Either/Or Thinking

I’ve always fallen into the same trap that most people do — thinking along the lines of either/or statements. In my two most recent posts I’ve been thinking about this concept in terms of democracy and authoritariansm — Are we a democracy or not? In reality, there is a whole range of in-betweens. Previously I’ve also confronted this with regards to belief in God. It’s common to ask; “Do you believe in God or not?”. For me, over the past twenty-or-so years, it’s not an either/or questions — it’s a percentage of likelihood, based on the properties of the god that we’re describing.

I get the sense that any condition where we automatically inclined to assign an either/or, a yes/no, or some notion of black or white is, in reality, better expressed as some position between the two extremes. I’m trying to do better at spotting these thinking traps, but this seems like something I should have been trained to identify early on in my education. In one of the courses that I think should be taught in middle or high school, “How to Think”, this would definitely be one of the topics covered.