The persistence of binary thinking

I was watching "Real Time" the other night and it hit me again how trapped we all seem to be in thinking that for every problem there are only two answers: The Right Answer and the Wrong Answer. The panel was discussing the Obama administration's use of drones for targeted assassinations of possible terrorists. There are huge problems this whole notion, of course, ranging from violations of international law and the moral repugnance of planning to kill multiple innocents ("collateral damage") in an attempt to take out just one mastermind, but those aren't the subject of this post.

No, what struck me was Bill Maher's persistence in framing the discussion as an Either/Or question. You know, we either use drones to blow up someone's house or we do nothing. In Maher's world view there was only one Right Answer. It was like Maher was trapped thinking in Basic: for him everything was either a 1 or a 0; there were no other numbers. Dylan Ratigan kept pointing out that there were alternatives to drone strikes, such as special operations teams (e.g., Seal Team Six), that could be sent in to extract high profile human targets. Jeremy Scahill was being quite persistent in reminding everyone that drone strikes are not particularly effective. Among other things, they do a really nice job of recruiting new persons into supporting anti-U.S. terrorism. Blowing apart a wedding party or a gathering at the local coffee shop with a U.S. drone strike is a really good way to persuade the survivors they want to sign up with Al Qaeda or the Taliban after all. A more effective strategy might be to come up with ways to reduce support for terrorism, not bolster it. Maher wasn't having any of it. In his mind, there were two possibilities: doing nothing or using drones.

This is a situation we encounter all the time in our every day lives. We all know people who can't seem to figure out that for any situation there can be multiple responses. They decide that there is one Right Answer, and if for some reason that answer doesn't work out, they're paralyzed. The idea that there can be multiple right answers never sinks in. I'm not sure where this tendency comes from. It is the end result of being told over and over in school that there's only one right answer for any homework or test question? Have we been brainwashed by too many generations of politicians who insist publicly that there's only one policy solution to any particular problem? Are we humans just naturally lazy thinkers? We're always exhorting each other to "think outside the box" but we almost never do. It's a mystery.