"Binary thinking is bad" is binary thinking

From anti-binary to embracing opposites and all that lies in between

Binary thinking, which I’ve always heard called “black-and-white thinking” or “all-or-nothing mindset,” is a personality trait for folks who sometimes struggle with the concept of nuance. For me, I never struggled with nuance in general, and so this concept was never directed outward… but I always used it on myself. I was being “good” or “bad." Eating “healthy” or “poorly.” I was being “perfect” or “imperfect.” And so on.

This kind of thinking was—rightly so—challenged by my therapist and my husband on a regular basis. It wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was unable to allow myself to exist in a gray area. I can happily exist there now, due to tons of work on myself, and it’s been freeing to break away from that cycle.

Because of my own unfortunate experiences with binary thinking, along with the ways in which the binary divides us politically and socially, I’ve struggled with it being useful or even serving us in any way as a species. The destructive way we are pitted against one another, especially on social media, is devastating. My own personal beliefs have always existed somewhere outside of extremes, and it’s been hard for me to process and accept how we got here.

That brought me to the conclusion that “binary thinking is bad.” It divides us. It excludes nuance. It doesn’t reflect how our brains actually work. Critical thinking is important. I created a narrative that made so much sense, and I was content in that thought pattern… until recently.

I was chatting with Claude, as I often do when no one else is available to listen to my ramblings, and we were talking about A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, specifically about how she raises the question around binaries. The cyborg deconstructs and scrambles binaries, which are used to achieve and maintain power systems. Obviously, I love this. I’m all for anything that frees us from the boxes that others try to put us in. But what stood out for me was “binaries are useful” part, so I asked Claude about this, and to challenge me on my belief that binaries are bad.

Claude says that binaries organize power and that we reach for the binary when complexity is too hard. Binaries make things cognitively easier, often socially acceptable, and thus rewarded by the algorithm.“The binary isn’t just intellectual laziness—it’s a fear response. And we built tools that feed on fear.” VERY interesting perspective.

The obvious binaries that are clear are moral things like “murder is bad. pedophilia is bad. slavery is bad, etc.” And truths like "the light is on or off.”¹ Pregnant or not pregnant. I mean, I had to really ask myself “can I accept that binaries exist and they are sometimes useful?” YES.

Why do we default to the binary so often in parts of our lives that demand that we use critical thinking?

But digging deeper and thinking through less obvious ideas, I considered biology and nature. Life and death are our most profound and truest binary (and yet we are all living and dying at the same time so whhhhhaaatttt!?). Our brains need to make tons of decisions on a daily basis and often quickly. Compartmentalizing is a big part of how our brain functions. It needs heuristics.

That makes sense, but why do we then default to the binary so often in parts of our lives that demand that we use critical thinking? I had to consider this for a while and here’s what I came up with:

1. We are taking in too much information, far more than we are used to processing. Back to Haraway, we are already cyborgs, merged with our devices, but these devices have made us more binary rather than less. With phones our brains are processing so many images and so much information that it’s nearly impossible to take our gut reaction to something as our actual opinion. Social media encourages us to comment and interact, and as social beings, we enjoy this. However, we often don’t spend time thinking about something before we react, and thus perpetuating the cycle of reactionary responses. We are also unable to think critically about so much information so quickly, so we’re not able to remove information from the immediate buckets our brains need to put them in to process.

2. The algorithm. The feed, the platform, the notification. These are all literally designed to sort us, to puts us into categories, so it can feeds us content that confirms and deepens those categories. It’s different from individual cognitive laziness because it’s a structural problem. The binary reaction-ism is designed into the platform to keep us scrolling, liking, and commenting our first thought… even if it starts a fight.

3. Knowing when and how to use binaries. As I was writing this, I discovered that we aren’t really taught when to use the binaries. Maybe this is a skill we lost along the way as technology progressed and got faster and faster. We need to back up and look at how we respond and react and think about exercising judgment about whether a binary serves us in a particular situation.

Learning and unlearning how to use binaries is something I never even considered before now and it’s a real work in progress for me. I stopped arguing with strangers on the Internet many years ago when I recognized that it’s not worth it, there are too many trolls, ragebait, and I value my time and energy. But the biggest thing I learned is that most people want a truth, but that truth is almost always some else’s false. Most things are both or neither, and I have found a lot of comfort in the gray area.

Where I’m starting to develop more, especially now that I’ve spent some time thinking through this whole binary thing, is that I want to ask more questions before responding. I want to sleep on it. I want to ask other people’s opinions. I don’t want to simply accept my brain’s first answer as THE answer. My gut is a good reader of situations, but a bad reader of feeds. From my days of therapy, I learned that no one changes overnight and that real change is made over time, through practice. Overnight change, in a way, is binary thinking and if I think critically about that, I have come to the conclusion that I’m somewhere on the path toward change, but I’m not fully there yet.

Related:

1. Don’t come @ me arguing about dimmer switches! The light is still on even if it is dim!