American Thinking is Over-simplied Dualism - That Paradigm Gets Us into Trouble

© 2010 Peter Free

 

25 June 2010

 

A flaw in American thinking patterns

 

A general flaw in American thinking is the tendency to see truth as coming from the juxtaposition of unnuanced opposites.

 

Reading opposing lawyers’ briefs, for example, is an exercise in beholding stupid exaggerations that a neutral observer has to throw out.

 

Yet, as a culture, we continue to think that a neutral arbitrator can construct an accurate view of reality from two (or more) deliberately inaccurate constructs.

 

Stupid people have good reason to over-simplify

 

I can see why stupid people would arbitrarily narrow possible interpretations to two caricatures.  Over-simplification makes it easier to present and evaluate data.  Allowing for arbitrarily constructed polar opposites allows us to weigh in with our apparently innate need to be morally self-righteous.

 

Smarter people don’t have the “I’m too dumb to understand” excuse

 

Smarter people, however, should come up with something more Reality-representing than a nonsensically-reduced dualism.

 

Most lawyers, for example, know that truth in law (and virtually everything else) is hard to convey, except in nuanced shades of gray whose textures change according context.  Yet lawyers and courts continue to present arguments as if this were not true.

 

Political theater follows the same dumb-dualism pattern.  Politicians reduce complex issues to good-and-evil cartoons and demonize honorable opponents for purposes of igniting the common person’s passions enough to get him to vote.  Political rhetoric on both sides falsifies Reality beyond recognition.

 

What we lose with the simplification paradigm is capable thinking

 

The dualistic simplification paradigm reduces our society’s capacity to think and act capably.  The less analytically capable we are, the less attuned to our continually changing environment we are.

 

Over-simplification is not a prescription for survival success.

 

We see evidence of analytical failures that are based on duplicitous dualism all around us: Vietnam and subsequent wars, plutocracy’s takeover of our democracy, a non-functioning Congress, a regal Presidency, and BP’s egregious risk-taking in the Gulf.

 

Yet we continue to mask those failures with by parroting the same absurd simplifications that got us into trouble.