False dichotomies

What do these have in common?

Right/wrong, true/false, guilty/innocent, us/them, friend/enemy, principled/unprincipled, tyranny/freedom, democracy/dictatorship, justice/injustice, natural/unnatural, civilised/barbaric, capitalist/Marxist.

These are our treasured dichotomies, says Edward de Bono.. ‘Without them the principle of contradiction and the certainty of our logic are greatly weakened’.

‘Someone hands you a piece of paper bearing a fine grid - as in a school exercise book. The person tells you that he is thinking of just one of the small squares. He wants you to locate that square by asking questions which will only get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. So you divide the sheet in half with a line and call one half A and the other half B. You ask: ‘Is the desired box in A?’ If the answer is ‘no’ then the box must be in B - there is nowhere else it could be. So you now forget about A and proceed to divide B into half, lettering each half as before. Again you ask the question. In the end you must come to the chosen box. The point about this simple strategy is that at every moment the desired box must lie in A or not-A (which is B). There is nowhere else. Nor can the box lie in both A and B.

‘It is precisely the simplicity and the certainty of this logic that we aim for in our dichotomy design. If something is not true, surely it must be false. If something is not false, surely it must be true. The polarisation is a sharp one that allows no middle ground. Yet something may be partly true and partly false. The partial perception (’economical with the truth’) so beloved by perception and by the press gives something which is undoubtedly true in itself but false in conveying the wrong impression. What about ‘illusion’? This is something we may hold to be true but others can see to be false.

‘So dichotomies impose a false and sharp (knife-edge discrimination) polarisation on the world and allow no middle ground or spectrum … It becomes impossible to step across the boundary without at once being seen as directly in the enemy camp. It is not difficult to see how this tradition in thinking has led to persecutions, wars, conflicts, etc. When we add this to our beliefs in dialectic, argument and evolutionary clash, we end up with a thinking system that is almost designed to create problems’.

From Edward de Bono’s I am Right, You are Wrong.