Judith Kopp
Duality infuses much of humanity’s perception of the world. Men and women are different. Cultures are different. Ideas are different. People disagree. But what if people evolve away from the habit of needing an opposing side?
Many form their identities through opposition. Some know their politics because they’re against someone else’s politics. Some know their religion because it’s different from someone else’s religion. Nations have defined themselves through their rivals, movements through their enemies, and even families through the relative everyone agrees is the problem. So much identity is borrowed from opposition. Remove the opponent and suddenly people have to discover what they actually stand for.
What if this old two-sided arrangement lost its ability to affect identity? What if people learned to know themselves without requiring somebody else to be wrong?
Duality served a purpose for much of human history. Early physical survival required rapid distinction. Safe or unsafe? Edible or poisonous? Friend or stranger? These were useful decisions that needed to be made quickly. Then social structures took that sorting ability and expanded it into categories so people learned to sort by belief, nationality, race, class, education, wealth, spirituality, politics, etc., through pairs (us/them, this/that) because pairs make a complicated world easier to process.
The difficulty begins when someone’s belief about something becomes part of their identity, when someone becomes so attached to being on one side that information is no longer evaluated according to whether it’s useful or accurate but whether it strengthens the side they belong to. We’ve all seen this. Two people look at the same event and immediately search for the interpretation that protects their group. This is a hidden cost of duality where curiosity gets replaced by allegiance.
What happens when people choose curiosity over duality? They gain the capacity to hear two perspectives without assuming one contains the entire answer. They recognize that one person has seen something useful while another has seen something different that’s also useful. They discover that two ideas may appear contradictory because they’re describing different levels of the same situation. Curiosity makes decisions cleaner because there’s no longer a team to protect while making them. An argument loses its emotional grip once people stop needing someone to win. People can see where someone may be mistaken without them becoming the enemy.
People evolving away from duality dampens the unhealthy emotional reward opposition sometimes offers. Arguments exist, but they no longer give the same sense of identity. Debates that once fascinated, feel unsatisfying. People find they have simply outgrown the need to discover themselves through conflict.