There are at least three sides to every coin - Duality as a false premise

According to a research project at Cornell University, we make almost 227 decisions a day just about food.  As I typed that, I made a decision that three pieces of popcorn was the right amount to put in my mouth and then I wondered about my glass of water and whether I should refill it. I didn’t by the way, I decided I would wait.  There was no right answer, it was the one I made in the moment and if I’d chosen differently, things would have been just fine.  Of course, the need for water is an innate human necessity; but how I get to it, is my journey alone and one for which I can make my own choices.  Simple, right?

 In total, research says we make 35,000 total decisions a day.  it’s no wonder our brains get tired.  We’re super efficient at trying to make decisions fast.  We boil them down into tiny pieces and then make an instantaneous judgment call based on our needs, wants, desires, and influences.  And, at the base of this process is where we get played.  It’s in our desire to oversimplify things that others manipulate us, gain power, and turn us from what we believe to be operating on our own to getting manipulated by others.  It’s where social media algorithms get their power, politicians get their votes, religions get their devotees and businesses often retain their customers.  If we can bring a decision down to an either/or equation; and convince you that your only possible answer is between one of two things, anyone can eventually own your mind and control how you behave.  The truth of you as a thinking entity is that there are millions of permutations that could be fine; but you’ve been told, and accepted, there are just two options; and thus you go down that path.   

I grew up in a household that very much lived in a forced duality.  Everything was right or wrong, done or not done, appropriate or not appropriate, obedient or not obedient, behavior that was good or behavior that wasn’t good. There was no middle ground and to this day it’s why I have a very hard time just sitting still and enjoying the world or people around me just because it’s pleasant.  Free will existed as long as the choice was between the right answer and the wrong answer and you always picked the right one.  That’s fine in most parts of mathematics, but when it comes to developing free thinking humans; it’s a shit show.

Forced duality is a dangerous thing but it also plays to our human comfort zones.  If I just have to make a singular choice to be right, everyone who doesn’t agree must be wrong.  I become superior.  If I accept a “leader’s” word as correct then I don’t have to deal with all the complexity of figuring out what I actually believe about issues, I’ve just decided I believe whatever a “leader” says and it’s easier.  If I choose to believe that all my knowledge is all the knowledge necessary to be informed, then I can trust that all my choices are correct.   I would argue that a true leader asks you to assess a situation and look at as many alternatives as possible to get to a decision.  It is the difference between discovery and dictates.  The difference between blissful ignorance and the joy of realizing we are imperfect in every way but being alright with that.    

 It’s in the proverbial gray zone that things get both immensely interesting for people who want to tread there and immensely unnerving for people who have a hard time pondering the fact that there may be multiple right answers, multiple wrong answers……or even better, millions of answers that aren’t right or wrong but rather just perfectly ok for that individual.  This is where human knowledge expands, evolution progresses and we are challenged to break out of the boxes we have put ourselves in.  

As we go through life we are constantly told we must choose one of two:

Heads or Tails?

Good or Evil?

Republican or Democrat?

Single or Attached?

Legal or Illegal?

Moral or immoral?

Patriarchal or Matriarchal?

Our society is rampant with logic fallacies used to keep people from pursuing their best potential or existence and instead helping simply to empower others’ position or finances.  One of the greatest fallacies of all time could be attributed to the Catholic church who has dominated centuries of believers with the notion of “follow our rules or burn in eternal hell.”  This either/or proposition is blatantly false(even if you adhere to the notion that the bible is 100% accurate which most do not). Even the church has redefined which books are “official” so good luck sorting that all out.  These rules frequently involve unquestionable loyalty and a ton of your money even though the book they claim to profess is pretty clear that money should have nothing to do with it.   If the doctrine of the Church was consistent over centuries I suppose we could wait until death to find out, but since the doctrine changes with the whims of the humans at the head of it, it’s questionable.  The logic of “follow the rules that we sort of made up recently that have only passing attribution to the book we claim to be the end all and be all or burn in eternal hell” has less teeth.  This is not to say that inside of us we don’t have a moral compass that says in most cases killing someone is a bad idea.  But, it does absolutely say there are many pathways to be a decent human in this existence that don’t necessarily need to follow an exact path to avoid a universal incinerator.  As a matter of fact, there’s hundreds of cultures which successfully offer up the idea that we get a bunch of chances at life to consistently learn and improve on versions of pathways we tried before.  

In more recent years, the rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States is a younger but similar direction which also frequently combines superior race theory anchored in a bastardization of what used to be a protestant faith path dating back to Martin Luther’s reformation.  As the separation between church and state has fallen even further into disrepair; we see the government or pseudo government entities determining morality instead of the individual.  In other parts of the world, you could compare it in some ways to Sharia law for muslims.  In both cases, people are not given freedom to think, they are instead told.  If you hold a mind and people captive long enough, it begins to believe that indeed, the only choice is to obey or not.  If you paint the picture of fear vividly enough, the perceived consequences of not toeing the line are either supremely detrimental to the individual or perceived to be the end of a society positioned as perfect because it’s all they know.  The perceived dangers of allowing those who may see things differently than you or look differently than you to be seen as a peer becomes a threat to your very existence.  It’s completely ludicrous when looking from the outside in.  But when you are in the box, you don’t even know there is an outside to look in from.  

These boxes are meant to keep the mind focused on specific frameworks and power structures.  Should you open the box and let the light in, you run the risk of upsetting someone who probably put the box together.  A great example is controlling people through sexuality.  Most “western” nations would predominantly claim male/female marriage at an early age that lasts a lifetime is the “only” socially acceptable pathway to human success. This goes back to puritanical roots, the church needing their faithful to conform and ultimately the want of a patriarchal society to hold women down. In a broad sense, it protects the animalistic need of the male to protect his genetics and those in power to control. Yet with only a minor amount of research we know that throughout history this is false.  Going to nerd out on you here but only to prove I’m not making this stuff up.  According to a report in Evolutionary Anthropology in 2013, only 17% of documented human cultures are strictly one to one male/female relationship dominant when it comes to sexuality.  So while your government tax structure, your religious leader, or your grandma may all be saying you’ve only got one “right path,” it’s worth pointing out that millions of people for thousands of years had very fulfilling lives and existed in ways that prove them wrong.  So, if marriage in the current primary definition is your cup of tea, great.  But, if you believe you are somehow the “one right and true answer”, you’re wrong. It’s an answer, but only that. While the number of descriptors may be out of hand to the point of not being able to track it anymore, the point is valid, that individuals should be able to pursue that which fulfills them provided there is a general neutral effect on those around them and they have willing partners.  And certainly, the dualities normally positioned as married/unmarried or gay/straight have no grounding in reality, only grounding in ignorance of those without their own experiences who attempt to define the world with their limited viewpoint.  

It’s also worth noting that when one is no longer bound by an unchangeable yes or no, we are allowed to grow as people, define ourselves, our own preferred way of living, our sexuality, and how we contribute to society.  Where we start in our perspective on any of these points, is often unlikely to be where we end as we learn to express our own individuality more purely. If you are unflinching for a lifetime, it's likely you left a lot on the table.

As children, we are taught right and wrong often in terms of legal vs illegal.  But through a broader human culture lens, this is again a false premise.  If one lands in the high mountains of the Andes, it is likely you’ll be given by your host a cup of tea made from coca leaves.  It’s meant to help you with altitude sickness and has been used for thousands of years.  While simply having those leaves in your possession in the United States is considered a crime not because of the tea, but what you might possibly extract from the leaves.  The assumption of guilt for the mere possession of a tea leaf creates a certain level of judgment on your character.  For a nation that teaches “innocence until proven guilty” in elementary school civics class, if you make simply having a tea leaf in your hand a crime, it’s pretty easy to make everything illegal and everyone a criminal at the whims of those in power.  Statesman used to exist and it eventually morphed into pure politicians.  Those politicians are now most often referred to as legislators or more colloquially, rulemakers.  They make rules on who you can sleep with, what you can eat, what you must believe, where you can travel and even where you are allowed to come from.  When there is no incentive to remove rules, but rather just add on additional right/wrong determinants, eventually the rule of law itself disintegrates because following all of them is impossible and thus following any of them becomes optional at a societal level. There will always be plenty of people who want the easy decision.  They’ll choose the blue pill every time.  Choosing blissful ignorance as the “right way.”  While others will always know there is more or a set of different pathways which aren’t about right or wrong, but simply evolving as souls in this universe.  It’s not my purpose to tell people that choosing the generally accepted “right way” is wrong.  It’s not as long as there is acknowledgement that it’s not the only valid way of being.  It may be yours.  The challenge is to understand that it doesn’t mean other choices, ways of living, lifestyles, dress, relationships, faiths, are wrong.  As a matter of fact, they are what give us as an inclusive human race the ability to truly move forward and we should allow ourselves and those around us to be free people with open minds.

chris.day@alwaysdriveinnnovation.com

Blogs are meant to spark ideas and conversation. If you find yourself thinking, offended, celebrating, or otherwise driven, it's successful. Boredom and stagnation are the death of a thinking society. You can agree, or not, because that is the point.