the most important factors explaining why the legacy of European colonialism is so toxic and deep-rooted— while it is true that slavery existed across the world before the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a person’s status as a slave was usually based on the fact that they had been captured in warfare, and was not an assumption based on the colour of their skin — an act of violence that would be inherited from generation to generation.

History provides countless examples of where the “no third possibility" principle comes with a power to set the premises, divide black and white, and do harm. Extreme binary thinking is the philosophical foundation of authoritarian regimes enforcing a strict division of us (good, truth-tellers) vs them (bad, liars), with abundant examples even in the modern day.

Not all uses of binary thinking are so pernicious, of course. But the power of this mindset to do harm should be something we endeavour to learn from.

Thinking in silos: systems built on binaries

There are many more every-day examples of how the belief in binary categories has shaped thinking in the West. We often think of ourselves as either “sick" or “healthy," meaning we rarely think about health unless we are in need of treatment. That has political consequences in that the majority of the debate surrounds the state of our hospitals, rather than the everyday activities we do that move us up or down on the health continuum.

The division is even more obvious when it comes to mental health. We stigmatise people as “being mentally ill" but dismiss our own anxieties as something totally unrelated. There are examples too when it comes to politics (Republican vs Democrat, Leave vs Remain), religion (the nature of purity and sin) and gender.

Younger generations are often quicker to reject the above binaries and embrace a more pluralist approach. This doesn’t always translate into a rejection of us vs them binaries more broadly, meaning that we remain vulnerable to echo chambers.

The origin of echo chambers comes back to binary thinking. When we identify strongly by our beliefs, the lines we draw between true vs false or good vs bad inevitably become the boundaries between us vs them. We like to think that we draw the lines based on truth or morals first and based on identity second, but that is not always the case, particularly when we start to instinctively trust the group we identify as “us” and distrust “them.” That is the real marker of an echo chamber — not that we never hear the other side of the argument, but that we instantly reject it as false, based purely on where and who it has come from.

In particularly divisive topics we feel an almost gravitational pull towards one of two extremes. If we criticise aspects of capitalism, we may well hear a response along the lines of — well, communism didn’t work either. The binary distinction between communism (bad / them) and capitalism (good / us) restricts us from seeing a whole world of other options that might be much better than what we have.

Binary thinking can sometimes hold back anti-racist action as much as it underpins racism itself. The “white silence is violence" slogan motivated many white people in the Summer of 2020 to commit to speaking out against racism (silence = bad.) But by assuming the opposite to be universally true (speaking out = good), there were countless examples of white people speaking out in unhelpful ways — performative posts on social media, false assumptions of the homogeneity of the black experience, and emotional confessions that served more for personal catharsis than genuine remedy of harm.

When these actions were criticised, a lot of white people felt stuck (silence = bad, speaking out = bad too?) The resolution is obvious — the “why" and “how" of the actions are important, and often, there is not a clear, tweetable blueprint of what “good" looks like.

In fact, this is one of the key drawbacks of binary thinking — it focuses our attention on the question of what to do, rather than the often more important questions of why and how.

Learning, growth and innovation: the power of seeing nuance

A white person committed to improving on the question of how to be an advocate for anti-racism (rather than settling for the what of identifying as anti-racist) will inevitably make mistakes along the way, but can at least commit to learning and growth.

Challenging binary thinking is probably the quickest way to get to a learning and growth mindset, as I have written about here. Fixed mindsets assume polarities — either you are good at something or bad at something. If you performed badly in a task, you are one of those people (us) who is bad at that task, and not one of those (them) who is good.

We do this more than we might think. Learning languages is a common example — “some people learn languages very quickly, but I am not one of them.” From this perspective, the jump from us to them / from good to bad seems too large to be realistic, and we close the space for learning and growth. The alternative is very simple — “some people have put more time and effort into learning than I have and therefore speak better than me, but with time and effort, I can learn and grow as well.”

Seeing decisions as a continuum rather than a binary can support not only learning and growth on an individual level, but also across a system or society. In other words, it can create room for innovation.

To give one example, a common assumption we make is that most people either work in for-profit companies, with the goal of making money, or non-profit organisations, with the goal of making a difference. This has led to the absurd system where we invest in financial growth in a harmful way, reinvest a tiny fraction of the profits in addressing that harm, and then continue as before, questioning why the spare change we put towards charity isn’t making a difference.

A lot of the most exciting innovations in social change come in the space between the for and non-profit binaries: including social enterprises that empower people to become financially independent rather than offering charity, and impact investing, where investors prioritise organisations that bring a social as well as a financial return. While not every social change intervention can have a revenue-generating stream, the message that for and non-profit ventures exist in the same world is fundamental if we are to see the progress in human rights, climate change, and other key systemic issues.

Chasing rainbows: illusions of order

The most important insight I have had reading around this topic is quite simply that a) we think in binaries far more than we realise, and b) that whenever we start to feel stuck, whether on a conceptual or practical question, examining how we are thinking about the decision and looking for the grey area can often offer a path forward.

I like to remember this by thinking about rainbows. A rainbow has how many colours? We will instinctively answer seven: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violent.

In reality, a rainbow of course has infinite colours across a continuum. The seven categories provide, in Dutton’s words, an “illusion of order.”

What might the world look like if we committed to abandoning illusions of order once and for all? If we rejected all categories and endeavoured to see the world as it really is?

Fans of Jorge Luis Borges will recall the story of Funes the Memorius, who created his own language to liberate himself from the shackles of categorisation. It didn’t go well:

“Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.”

“It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every moulding in the sharply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.)”

“With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”

Overwhelmed by his effort to accurately perceive the world, Funes dies — notably — of congestion of the lungs.

So categories can keep us sane, and perhaps it is OK if we see only seven colours in the rainbow. As Dutton says in the introduction to his book, “a line drawn is a decision made. And life is full of decisions.”

But when we start to believe that these lines we have drawn are immutable truths — fixed by nature, history, God, or some other higher authority — we fall into a different trap.

We lose sight of science, and fail to understand how a rainbow is formed.

We lose peace, fighting with people who see six or eight colours.

We lose creativity, incapable of seeing the world from other perspectives.

And of course, we fail to see the true beauty of the rainbow.

To sum this up with a closing thought — we evolved to think in binaries to keep us safe, and some level of categorisation will always be needed. But in the modern world, dogmatic and rigid binary thinking can put us at risk, do harm, and hold us back as a collective.

Ultimately, binary thinking is neither universally “good” nor “bad.” That piece of meta-logic might give us a headache, but if helps move us out of echo chambers and towards shared learning and growth, it is a conversation well-worth having.