Binary Thinking - both/and

I recently looked back at something I wrote in 2019:

Those onto whom we have projected our personal and collective power: charismatic leaders, technology companies, political parties, spiritual gurus, are no longer serving us. With this loss of projection, we face a vacuum, a fertile void from which we can investigate our own unconscious. What are the beliefs, biases, idealizations, attachments to roles and identities that keep us hooked up to false power?

At the time, answering this question felt urgent. Now seven years later, it feels critically overdue. It’s time to investigate not only what we believe, but how we’ve come to believe it.

As we take up this investigation, responsibility and agency become mutually supportive. The more we take responsibility for our unconscious participation in false power, the more agency we have to make choices that are free of identification with it. This means working through the inherited psychic material, piece by unexamined piece, that informs our attitudes, behaviors, and even feelings. It is shocking to find out the degree to which we are running on a program that is not ours.

As we get to something resembling a core, we confront our operating system, the fundamental way we process information, make decisions, and construct our world.

Our primary operating system is binary. Binary thinking judges and organizes information into categories, hierarchies, and either/or choices. Binary thinking puts opposites in tension: left or right, radical or traditional, individual or collective? It creates fragmentation as a necessity of dominance, splitting off what we don’t like from the whole and moving it into the unconscious. Over time, this fragmentation creates the kind of tension that we feel now.

Binary thinking is a part of our biological wiring that is activated and reinforced by our environment. It is also a choice.

The choice is stupidly simple: Are we able to see our differences, especially opposites, in either/or tension, or in creative potential? With the latter, we have the chance for differences to be part of a whole that is more resilient because of diversity, not in spite of it. With the former, we ultimately have to kill off one thing at the expense of raising another.

If the choice is simple, the way through isn’t. We are facing complex, systemic problems and genuine evildoers among us. The paradox is that at the same time the binaries of right and wrong and good and bad seem more certain than ever, we need to evaluate our relationship to certainty. As we continue to organize ourselves around who is right and wrong, what better conditions to understand where our rightness is entangled with their wrongness? The crisis of binary thinking is very much inside.

Addressing our binary thinking doesn’t mean bypassing our own morality, compromising our personal integrity, or distorting reality. It means being comfortable with a self-archeology and a radical empathy that as a collective, we haven’t had much experience with.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

The last few hundred years are a history of binary thinking. Our social and economic structures are entirely governed by it. From it we’ve developed our institutions, our relationships, and our technology. The result is:

Competition as an evolutionary principle
Systems that benefit some at the expense of many
Social hierarchies and at the extreme, oppression
Ideological division and identity-driven decision making
Technology that optimizes for attention, scale, and capital
The centering of certainty and efficiency above all else

We are under the spell of binary thinking because of perceptual momentum, not because it is the only way to perceive reality or because of fixed evolutionary rules. Transforming this kind of momentum is a daunting task, and it starts with adjusting our own binary thinking, moment to moment. Paradoxically, we have to let go of our attachment to the outcome. We do it because we are seeking to cohere with our own nature.

This effort begins with the belief that we can in fact, see and relate differently than we do. I believe that binary thinking as a dominant model is a result of the ego in a stage of developing a mutually supportive relationship with the unconscious. Instead of partnering with the unconscious, which we can think of as the totality of the unknown - infinitely generative and creative - the ego seeks to reinforce existing knowns. And without the twinned, creative relationship of ego and unconscious, binary thinking becomes the default approach to maintaining the ego’s dominance – to detect safety, create certainty, and categorically organize the complexity of the world around us.

It is not a question of killing off or deflating our ego, it is a question of putting it in the right relationship with the whole.

FRAGMENTATION AND THE POLYCRISIS

Meanwhile, all around us, the tensions of our binary world have become untenable. We are in a polycrisis, with multiple breakdowns occurring simultaneously and interacting with each other:

Environmental - The impact of industrial and technological scale on natural resources

Institutional - The collapse of public trust in institutions, traditions, and consensus belief
Psychological/Spiritual - A crisis of meaning and the rise of multipolarity

Because the whole system is affected and the whole system has the possibility for transformation, we need a whole-system approach to move forward. Counter-intuitively, our approach uses fragmentation as the material inquiry into what needs attention. We restore wholeness by looking at what has been alienated from it.

If we’re going to begin our inquiry into fragmentation and alienation, we might look to indigenous and eastern wisdom traditions that offer profound wholeness and nature-based worldviews. It seems intuitive for many in the West to access the practices of other cultures, ancient and modern, as a way to reconnect to what’s been split off from the western psyche - connection to land, cyclical time, embodied wisdom. In fact I think part of the colonial history of the west has been unconsciously driven to access these qualities. We’ve used dominance, extraction, and technology as poor substitutes for acquiring intelligence derived from a living connection to land and ancestors.

We look to the opposite of what we lack. We seek indigeneity for a connection to nature, yet we keep our mind/body split. We seek the east to teach us about oneness, without resolving the two-ness that the western tradition has put in front of us. We don’t need to consciously identify as a Christian to be unconsciously influenced by the concept of a conditional God that punishes and rewards us based on our actions. This influence operates underneath, even as, (especially as), we embrace other traditions. Ultimately, we have to reckon with our own psychic inheritance and uncover its potential for healing. This is the homeopathic approach.

Carl Jung made this point after visiting Taos and meeting the Pueblo tribal elder Mountain Lake. He wrote:

He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being. - 1

We must till our own soil and tend to our own roots.

In the west, our primary encounter with perceiving opposites through a judgement-based lens is described in Genesis 3:7. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Here, perception of the opposites is tied up shame, and with the devil himself. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Addressing this original psychic split has to be resolved through working with the opposites, not through bypassing them. Fundamental to addressing our binary problem: When seeking oneness, we can’t skip two-ness.

JUNG AND MARX

Taking up the western tradition we have Carl Jung and Karl Marx, who both went deep down into two-ness and described what happens when aspects of the whole are fragmented. Jung understood this from a psychic and individual point of view, Marx from a material and collective point of view. Jung was inside the archetype of fragmentation; Marx gave us equations to measure it at scale from the outside.

Because much of their work is about fragmentation, we can look almost anywhere for their descriptions of it. For Jung, it is an inner split, where something has been moved into the unconscious. For Marx, it is the material conditions that cause us to split off from our own humanity and ultimately from others.

From Jung: Neurosis is an inner cleavage — the state of being at war with oneself. What drives people to war with themselves is the suspicion that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another.”2

And in Marx: In fact, the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.3

For both, what has been fragmented is ultimately seeking resolution that is beyond a binary choice. Instead we must find our way through a creative process that restores wholeness.

Jung and Marx describe this creative process uniquely within their areas of discovery. For Jung this is the process of individuation, a slow working through the fragmentation within the psyche by integrating unconscious aspects into conscious awareness - what we avoid is precisely what we need to develop. This process leads to the alchemical coniunctio, or discovering our philosophical gold. It is the flower of our life, blooming into uniquely purposed individual, who is able to healthily relate to the collective. Jung’s description of wholeness - which is dynamical, not static - resolves the opposites through integration rather than splitting them off.

The self, as a symbol of wholeness, is a coincidentia oppositorum, and therefore contains light and darkness simultaneously.4

This wholeness that Jung calls us toward in a process of individuation serves The Self, the psychic center of the unconscious within us. This Self guides us toward a deeper patterning of our life that is often at odds with the wants of our ego. The ego in this case, serves The Self, not the other way around. In this relationship, there is a mutually supportive relationship between ego and unconscious.

For Marx, the creative process was history itself moving through a series of opposites facing one another. As with Jung, he understood the tensions that arise through contradiction within a system, and for Marx this tension is the engine that drives the emergence of something new. What ultimately emerges is the thriving non-hierarchical, statelessness of communism.

His version of wholeness, described materially and historically, resolves the tension of opposites, not by one side dominating, but by transforming the conditions that produced the tension.

Communism is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.5

ALIENATION UNDER CAPITALISM

Because we are dealing in time and the unique tensions of our polycrisis, we can use Marx’s understanding of alienation under capitalism to better understand binary thinking, which is the operating system capitalism emerges from. Most of us already understand capitalism as the cause of economic and social systems that work for some at the expense of most, and nearly all of us experience the forms of alienation inherent in the capitalist system.

For Marx, alienation is a property of contradictions within a system. Although unique to their historical moment, scale, and complexity, these contradictions, like anything binary, have predictable outcomes.

We can get a closer-in diagnosis of our polycrisis through the lens of Marx’s four dimensions of alienation:

Alienation from the product of work - Most of our work is inescapably entangled with systems of oppression, climate change, data aggregation and surveillance, and forces that work directly against our values. This is the “What can I do?-ness” that we increasingly experience, and we try to find paths forward that have the least amount of compromise.
Alienation from the act of production - Burnout, meaninglessness, and disconnection from the work itself. Incoming automation through AI increases this more. The methods of extracting labor, and the platforms on which work is created and consumed, have been consolidated by a very small class of beneficiaries.
Alienation from others - Expressed through competition, manufactured scarcity, and algorithmic divisiveness. We communicate on platforms that amplify this divisiveness with algorithmic intent. Instead of uniting with those who share our interests, we are trained to dominate them. A billionaire has been delivered as something aspirational, if one works harder than others within the system.
Alienation from our species-essence - The potential to develop purpose and wholeness in our lives. The free, conscious, creative capacity we have to imagine what doesn’t yet exist, make meaning - it’s what we are at our most human.

Many of us would agree that this gives us an accurate picture of life under capitalism. What is important to note is that when Marx was writing in the 19th century, capitalism only existed regionally. Having observed only the beginnings of an emerging system, he could predict how contradictions would lead to alienation decades before it took root as a globally dominant model. And he’s been more than validated. We now have a century’s worth of reckless growth, imperialism, and military-industry, beyond the observations that he had in his own lifetime. What Marx really understood were the fundamental dynamics of how a binary system expresses itself over time.

In our cultural critiques, we mostly stop at naming capitalism as the root cause of our alienation. To go further requires self investigation, and this is the critical step: to move beyond critique alone, which can be a mechanism of fragmentation, and instead meet our participation with the problem from the inside. How does our approach to the problem and the people underlying the problem keep us locked in the same binary relationship of self and other?

Many socialists, futurists, radicals, and ourselves included, operate through a predominantly binary lens. Leor Zmigrod, writing about the ‘Ideological Brain’ from perspective of neurobiology, makes the point that the ideologies may be radically different, but the underlying quality of mind is the same.

The ideological brain is a brain that is cognitively rigid, emotionally disregulated, physiologically less sensitive to injustice and injury, neurobiologically receptive to addictive rituals and binary categories. [Its] rigidities and idiosyncrasies manifest where we least expect them, in our most private sensations and physiological responses, beneath the surface of our public convictions and conscious feelings.6

It can be difficult for us to accept that binary thinking transcends our moral high ground. But regardless of how right we are, binary thinking is something we participate in unconsciously that governs our relationships and limits our creative potential.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

And what of the unconscious? Where does binary thinking live within us that functions underneath conscious awareness? The answer lies in how cultural patterning activates and reinforces structures already present in our evolutionary brain.

Because our perceiving lens itself is binary, we mistake it as natural and having no alternative. When we go deeper, we see that there are distinct periods of evolutionary, societal, and scientific developments that have led us to seeing this way. We find that binary models are increasingly out of step with current scientific and social realities.

To start, binary thinking is a survival mechanism, not a creative one. It is how we organize and categorize information to protect ourselves. To process information, binary thinking collapses and distorts information so we can better use it to evaluate a threat:

Information about external stimuli reaches the amygdala by way of direct pathways from the thalamus — the low road — as well as by way of pathways from the thalamus to the cortex and then to the amygdala — the high road. The direct path is a shorter and thus faster transmission route. However, because it bypasses the cortex, it is unable to benefit from cortical processing. As a result, it can only provide the amygdala with a crude representation of the stimulus.7

Through this predator-detection, we receive a “crude representation” of our environment. This operating system, learned through our evolutionary past, is still being utilized in discourse, design, and situations of deep moral complexity. Binary thinking in these cases is an over identification with one type of very basic intelligence that we have access to.

We can find origins of elevating binary thinking in major cultural developments throughout history - the development of written language, the shift from polytheism to monotheism, the organization of societies around personal property – these are shifts that generally speaking, consolidated linearity, a singular authority, ownership, and hierarchy.

The Neolithic consolidation of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago, began a massive transition from egalitarian and democratic societies to hierarchical societies based on direct dominance. The hierarchies and power systems that developed from the Neolithic regressed most of humanity to the dominance of communities by Homo sapiens alpha individuals and coalitions that persists to this day.8

Here, advances during the neolithic period rooted communities into region-specific agricultural societies, from which emerged notions of fixed location and property. As with the rise of industry via the combustion engine in the 18th and 19th centuries, or in our current context, technological leaps scale and reinforce the dominant operating system and the conditions from which they were created.

It is the Enlightenment era, however, that I believe cemented binary thinking as our dominant model. In it, a few men have largely shaped the western way of thinking around a materialist, rational perspective, taking observations of nature, biology, and systems, and turning them into rules. This is primarily an object orientation rather than a relationship orientation — it is one way, not the only way, to see and construct our world from.

Newton - The originator of classical physics. From Newton we get a model of a rational, cause-and-effect universe, and fixed rules about the physical world.
Smith - He applied natural-law thinking to economics, morality, and social order. From Smith we inherit the dynamics of free market capitalism as a self-regulating system.
Darwin - From empirical observation, he derived evolutionary laws of competition based on the scarcity of resources.

Each of these thinkers was operating within their own worldview of white-Christian Eurocentrism. In this group, colonial expansion was already being justified through racial, intellectual and mechanistic supremacy. A natural social hierarchy was the rule of law. The ideas and worldviews that emerge from a dominantly binary operating system can’t be removed from their context.

Since these contributions of these enlightenment-era thinkers, we have seen those in power use them to shape a worldview that justifies their actions. From racial hierarchies, “might makes right” geopolitics, to shareholder-value-above-all business practices. For those in power, scientific models that seem to reinforce existing beliefs are worth amplifying.

The global tensions of our polycrisis didn’t arrive suddenly, they are the consequence of incremental shifts that oriented us over time and habituation toward a binary operating system.

IN THE PRESENT

What makes this moment so critical is that binary models are embedded into the technology we use and communicate through every day. This reinforces binary thinking within us, and amplifies, scales, and accelerates the resulting tension. In our most recent and compressed stage with us as digital consumers, alienation has become a commodity itself. Here, inverse to Marx, our value to produce this commodity becomes greater as we get weaker, more tired, more burnt out.

And because our code is binary, computing itself is a living metaphor for the limitations of it as a dominant model. In binary code, the choice at any moment is a 1 or a 0. As we move from binary to quantum computing, we access superpositions rather than only fixed bits, and with that shift comes an exponential increase in processing power. In the same way, binary thinking seeks fixed outcomes that strengthen our pre-existing knowns and certainties about the world. This metaphor shows us that to access a deeper level of processing, the unknown must be in the equation.

It may seem obvious, but the unknown requires us to actually be in the unknown, not to perform a relationship with it while privately holding onto a fixed outcome. It requires facilities that aren’t valued in our culture of certainty: the ability to be in emergence, to have creative dialogue rather than competitive debate, to imagine and to dream.

Many have been doing the work to deprogram colonial, racial, and capitalist narratives and the roles we uphold that support systemic injustice. As we clear outdated structures, what we replace them with can’t be born out of the same binary models - they must be newly imagined. If we don’t create from a process that includes the other, the seed of our creation will inherently be fragmented. This is about emergence, not choosing from existing alternatives. From adrienne maree brown: Reclaiming the right to dream the future is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.9

Looking back at our polycrisis, we see it is the result of fragmentation played out over the long term: Man vs. nature, free thinking vs. group thinking, and particularly in the west: mind vs. body. This fragmentation is scaled by capitalism, and reinforced internally by the technology we use every day.

If we take our own advice, we must hold radical empathy for the binary world. We go into our own alienation with curiosity, seeking to understand how it relates to the whole. It can be challenging not to collapse into certainty, dogma, or idealizations about the results. We need the stamina to do it incrementally, working on it from the inside as a creative process, not as an ideological mission.

Updating our operating system may take endless effort, but it is possible. Through this effort, we place ourselves on a new evolutionary trajectory that uses fragmentation as the material that guides us toward wholeness, shifting us from unconsciously responsive to consciously creative.

As we make this effort, we know the crisis contains solutions that only a process can reveal. The poison and the antidote rise simultaneously.

Alexander Deleuse, 2026

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1 C.G. Jung, CW 10

2 C.G. Jung, Modern Man In Search of A Soul, 1933

3 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Estranged Labour.

4 C.G. Jung, CW Vol. 5, Symbols of Transformation

5 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Private Property and Communism

6 Leor Zmigrod, The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, 2025

7 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 1996

8 Ruiz Collantes, F. X., Democracy against Homo sapiens alpha: Reverse dominance and political equality in human history, Constellations, 2024

9 adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, 2017ˆ