‘Black vs. white’ thinking causes confusion without shades of gray

By David McElroy · September 26, 2011

According to a first-time commenter on the site named Terry, I’m apparently part of the “main stream (CFR influenced) Liberal media.” Those who regularly read the site probably find that just as amusing as I do, but I’m not mentioning it just to entertain us all. I’m mentioning it because of the sad point that Terry illustrates.

It seems as though it’s human nature to see the world in terms of “us vs. them.” There are many different positions that we can take — on political issues and most other things — but most people narrow it down to “what I believe” vs. “what the wrong people believe.” It’s just that the ways in which they segment the world are radically different. So even though most people see the world as “us vs. them,” they define “us” and “them” in very different ways.

Terry’s comment about me is a perfect example. He’s a Ron Paul supporter, and he took exception to my comments last week that straw polls are meaningless. It apparently would make his head explode to realize that there are more positions other than “Ron Paul is going to win and straw polls matter” vs. “the mainstream liberal media who are in lockstep with the Council on Foreign Relations.” It doesn’t seem to occur to the guy that someone could be in favor of liberty enough to reject the statist system he supports — and is actually much further away from the mainstream than he could dream of being.

When we get locked into systems of thinking in which we define everybody as either “with us” or “agin us,” we make errors of logic and judgment. It’s intellectually lazy, because it allows us to simply label everyone and avoid confronting the other person’s argument. If you looked at Terry’s comment — and the article he was commenting on — you might have noticed that he never even attempted to refute anything I said. He merely labeled me as part of “them” in order to call me “lame.”

As for the reason for this, there are two ways to look at it. One is to approach it as linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky does when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

If you think about it, that’s exactly what we have in the U.S. political system. The range of acceptable opinion between Democrats and Republicans is very, very narrow, but they argue over those differences as though they were gaping chasms. Those of us who are making arguments for things outside the mainstream are completely ignored — by the media, by the politicians and by everybody else. Basically, we might as well not exist insofar as the real debate goes.

I believe Chomsky has a brilliant insight here, but I think he might be giving too much credit to the conscious intent of authority figures. I think it goes back to the human tendency toward binary thinking. (Have you ever noticed that many highly intelligent people — especially in very technical fields — are prone to doing this, in particular?) Western philosophy has had a strong binary bias — us vs. them, yes vs. no, black vs. white — that Eastern philosophy has been able to avoid. We westerners are comfortable with yes/no, but easterners are comfortable with shades of gray. (This is almost certainly why Asians were so much more quick to adopt and exploit the idea of “fuzzy logic,” something that makes a lot of western techies uncomfortable.)

If you find yourself simplifying the world into just two categories — in pretty much any field — stop yourself and loosen up. There are many different potential positions. If you’re trying to force everybody into just two categories, you’re going to misunderstand what people are saying — and then you’re going to look just as foolish as Terry did when you mouth off in your ignorance.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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