I probably don’t need to tell you about the many existential threats to human existence today.

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From AI, to war, to pandemics, we’ve certainly done a good job of making strife and conflict for ourselves.

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And if I were to ask you how you feel about some of these issues—let’s say AI, Israel & Palestine, and Democrats & Republicans—you’d probably be able to answer quickly and definitively.

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You probably have capital A Answers!  

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This is largely how our brains are designed to work—make quick, black-and-white judgements about things and people so that we can quickly decide if they’re threatening or not.

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Like so much of our brain stuff, this is likely leftover, ancient wiring that helped our ancestors determine if the thing rustling in the bushes was a tiger or not when they were tired and stressed as hell.

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Polarized thinking—often called all-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking—is an outdated survival mechanism that we all indulge.

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And I personally believe that our tendency to overindulge this sneaky cognitive bias—to give things all-encompassing labels or hard-stop conclusions—is actually the most existential threat to our survival.

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Let me explain why.

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This form of thinking protects you from feeling anxiety

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There’s a reason that polarized thinking has endured through so many centuries. I think that it’s protective against the thing we as human beings fear the most—uncertainty.

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There’s a plethora of data to back this up.

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Kruglanski and Webster wrote a paper way back in 1996 that explored the need for cognitive closure, which is the idea that it feels psychologically comfortable for our brains to “seize” on available, definitive answers for ambiguity. It feels so good that they noted people often “freeze” on their answer once they’ve found it. Aka, they become unwilling to revise their point of view.

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Three studies published in the British Journal of Social Psychology in 2016 observed that exposure to uncertainty increased discriminatory attitudes or intentions among people who normally had a lower need for cognitive closure. People with a higher need for closure tended to be more discriminatory whether or not uncertainty was made salient.

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But beyond the data—we can observe in our own lives that nearly all of our fears live in the future, which is made up, entirely, of uncertainty. We fear that we may one day become really ill, that we may lose our jobs, that we may get divorced, or that our country might go to war.

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So it makes sense that when someone, whether they’re in a position of expertise or not, offers you a definitive answer—you’re perfectly healthy, your job is secure, your partner really loves you, your country is safe—we immediately exhale in relief.

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And even if it's negative—you’re sick, your job is getting eliminated, your partner wants a divorce, war is starting—these states are brutal at first, but you might have observed that they still feel better in our bodies than existing in that state of not-knowing.

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That sense of relief is exactly the cognitive closure Kruglanski and Webster observed, and it exists even if we don’t actually like the end result. That’s how self-sabotage works, btw, but that’s a whole other article in itself.

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I say all this not to cast judgement or to pick on anybody but to really hammer home the point that all of us are biologically hardwired to choose a polarizing opinion or stance, and it’s imperative that we all recognize this tendency within ourselves and take action to curb it.

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Because—

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Truth lies in the messy middle

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In a world in which it’s way too easy to get into comment wars with online trolls, I have a simple test that determines if I’ll engage with someone on a TikTok comment or Reddit thread. That test is: does this person demonstrate that they actively seek uncertainty and nuance? The way I look for that is:

Does the person openly acknowledge the cons in their proposed solution? Can they admit to at least one positive upside for what they’re arguing against? Do they admit when they don’t know something or encounter new information? Are they controlled and cool in their writing, or full of emotion?

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If my sniff test fails, I do not engage because, frankly, it’s not worth it. That person has become hypnotized by the comfort of their own cognitive closure on the topic, which means it’s going to be impossible to get them to engage with the shades of grey in between.

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You’ve probably encountered this yourself if you’ve ever tried to argue politics with someone who has a different point of view than you. Rather than learn something about the way the other person sees the world, we often just end up screaming at each other, hedging further, and not speaking ever again.

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I’m arguing that this tendency, more than anything, is fracturing our world into violent false polarities that threaten to rip us asunder.

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We’ve stopped listening to each other because we’re all addicted to our own cognitive closure. It is destabilizing and uncomfortable to admit that the person who has a different perspective than you may actually be right about a thing or two.

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So, as with most uncomfortable emotional experiences, we choose avoidance instead of confrontation.

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There’s an obvious social cost to that. But I believe there’s also a personal cost, too.

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We become hypnotized by belief—and this makes us fragile and scared

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Terence McKenna, a non-dual philosopher (I guess that’s a thing) that I respect, is quoted as saying “Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it’s there, it doesn’t require your belief and if it’s not there, why should you believe it?”

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To the theme of nuance—I mostly agree with that sentiment.

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When you interrogate any belief that you hold—some way of looking at the world apart from what’s in front of you right now—you will find that every belief serves two purposes.

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The first is to help you make quick decisions that move you through reality. This is important, and essential because true certainty does not exist. We’d never get anything done if we couldn’t act on beliefs and assumptions.

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The second is to provide emotional comfort that glosses over life’s inherent uncertainty. This is the unnecessary part that gets dangerous, fast.

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You can think of beliefs that fulfill the second function as akin to mental drugs. They make us feel really good inside, but at a cost. And the cost is that we don’t see reality as it is.

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Look at it this way—you believe that you’re going to be alive in the next 5 seconds, right?

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Well—do you actually know that for sure?

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No. There’s no reason why your heart NEEDS to keep beating, right?

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Do you know that your spouse will actually make it home from work?

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You assume that’s true. But really, anything could happen to them!  

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And, the very big one—do you actually know what’s in store for you when you die, or are you just committed to an elaborate story about what happens?

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I think you know the answer to that one, if you’re being honest.

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When you’re directly confronted by all that you do not actually know, your body gets really anxious, fast.

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Even typing some of those scenarios above induced a pang of fear in me. “Oh my God, I guess I could really just die in the next second and that’s going to be true for my entire life!”

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If you open up to that anxiety—if you allow yourself to fully feel it without letting your mind paint over it with more rationalizations or stories—you will also discover something magical.

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The uncomfortable feeling of anxiety does not last that long. Eventually, you get bored thinking about your own heart and conclude: “Ah, I guess I could always die in the next few seconds, but I’m not going to let that stop me from living because that’s just the way it is!”

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Perhaps you see how all this works now.

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Letting go of belief and committing to seeing reality how it actually is creates a great deal of resilience. Dealing in shades of gray, admitting that we don’t actually know, and being willing to be wrong make all of us tougher on the inside.

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You can think of this like a mental gym. You have to endure some short-term pain (anxiety) that makes you much stronger in the long run.

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Forming a polarizing belief or opinion will rob you of this growth every single time in favor of the comfort of cognitive closure. It’s the equivalent of skipping the mental gym and eating junk food. It’s lazy, and it makes us, and society itself, fragile.

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Because what happens when reality inevitably tramples over your rose-colored beliefs about it?

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You will immediately be flooded with that same anxiety, but multiplied ten- or hundredfold for all the times you avoided it with mental gymnastics.  

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And because you’re not adapted to that painful feeling, your mind will do whatever it can to avoid it.

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Most commonly, it just doubles down on your existing belief. “I know that thing that just happened flagrantly and obviously violates what I just claimed, but here’s why I’m actually still right!”

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In more drastic circumstances, the mind goes for projection. “Well, that thing I believed would’ve been true but it’s actually the fault of those people over there—they ruined it!”

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And when we start projecting, we’re just a hop, skip, and a jump from active hatred and discrimination!

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“Those people over there are the entire problem and once we get rid of them, everything will go as I believe it will.”

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A human mind will do anything—quite literally any damn thing—to protect you from the intense fear that comes from admitting that you don’t know, all things are uncertain, and you’re largely powerless to prevent how they unfold.

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That, my friends, is how we all get continually gaslit by the 5 lbs of meatloaf in our skull into committing atrocities to each other over the centuries.

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So please, choose the harder, grayer path

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I don’t want you to be manipulated or fragile. My wish for you, and the rest of the world, is that we all become as mentally resilient as possible. Because that’s also how we become more empathetic and kinder to each other.

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I’m not asking you to let go of every belief you’ve ever held or to try to remove all belief from your life. You really can’t, anyway. Your brain is going to make up shorthand for life to help you move through it all on its own.

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But what we certainly do not need more of is belief’s second function—the saccharine feelings that come from cognitive conclusion. That sweet, sticky stuff is what’s rotting the world’s enamel right now.

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So here’s my challenge for you. It’s what I’ve personally tried to commit to myself in order to keep my own mouth tidy.

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1). Avoid conclusion; and

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2). If you must conclude, get really uncomfortable first

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Conclusion of any kind is ultimately a lie. There’s a really funny Taoist story that explains this better than I ever could.

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But to sum it up—nobody really ever knows what’s going to happen in the next moment. Our brains like to pretend they do, and a lot of the time, they’re right. But they also like to conveniently ignore the times they’re wrong.

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So when you’re talking about the big, hot-button topics of the world with friends or family or whomever, don’t conclude on them. You don’t know if AI will kill us all or not. You don’t actually know how conflicts in the Middle East will resolve. You don’t know any of this because, frankly, nobody does.

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So if you don’t have to, don’t conclude. But, sometimes, you will have to conclude.

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You will have to make a decision, cast a vote, or choose a path. Many of us know to do our homework when life throws us these big milestones. To research, discuss, review, and debate.

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But a lot of us like to cheat on our homework. We’re adults now, after all.

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We cheat on our homework when we don’t get really, really uncomfortable before we conclude. When we don’t read sources from “the other side” and when we don’t talk to people we’ve dubbed crazy, wrong, or stupid.

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Sometimes we engage in those discussions performatively. We pretend to listen, but deep down, we know we’re actually right. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t get anxious, confused, or curious while having the discussion, you’re not really listening—you’re acting.

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These uncomfortable emotions are signals that you’re brushing up against the truth. That a belief inside you is being battered against, challenged, or even unravelled.

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There’s a reason the great Pema Chodron said, “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”

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The truth isn’t your take or the other person’s—it’s the acknowledgement that neither of you actually has the full story because the full story is unknowable.

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You might do all this work and you may still conclude the same way as before.

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That’s ok, because you arrived at that conclusion not through a tempting belief shortcut, but through doing your best to see the world as it really is.

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In short, you sought the truth.

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Get out there and keep seeking and let’s see what we find together.

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Image credit: Photo by Jonas Tebbe on Unsplash.

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