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October 12, 2022

My eldest grandson, being a very precocious two-year-old, once responded to his mother’s demand that he “either eat his supper or go to bed” by retorting, “I don’t want two choices; I want five.” Well, don’t we all? But the world does not work that way. A boss doesn’t say to a laggard employee, “Get here on time, or, if you don’t like that, be more cheerful on the job, or, if that doesn’t work for you, try putting these widgets together faster, or you could just stay a little later each day, or….” That doesn’t happen. Nor should it. Humans are rarely capable of making decisions that way.

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The first decision of any importance that mankind had to make presented only two options — to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, or not. To obey God or not.   We are capable of choosing between two options; God gave us free will, but it’s limited. Any more than two to choose from and we start blowing gaskets. In fact all of our religious decisions are binary in nature. Do you believe in God or not? Don’t give me that “agnostic” nonsense. Does an agnostic believe in God? No. Not yet, so no. Is the Bible the Word of God? Yes or no? There’s no middle ground on the important questions. And yet, many people seem to be comfortable floating about in some hazy, cosmic limbo.

Limbo is a most confusing place to live, yet it seems home base for our society. It appears to me that part of the effort to gain control over our thinking is to obfuscate the obvious and deny the simplicity that has always graced human interaction. No longer are men men and women women. No longer is a Republican the polar opposite of a Democrat. No longer is good good and evil evil — instead we have 50 shades of murky, smelly gray.

We even claim multiple choices for things that are not up to our free will. We have men who pretend to be women and mutilate themselves to do so. We have women who pretend to be men, but still want to give birth. We have parents and teachers urging children to join in on the confusion. Depending on whose list you search, there are apparently 50+ genders now, most with made-up ambiguous titles. And for that complication do we have societal harmony? No. Now the LBGs are demonstrating against the Ts. My head spins.  “Men are from Mars: women are from Venus” — now that I can understand, but do we have to have a planet for every delusion?

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Most things in our world are binary. Just look at the computer world. Everything in cyberspace is made of alternating zeros and ones. Just zeros and ones, and from those two options we have made the Internet, and because of the Internet we have on line everything from groceries to doctor’s appointments. Our cars function off of computer codes, as do our phones, our appliances; our books even come that way.

I have a friend and colleague who recently had a son. We teased him for months about what name he would choose. I even made him a list of names not to choose — Archibald, Rupert (I use as my source British poets), but in the end he and his wife had to narrow it down from dozens of options to the final two possibilities. All of our choices work that way. When we buy cars or shirts or dishes or dogs, we have to narrow the field and then make a final, binary choice. There is no other way to go about it.

Though recently Alaska tried to choose a senator via the “ranked choice” method and they made a mess. In ranked choice voting one doesn’t choose directly from either a Democrat or a Republican, one ranks all of the candidates in order of approval. I like Thompson the best and Smith the second best and Marshall the third best, etc. If in the first round one person gets over 50% of the vote, he/she wins, but that rarely happens, and the more parties, the less likely it is to be so easy. Now, in the first place, we can rarely know enough about a candidate to have any idea who the guy from the Pretty in Pink Party is, let alone to know what to do with him, yet we have to rank him somewhere. This is so complicated because with each round the lowest candidate is eliminated, which reshuffles the deck and the final round, which at last contains only two options, often doesn’t include the candidate who won the most votes in the first round. There’s no way to tell who the public really chose.

Ranked choice voting is the absurd extreme to which we can take the idea of multiple parties. We always have a few outliers from obscure, purest partylettes, but most of us wisely choose between the usual binary options. I learned my lesson about the mess a third party can cause the year I voted for Ross Perot. I basically helped Bill Clinton into the Oval Office.  Voting is dependent on the binary system because it’s based on the majority. If you have three or more viable political parties then rarely does anyone get a majority.

Our entire court system is built on the binary choice between guilty and not guilty. For serious crimes the jury vote has to be unanimous. Could it function if we allowed juries to do ranked choice? “Your honor, we have reached a verdict. We find the defendant 7/8 guilty.” That can’t work. We have already complicated things with “not guilty due to insanity.” Of course that may be a moot point since we no longer seem to be prosecuting criminal actions.

All of this is to argue that human society — in fact all of life — is basically (dare I say it?)  black and white, and the more we concentrate on the grey areas the more confused we make things. Moral issues are yes/no options. This is often very uncomfortable and distressing, but trying to fuzz the issues doesn’t help. We can call a pedophile a “minor attracted” individual, but he’s still traumatizing children and we know in our hearts that is wrong. As we listen to candidates this election, aren’t we looking for those folk who don’t lie? Are we fine with someone who only lies because it’s politics? No. (I did once hear a liberal say that yes, his candidate lied, but the man had to do that to win the election. Wow.) Don’t we want honest people in Congress? Yes. And that’s a binary decision.  A person either lies or he doesn’t.