Friend of mine recently went from being the "golden child" to being the "black sheep." Some decision she made didn't wash with her family, and they let her know it.
Her experience reminded me of the Peanuts character Charlie Brown, who in his baseball exploits always wanted to be the "hero" with a game-winning strikeout, yet usually ended up being the "goat" as he gave up a game-losing home run. I'm also reminded of Colonel Cathart in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. Cathart was forever struggling to take action that result in a "feather in his cap" with his superiors, yet often his attempts backfired, resulting instead in a "black eye" in how others viewed him.
Where might we be without binary thinking?
In my view, the dichotomy robs humans of their unique and wide range of experiences. Rather than having a myriad of behavioral options and descriptions, dichotomies limit our experiences (or the labels we put on our experiences) into very narrow categories: good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, etc.
Another way of saying this would be to say that dichotomies represent thinking errors. The field of General Semantics has a saying: "the map is not the territory." This shorthand depicts the distinction between the world of words and the world of experience, and how sometimes our word-maps fail to adequately represent reality-territory. Dichotomies nearly always presume faulty maps by under-representing shades of gray into one distinct black and one distinct white.
Moreover, dichotomies do not exist outside the linguistic structures inside our own heads. Ever go for a walk in the woods, through leaves and over bridges, and stumble across a dichotomy? "Hey, there's one, near that old stump." They're a function of one way of thinking, and rarely test out in real life.
So why do we use dichotomies so often? Got ideas? Please share.
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