Getting Rid of Binary-Thinking; the world is more complicated than we think, that's why interesting.

Probably, most of us have said this at least once: "He is a smart person!!"

Well, I don't think it's a problem to say such a thing but today, I want to think about it.

Certainly, there are lots of types of smartness: having a good memory, being able to think deeply, being able to come up with new ideas, being good at presenting ideas, etc etc.

However, I think we are kinda lazy to think about all those possibilities when judging a person. So we just say "he is smart."

When we say "he is smart", we are unconsciously dividing people into two groups: smart people and non-smart people.

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This is the feature of modernism (Shillington, 2015, personal conversation).

In modernism, people tend to see the world in a dichotomous way: binary-thinking.

Developed countries/ under-developed countries.
Men/Women
Human/Robot
Rationality/Emotion
etc etc.......

But, are the boundaries between them so clear? No, right?

Obviously, 196 countries in the world cannot be classified in either developed or under-developed countries. Moreover, there is a huge difference inside one country. Even whether we can regard one country as one entity or not is questionable.

Men and women are not homogenous groups. There are lots of differences and heterogeneity inside those groups (Razavi and Miller, 1995)

We are using computers everyday and smartphones are part of our communication tools. Can't we think that we are cyborg in a sense? (Haraway, 1991)

We can divide rationality and emotion that clearly? We sometimes become rationally emotional right? How should we think about it?

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Binary-thinking is useful and not necessarily bad. We somehow need to categorize things to make sense of the world.

If all categorization is bad, we cannot even speak or write. Why? Because language is a product of categorization.

When we say, for example, "beer", we are categorizing lots of types of beers into one group because they share similar features (process of production, taste, contents, etc). Heineken, Budweiser, Kirin, Toña, etc etc, all of these are different but we call them "beers" for the sake of easier communication. That is totally fine.

But if we sometimes manage to get rid of that conventional categorization, we can see an another world.

One of the strategies might be speaking other languages and the other could be keeping doubting what you believe.

If we get rid of the binary-thinking, we can see the new phase of the world.

We will know that the world is more complicated than we thought because the world is definitely not dividable into two categories. Things are dynamic and changing all the time. There is no static dualism in this world. It is so complicated that we might be sometimes overwhelmed.

Is that a bad news?

For me, not.

That's why the world is interesting. That's why it's worth exploring.