<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/04/hamas-israel-good-evil-splitting-amanda-ripley/>
"Humans carve the world cleanly in two when they feel threatened. There’s a
right and a wrong, a good and an evil, an us and a them. In normal times, this
behavior is most obvious in people with serious depression or borderline
personality disorder. Psychologists call it “splitting.”
These days, we see a lot of splitting by all kinds of people, from students to
senators. “This fight is barbarism against civilization, good versus evil,”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. “The
differences between the two sides are as stark as darkness and light.”
In times of high anxiety, each new conflict gets framed this way, a galactic
struggle against a dark lord. Complexity is intolerable; ambivalence is
cowardly. During the racial justice protests in 2020, all cops were bastards —
or so the slogan went. You were either a racist or an anti-racist. “There is no
inbetween safe space of ‘not racist,’” Ibram X. Kendi wrote.
Splitting is deeply comforting, down in your gut. It promises an escape hatch
from chaos. If we read the right books and put up the right lawn signs, it
whispers, “We can be safe here, on the side of good, far from them.”
But like most cognitive distortions, splitting makes us feel worse after it
makes us feel better. Bright lines have a way of hardening into prison bars.
“When besieged, we tend to raise our mental drawbridges and shut out new
information just when it is needed most,” Maggie Jackson writes in her new
book, “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.” “The catch-22 is
clear. We yearn for clarity when we know least about our predicament.”
We also start to misidentify our enemies — and our heroes. We can’t integrate
information that doesn’t fit the narrative. Every day, our blind spots grow.
When splitting, people “get stuck in either the thesis or the antithesis,”
pioneering psychologist Marsha M. Linehan wrote, “unable to move toward
synthesis.”"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-cancer-canada-elephants-africa-batteries-china/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
