“We cannot pay our good luck with bad grace – it invites darkness.” – Robin Hood (2010)

Here’s what I look for in contemporary discussions, both personal and in popular media – a framework which is based on:

• seeking nuance & balance (tolerating complexity)
• distancing extremism
• deprecating violence

This article highlights the risks of easy “black & white” (stark) cultural divides – how that erodes & distorts reality:

• Polarity defeats reason (thereby losing the in-between of things).
• Safe comfort is exchanged for understanding (and humanity).
• Easy clarity leads to siloing.
• Blind spots develop as to our allies and opponents.
• Any uncertainty (doubt) becomes viewed as weakness.
• Extremists co-opt discussions of hard problems.

• Washington Post > Opinion > “Why we split the world into good and evil — and make decisions we regret” by Amanda Ripley (January 4, 2024) – Splitting is a broken compass in a byzantine world.

Humans carve the world cleanly in two when they feel threatened. There’s a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, an us and a them. … Psychologists call it “splitting.”

In times of high anxiety, each new conflict gets framed this way, a galactic struggle against a dark lord. Complexity is intolerable; ambivalence is cowardly. During the racial justice protests in 2020, all cops were bastards — or so the slogan went. You were either a racist or an anti-racist. “There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist,'” Ibram X. Kendi wrote.

But like most cognitive distortions, splitting makes us feel worse after it makes us feel better. Bright lines have a way of hardening into prison bars. “When besieged, we tend to raise our mental drawbridges and shut out new information just when it is needed most,” Maggie Jackson writes in her new book, “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.” “The catch-22 is clear. We yearn for clarity when we know least about our predicament.“

That may be the best advice for living in a time like this: “Inhale the complexity.” See the pain. Beware black-and-white thinking — and rest your tired eyes on the gray. That’s where all the action is.