The Social and Mental Foundations That Make Our Binary Being

We are what we live within

With our human psychology, (what I see as ecopsychology) our mental and physical health is tied to all we sense, breathe, eat, and survive with. Our ability to see “the good” will unconsciously recognize those factors that contribute to our survival — our good — our benefit.

It is therefore critical to our survival that we see ourselves as “good” so that we belong within the social group. We need acceptance. Sadly, though, we often need others to blame for all that is not good. This is what we now call “othering.”

It is difficult to overcome our programming for othering, but you can do it if you recognize when it happens.

We all learn to become binary in our thinking. Thinking in black or white, good or evil, is just a mental shortcut that all of us take to get through a barrage of constantly flowing information.

If you ever wonder why, on some subjects, people are more conservative and exclusive, while at the same time they want their group to be inclusive, this is why.

Extreme nationalism can be rebranded as patriotic ideals. Or identity politics can exclude certain people.

Think of the “working class.” Think of the “big tent party.” Everyone needs to feel that they are the ones who are the hard workers or job creators. Or they strategize about how to recruit others to their purpose and cause. We create identity in this way, or we prioritize “working” as an ethic that is better than all other behaviors.

Introducing BIT

A BIT is a verbal shortcut for Binary Intel Trap. Think of it as a meme bite that we bite off — but don’t have time to chew — to thoroughly digest, mentally.

The intelligence we all gather as we go about our daily tasks cannot be accumulated fully. It’s just too much.

A binary, mental and social shortcut we take is to quickly assess if something is good, or bad. It’s a binary intel trap. That is, we collect a lot of intel about others, and it traps us in socially reinforced confirmation.

We conclude, over time, that “homosexuals are just sinners,” or that “right-wing conservatives are just selfish.” There are millions of such cemented thoughts that get reinforced mentally. Unfortunately, they then enter our social behavioral patterns, and therefore, influence our politics, faith, wealth values, and even our views on our environment being “just fine” or “in tremendous peril.”

We also bite ourselves

A weird outcome of this is that we internalize social messages. It is not at all unusual for marginalized people to see themselves as a version of “bad.” This provides an unconscious inferiority complex. The default is the supreme people, the ones with power, influence, and often wealth.

Not everybody wants to eliminate the powerful. Many of us want to BE the powerful ones and subjugate others as they have done with us. Many men in leadership roles actually promote this idea, and their followers see seizing power as strong, not selfish.

This social learning follows every culture, historically.

A cruel, but true irony is that we do not often see our “bad,” we just bury it deep in our psyche. This is why sexism has persisted for thousands of years, and more recently, racism.

You can also identify homophobia as having roots in sexism, the shame of being “less than” because women are traditionally seen as inferior to men.

In this way, we do not see our own prejudice. To see it would make us painfully “bad.” Instead, when cognitive dissonance strikes too boldly, we just go into denial about it.

Again, social belonging, and belonging to nature, are the drive of every organism. It is automatic. What is different about human beings is that we can not only think of abstract, often fictional ideas, but that we transfer them in the form of writing, historical accounts, and now, digital messages to signal our belonging to the tribe.

Internalized “bad” means that we blame ourselves. We practice self-talk and play tapes in our heads that scold ourselves, belittle ourselves, blame ourselves, and more or less “correct” ourselves in negative ways.

These days, we even accuse ourselves of not being positive enough. To banish “negative thoughts,” from your thinking does not eliminate them, but it can displace them to places in the body and brain, or even the social milieu, where they go on to be destructive rather than instructive.

We all do this. We are mentally harder on ourselves, usually, than we are on others. It takes an extreme amount of self-awareness, mindfulness, and focus to practice self-love in a way that realizes we can’t be here for others if we are not fully here for ourselves.

We have to see reality and face the truth. Learning to accept negative feelings, and face real distortion, can be used to real progress.

Snowflakes and tough guys

To be a snowflake is to be overly sensitive. Even censorious. But it is obvious that many people are pearl-clutching snowflakes on every side of every argument. That is, you may want to censor, or cancel Critical Race Theory or Black Lives Matter, or you may want to get tough about the politicians who sell their devotion to corporations, or special interests that favor elite power brokers.

Authoritarian leaders and populists are a world threat. A big reason why comes down to taking sides.

It is very difficult for a good guy to see the harm in revising history to suit our sense of “goodness.” Let’s all just be the greatest, all the time. It saves us from humiliation and accountability.

We even look upon Marxism and Capitalism as binary opposites, when both are fully untried ideologies that have never fully been enacted in their aspirational ideals.

Christianity, or any religion, can also be seen in this light.

The only answer

All philosophy and justification for being alive rest upon a foundation of feeling like we are doing the right thing. That is why we have to lie to ourselves about things like supremacy, or “I’m not racist” in order to feel like we deserve respect.

It is very tempting to ignore the waste, trash, consumption, and damage that the global north inflicts upon the global south, for example. Or to blame China/Asia for all the polluting products they make (but we buy.) Or, as many growing global international entities have hit upon, they can make people feel “good” about recycling when it’s just greenwashed products being sold to us by concentrated monopolies controlling massive wealth, jobs, production, and distribution.

To set aside our supposed supremacy offers our best chance. That is, we must tackle sexism, racism, and classism. We must see each other as family.

The only answer to our self-deception, our internalized hierarchies, and our othering of everybody is to see ourselves as belonging to one tribe.

That tribe, in these days of climate warming, pollution, refugees, and resource shortages, is a human tribe.

Many of us would go even farther than humanism, however. There is an Earth tribe — a biosphere. We abuse it at our own peril.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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