Polar thinking is a kind of thinking in which habits of thought are triggered without the intervention of conscious thought. You can recognise Binary thinking when you see it;
The dogma of Polar thinking is that everything can be defined by two opposites. These opposites create an invisible agenda that limits our options and denies anything else that is not described in terms of one opposite or the other.
The world is complex and our choices can have important consequences. When this is combined with the emotional discomfort of uncertainty, the quality of our thinking is impaired. We look for external experts to give us the easy answers of a black and white world. This allows us to quickly move from fear and uncertainty to safety and the security of external authority.
Polar thinking is endemic in public conversations around issues of the day. Politics is a domain of life where Polar thinking is obvious with the split of parties into the left and the right. The political left-right Dyad hides the nuances of a much more complex world. Each side represents one pole of a larger but “hidden” (third force) whole.
The 6 features of Polar Thinking are;
1**. Dyadic**
A Dyad is any system that has 2 "terms"; the architecture of Polar Thinking is the Dyad. Not only does Polar Thinking only provide 2 options but each of those options only has 2 evaluations; either right or wrong (true or false).
2**. Uncertainty and emotional discomfort**
Uncertainty in the face of important consequences and complexity leads people to feel emotionally uncomfortable. Our habitual response to discomfort is to move away from it as quickly as possible. One of the best ways to doing this is to look to external authorities to tell us what to do.
3**. Externalised authority**
Polar Thinking is a function of Projected authority whereby authority is external to us. We look to external authorities to tell us what to do; and quickly please. In projecting authority onto another person or institution we abdicate responsibility for exploring our own thinking on the issue. This is the death of curiosity, nuance and responsibility for better choices.
Polar Thinking also projects a “third person” objectivity onto the world that doesn’t exist. Primary Dyad distinctions like subject and object or subjective and objective are outdated Cartesian artefacts of a world where an implicit Projected authority asserts the idea of an absolute truth and then defines what it is.
5**. Blindness to context**
George Gurdjieff said that we are Third force blind which is blindness to the Reconciling force which brings relationship and wholeness to a situation. Binary thinking is a way of perceiving & thinking which only sees one option at a time, and doesn't recognise the larger contextual "whole" of which the opposites are "parts", and relatively arbitrary ones at that. A dyad sees 2 possibilities. A Triad sees infinite possibilities.
Polar Thinking creates a number of false dichotomies