You wrote: “…we like for things to be black and white. If x is bad, then the opposite of x must be good.”
There’s a long and sordid history in the U.S. of “purity” being associated with racism and racist legalisms…likely driven…in part anyway…by the sad and futile quest for certainty.
A long long time ago, an undergrad professor I had told a class that unless you can tolerate ambiguity, psychology will be a very frustrating area of study for you.
My experiences since then have taught me that lived life is way way more often ambiguous than not and seeking certainty is almost invariably a path to reality distortion. I have found it to be much more useful (and accurate) to think of most phenomena associated with living beings as existing on a spectrum rather than some good/bad binary.
Yes…”…we like for things to be black and white.” … that desire for certainty can lead us into tailoring our perceptions of reality to fit our desires rather than struggling to accurately comprehend reality. The old saying “often wrong, but never uncertain” is a statement about this common human desire.
This article on the Psychology Today website elaborates more about this understandable but often disastrous desire for certainty.
