Unnecessary Dichotomies & Narrative Thinking

We are sometimes taught to think in the direction of opposites, and that "sadness" is the opposite of "happiness," but isn't it also the case that anger or nausea is just as distant from happiness as sadness? You could say that this is an unnecessary dichotomy -- I think 'false dichotomy' would be too strong since it is not deceptive to make a comparison between the two...It's just not the fact that we have to conceive of sadness as the opposite of happiness.

I think there's actually a lot of unnecessary dichotomies like this -- for instance, Capitalism and Communism are opposing economic visions, but if we were to look at a partially planned economy from the premodern period, we could scarcely say that it is a "mixed economy," nor could we say that it either validates a Capitalist or Communist world view. Thus, while Communist & Capitalist are opposites in a sense, it does not mean that, by necessity, an economy which has property rights/ownership that would be considered "mixed" by somoene from a capitalist/communist perspective is necessarily mixed. 

Just as such, we cannot say "There are atheists who do not believe in heaven or hell, and Muslims that believe in layered heavens and hells, and Buddhists as well who acknowledge near infinite heavens & hells, so a Christian is a moderate, perhaps even closer to an atheist!, since he believes in one heaven, one hell." 

By thinking too much "logically" in a linear, graph-paper sense of the word, we come to unnecessary dichotomies. The sort of thing that school teachers would drum out of us -- the attempt to map everything out and categorize things has actually resulted in all of these unnecessary dichotomies that clutter the mind. 

We can see this as well with the "racist" and "anti-racist" dichotomy. Yes, in a sense, the opposite of someone who believes in the superiority of their race and dislikes other racists is an anti-racist, but this is not a scale that actually has to be applied to everything. It's not useful in every circumstance.  In fact, it may even be the case that it is very much not useful in most circumstances. 

Unnecessary dichotomies is one of the things that hampers any form of debate because it draws people into the practice of trying to define their enemy in unflattering ways -- ways that does not actually amount to how they define themselves. It breeds a sort of dishonesty in discussion that rarely anyone moves beyond. 

 

And this is the stuff of narrative thinking: everything that exists in the world is reuploaded into the context that the partisan thinker wants. So, for instance, gender roles in a Sri Lankan fishing village or 19th century art becomes something that is then looked at through the lens of a 21st century feminist, and the whole world rewards her as an intellectual for translating it all into the biases that she has. 

People think they are doing something objective when they literally take a foreign, independent cluster of references, meanings, and ideas, and then reconstruct them within their own framework of bias in a way that is usually unflattering. 

This isn't philosophy. It's thought terrorism.