Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

Make a New Normal

How the political binary breaks our brains.

"How the political binary breaks our brains." - a photo from the perspective a person looking on the ground, their shoes visible, and a card in on the walk which reads "there is nothing stranger than truth."
"How the political binary breaks our brains." - a photo from the perspective a person looking on the ground, their shoes visible, and a card in on the walk which reads "there is nothing stranger than truth."
Photo by Oksana Manych on Unsplash

Competition, not truth, is oppositional.

This is how broken our brains are with binary thinking:

  • People are on Twitter talking about how bad Elon Musk is.
  • Other people are on Twitter arguing that Twitter was bad and therefore Elon Musk is making it better.

The truth is that Twitter was bad AND Musk is bad.

a hellsite

Similarly,

  • Twitter is a hellsite.
  • Musk is making Twitter into a hellsite. 

Yes! Both are true.

It can be both.

The uncomfortable truth is that pre-2016, Twitter was more troll-infested BUT it was also used as a site for good.

Since then, it has been exploited by governments to destroy democratic opposition, target and execute dissidents. AND content moderation has increasingly eliminated the most offensive content from the site.

It is better and worse than it was.

It was more usable in 2020 by most Americans AND a source of political corruption. Most especially for conservatives and dictators.

Twitter is the American political paradox.

It is both a source for good and for evil. Just like content moderation makes the site more useable and attractive to the majority and frees their speech.

The problem isn’t on the left or the right. Nor do we solve it by camping out in the middle. The problem is our use of the political binary to make complex systems appear simple; which distorts the reality and makes it less true.

We treat a competitive frame as if it were a means of uncovering truth. What it usually offers, instead, is distortion.

Things can be bad and we can still be making them worse. We can have more than one bad guy or good guy. We can find truth without bothsidesing and obfuscating reality.

People like to say that “the truth is somewhere in between”. Like truth is always centrist. No, truth is throughout the whole thing. And we only find it by looking.