by Don Hall

Some things are absolutely binary. Black and White. Right and Wrong.

One can opine until faces are azure that 2+2=5 but if I have two fucking apples and snag two more, I have four apples. End of discussion. If I try to sell you five but only give you four but say it's five, you're gonna pop me in the jaw.

We humans love this simplicity. Nothing makes our tiny brains relax more than a binary answer to the big questions in the increasingly populated planet.

Disparities between ethnic groups in terms of financial success, job performance, school admissions, prison populations? Oppressor vs. Oppressed. So simple. So easy.

The presence of greed and graft in the capitalistic model? Rich vs. Poor. [image of hands clapping together as the problem has been solved]

Hyper-partisanship in American politics? Woke vs Racists. Media vs. The People. Whiteness vs. BIPOC.

In the late 1940s, a psychologist named Else Frenkel-Brunswick conducted a study that quickly became a landmark of its time.

The concept was simple. She showed participants a series of sketches. The first was a picture of a cat. The last was a picture of a dog. In between were cats whose features became progressively more doglike. Participants were asked to categorize each picture as either a cat or a dog.

Among any group of people, there are some who see the dog sooner than others. Volunteers who showed high levels of prejudice took much longer to make the switch from cat to dog. Some of them refused to ever switch to dogs. Even the final picture was seen as a cat.

This research uncovered a significant psychological characteristic which we now know as the need for cognitive closure.

The prejudiced views of the participants who only saw cats reflected their strong need for cognitive closure. People with this characteristic desire certainty. They need to see things in black-and-white, open-and-shut terms. And they’re less tolerant of ambiguity, less likely to consider an issue from all angles, and are likelier to make quick decisions.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who crave cognitive complexity. These are people who are highly tolerant of ambiguity. They see shades of gray in everything and tend to make decisions slowly.

As you might expect, people with extreme religious views exhibit a lower need for cognitive complexity compared to moderates. Their world is colored black and white, good and bad, saved and unsaved.

Cognitive complexity is difficult because our emotions are so often triggered and are almost wholly volatile. This is not to say that we need not allow ourselves these emotional responses—that would be like trying to contain the foam after dropping a Mento into a bottle of Diet Coke. It is to suggest that we compartmentalize our emotional responses to better navigate what is almost always incredible complexity.

FOR EXAMPLE:

The Israel/Palestine Conflict.

I don't know enough to hold a legitimate opinion but I can understand that:

Contrary to the popular interpretation, the British did not take the land from the Palestinians to give to Israel. The British took the land from the Ottoman Turks who had ruled there for centuries.

The two-state solution has been the go-to for thirty or forty years. The U.N. recommended it in 1947. It was accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs. From 1948-1967, the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza were all under Arab control. A Palestinian state could have been founded then but was not.

The two-state solution has been brokered over and over with the same result: Jews embrace it, Arabs reject it.

It is also true that as a result of this constant stalemate, Israel has evolved into a highly militaristic force in the region with billions of dollars bulwarking their military capabilities so when the Palestinians decide to fight the occupation, Israel pummels them in horrifying ways.

For centuries Jews have been the single most put-upon group of people on the planet, were given sovereignty over the land taken in WWI as reparations (of a sort), is surrounded on all sides by countries looking to eliminate them, and respond with increased authoritarian means.

This is not, as so many emotionally invested in it want it to be, simple. It is ridiculously complex.

Over half a century ago, long before there was witter or hashtag activism, Jews were the most marginalized and hunted group of people in history and now represent the colonizing forces of the world and marginalize and hunt the Palestinians. The cat slowly transforms into another thing.

In short, the whole thing needs some cognitive complexity to fully understand and find a solution.

So what prevents us from recognizing that the cat is gradually becoming a dog? Anti-intellectualism that goes back to pre-Enlightenment times. The battle between religiosity and scientific inquiry has been raging since the atheists and agnostics determined that living in a closed off, black and white binary is the road to authoritarianism. Allow the 'truth' to be dictated by a few and those few will gain and wield enormous power.

Are unemployment checks subsidizing laziness? Any answer that seems easy is wrong.

Is Green Energy the answer to the already too fucking late jump on the climate crisis? Any simple solution is bullshit.

The reason kids can grasp 2+2=4 is because it is simple math. The vast majority of mathematics is so complicated that only Asian college students understand it (which won't much matter for Asian Americans because colleges are doing away with the SATs because they're the only ones who can ace them at scale).

Speaking of, are the SATs a result of white supremacy? Not when taking into consideration that culturally and in vast numbers, Asians kick pretty much everyone else's ass. Doing away with them for admissions only hurts them for a culture of study in the name of racial equity.

This is not centrism. This is not middle-of-the-road thinking. This is a choice to embrace science and scientific inquiry instead of a quasi-religious humping of the binary.

There are no easy answers to the issues of 331 million people in fifty nation-states. There are no easy and quick fixes to the problems of nearly 8 billion people vying for their own piece of the global pie.

Those with an openness to cognitive complexity, who see things in terms of grey, will make slower decisions but they'll actually work. Everyone else is relying on faith in horseshit.