Right or Up

This link to a right wing news site is part of my policy to listen to different sides of debates. Our topic is never current gossip: this headline I share to bring up the topic of ordinary consciousness again. (To even get the point of the headline, though, you must be aware of the Brexit debate.) I stress that this post (this blog) is not about external events, it is about the way we think. That is, as Jan Cox spent much time elucidating, reliant on binary thought. But this is a good example of the processes of thinking that we rely on constantly. And it is blinkering, not clarifying. How so?

I quote:
REMAINERS’ PRO-MIGRANT MASK IS SLIPPING
It is oligarchy, not migrants, that elite Europhiles are fighting for.

End quote.

The operative logic in this statement is that if a person is for rich people, they must be against immigrants. But why could one not be for both segments of the population. No reason except that the point in the headline is made in an either/or format. The writer can do that because of the binary thought that is the structure of ordinary consciousness. 

Maybe some rich people are just pretending to worry about the fate of migrants, as a tool to prevent Britain seceding from the EU. But many are not insincere and there is nothing persuasive in that sentence, no facts marshaled, to diminish a both/and scenario. The strength of the headline is simple binary dualism. If a thing is that, then it cannot be also this. 

Binary thought serves a useful purpose when we examine the external world with a view towards rearranging it. But for most that is rarely the content of their thought. And since they are unaware of their reliance on a faulty dualism, gaining a broader picture of their situation, of the complexity we live in, is frustratingly out of reach. Yes they can fix a broken garage door, but others things do not yield to binary thinking in a manner that leads to effective ideas.

There is no right in right or left. And that is just the slightest example.
This binary thinking is a manifestation of that mechanicity which lives our lives for us.