📦 on boxes

We love to put things in boxes, and usually in a way that glosses over the complexity of the things we’re trying to categorize. Admittedly, categorizing someone as a Democrat or Republican is much easier than keeping track of a more complicated individual ideology, and a checkbox for ‘race’ on a form is easier to deal with than the deeper details of someone’s heritage. But although these shortcuts are helpful, they can easily start to seem real if we forget that they’re fundamentally simplifications. We start seeing political beliefs, race, and even identity as a series of checkboxes, and we lose nuance.

Life isn’t about black-and-white distinctions between extremes—it’s inherently subjective. Every person’s political beliefs, every person’s heritage, every person’s reality, are so much more complicated than categories make them seem. We want easy answers: a clearly defined number of continents, easily digestible political beliefs, a world that’s simple enough to understand. And while we can’t deny that such simplification is important—we couldn’t function without it—the temptation to thoughtlessly over-rely on it means we run the risk of forgetting that it’s simplifying anything at all. We start to see complicated issues as one-dimensional: political beliefs as a set of two ideologies, race as a small set of universal identifiers, the world as far simpler than is reflective of reality.

Beyond just making things easier to process, there’s another reason dichotomies are appealing, though—they’re much easier to debate, and easily lend themselves to the viral outrage of social media. To take a less serious example, questions like “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” are compelling—in demanding yes-or-no answers and therefore inviting easy discourse, they’re much easier to engage with than more complicated questions—”what makes something a sandwich?”. These kinds of easily-debatable questions can range from harmless (“is water wet?”) to more sinister (painting some political or cultural system as one-dimensionally good or evil).

We’re living in a world with politics that seem broken. We’re more divided than ever, common ground is shrinking, and less and less seems to be getting done. Political arguments have become more and more polarized, the most pressing issues of the day boiled down to heated, dehumanizing arguments between extremes. Think about an issue you’re passionate about that’s at the front of national discourse: is there a lot of nuanced debate happening publicly about it? How many people just put themselves in one of two camps, either for or against, pro or anti?

Our political discourse has been boiled down to some version of “is a hot dog a sandwich”, only concerned with dichotomies: for versus against, “us” versus “them”. Oversimplified labels have, on some level, replaced complex beliefs—because it’s a lot easier to put things in boxes then to think about them in all their complexity. It’s easier to think about politics as a two-party game and issues as just two-sided when that’s the only way those issues are ever framed. And once you start only thinking about the world that way, serious issues lose their complexity, becoming just another thing to argue about on Twitter.

Fundamentally, we really need to rethink how we think about boxes. Despite everything I’ve been saying, I admit that they’re necessary and useful—we simply can’t think about everything in all its complexity, so some things have to be simplified. But we need to be conscious of that. When we lose sight of the reality of oversimplification, of how many things we put in boxes, the world loses its complexity and its color.

We need to be comfortable taking things out of the box sometimes, understanding the things and people around us as the three-dimensional phenomena they are. Instead of hiding from nuance and complexity, let’s embrace them—and in doing so, understand the world for what it really is.