Free-range thinking: Beyond binary reductionism.
On a few separate occasions, for different subjects, I have received messages from people attempting to discredit my substance-based critiques or inquiries by saying that some right-wing media raised similar points and therefore what I say must be false or dangerous. This response comes up frequently when one highlights the factual limitations of and harmful impacts caused by “renewable” energy technologies. As someone pushed back when I wrote “Earth needs therapy, not ‘green’ tech nor ‘green’ finance”, “Far-right media propped up the film Planet of the Humans (which documents the real-life destruction caused by “renewable” energy technologies across the globe)—what do you think that tells you about what you're saying?”
This take is wildly reductionistic. It leaves no room for nuance, which does our potential for collective growth and breakthroughs a disservice.
There are, for example, anti-establishment, right-wing media commentators who are anti-war. Just because those sentiments are expressed by people whose worldviews are, in large part, different than mine does not automatically render all of their concerns, ever, invalid.
This is why sharpening our critical thinking skills and learning to calibrate all of the information we receive—based on the source, influence, and relativity to the knowledge we gain elsewhere—is of absolute importance. Otherwise, we risk falling into the trap of binary reductionism, where being accepted by a particular group based on their constructed ideals, where “staying within the boundaries” of one “side” and never daring to question the arbitrary lines, become prioritized over the genuine curiosity to arrive as close to the truth as possible. The latter requires an ability to detach from any “group” and the courage to go against the current, to question norms, to challenge “truths” often held as fundamental.
If I were to give an over-generalized analysis of the American “left” establishment and the American “right” establishment in the context of climate action, I would say that the progressive or liberal one recognizes that climate change is real, demonizes fossil fuels, while propping up “renewable” energy as the simple fix. Meanwhile, the conservative one denies the reality or seriousness of climate change, casts doubt on “renewable” energy as the solution, while propping up fossil fuels as impossible to replace.
There are actually elements of truth on both sides—as both fossil fuels and “renewable” technologies, at the same industrial scales, are not sustainable and should be critiqued. Though presented separately, this is not their point. They both circumvent the need for “degrowth” and decentralization. And they both want to maintain the status quo—the underlying, energy-intensive system which continues to allow for the monopolization of power and the erosion of community.
I am not on either of those sides. I am in a third lane. Or no lane, actually.
I'm just out in the open, a free-range thinker, if you will, because being boxed in with a carceral logic is my pet peeve. I have evolved my thinking and views too much over the years to want to swear my loyalty to any ideology or to rigidly define the entity that is me.
This is why I align with fugitive thought. And I believe that having a culture of people relying on categories and binaries to make sense of the world, rather than recognizing their limitations, is part of the deeper crisis of human supremacy.
As Vanessa Andreotti of Hospicing Modernity shared with me:
"Part of enlightenment humanism is this attempt to index the world into language. So we describe reality in order to be able to control it and to predict it. To a certain extent, it works.
But if our relationship with language is one of indexing, we may miss out on the fact that reality is much more dynamic—it exceeds what words can say and do.”
We use language to try to frame the world into concepts so we might make better sense of it. And there is value in that. But trouble arises when we fail to see their role as tools and instead hold them up as absolute truths—when we give more weight to these human constructs created to help us understand reality, over the actual, underlying, dynamic, unframeable reality itself.
Inspired by the articulations of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, I've been thinking a lot about our “crisis in form” as they take shape in a multitude of ways—from how climate action often replicates the problem, to how global conferences are often set up to reflect the injustices they seek to address, to how certain media platforms created to “connect” the world actually disconnect and dehumanize, and also to the ways we consume or deny knowledge, trying to expand our views yet often with exclusive lenses.
From my analysis, we have a cultural crisis in form reflected in how we approach the construction of knowledge and how we intake information.
The pursuit of truth-seeking calls on us to move past in-group thinking, to have the humility to learn from people with who we may disagree on some issues, to be able to honestly find elements of truth in conspiracies, to be able to queer our perspectives beyond either-or reductionism. As Dr. Akomolafe eloquently shares when talking about breaking dualisms, “One needs diffractive ‘lenses’ – a way of ‘seeing’ that brings us to the intersection points, where things cross-out, cross-into, spill through, and de/construct (the hyphen in the midst of the word helps us see the simultaneity of what is happening, without privileging sides) boundaries.”
So I reject when people tell me that for the “ethics of creating a responsible media ecosystem” (whatever that means), I can only interview, learn from, and speak with people who I already agree with 99%, that I would be irresponsible if I ever quoted or shared anything by somebody who once had some view that was problematic or disagreeable. I also reject when people dismiss what someone says entirely because of something else totally irrelevant to the actual points being raised.
I do not want to create a “media ecosystem” around me that is an echo chamber where I only ever engage with and expose myself, and those who read my work, to views that already neatly align with mine.
Rather than justifying censorship, de-platforming, or ostracization, I'm more interested in entertaining as many viewpoints as I possibly can, intentionally seeking alternative and opposing stories in order to best calibrate my critical lenses. I want to see the complexity of people as clearly as possible, and not feed into a superficial simplification of the human experience.
So allow me to clarify, once and for all, that when I quote or interview people, it is never an endorsement of every single thing they've ever said or supported. Apparently, some have that expectation of me. But that standard to hold a journalist or public thinker to serves only to create more surface-level silos that are part of the crisis in form. It might make people feel better and more at ease in their bubbles, but it prevents us from seeing the true intricacies of the world—all of the messy spillovers and entangled undercurrents that I'm curious to unveil.
“If you're standing on the beach, and you're seeing that moon… somebody 20 meters further up the beach is seeing it in a different place. As you move and walk up and down the beach, it's moving as well in relation to where you are. So you get 1,000 people right up and down that coast, all reporting on the location of where the moon reflection is. Every single one of these stories will be wrong and right at the same time.
But the aggregate story, the big meta story, the big narrative… [that is what] is approximating the truth.” –Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta of Sand Talk.