Ternary Thinking
“The equal is an intermediate between excess and defect” —Aristotle
Thinking is imprecise. We can hardly expect to arrive like an arrow on the perfect mark every time. First, that would assume there is a right answer, when outside of the narrowest arithmetic that’s rarely true. Second, it’s a mean burden. How dare we get something wrong the first few times! Yet I’d wager that a lot of shoddy thinking comes from greedily accepting the first thought that comes along as the gospel according to me, the Associated Press, a Harvard study, your friend who works in the field. The issue here isn’t the hysterically promoted, essentially problematic “fact-checking.” Facts are for people who can’t think past square one, anyway.
Aristotle argued that a virtue is not the opposite of a vice, but the midpoint between two vices. The opposite of fear isn’t courage, but the kind of foolhardiness that rushes in, blind to the dangers. The greedy miser doesn’t stand opposed to the generous giver, but to the wasteful spendthrift. Between the cruel and the toothless lie the merciful.
If we imagine a tall hill with steep slopes, thoughts tend to run off to the extremes like too much rain. Don’t believe me? Turn on the news. We tend to think that a good idea stands opposed to a bad one, but the opposite of a bad idea is usually a different bad idea. Questioning what we hear is more taxing than accepting it. The more extreme an idea, usually, the simpler it is to wrap our heads around it (all possums are a filthy pestilent scourge). They suggest simple solutions (get rid of all the possums!). Besides the time and energy we save, the broader appeal of adopting these ideas is that there are usually a lot of other people that we get to call allies once we do. The middle is often full of complexity (Possums are a scavenger species that plays an important role in certain ecosystems but probably don’t make the best pets.) There’s another important lure of extreme thought, thought. It allows us to conjure an extreme emotion that usually satisfies us on a deep, unconscious level.
Emotion, too, is subject to extremes. A frightening stimulus can either make us run or freeze in meekness, or rage against the threat with the ferocity of a mother bear. Depression may be the other pole from anxiety. And I don’t think that love is the opposite of hatred. I think there are different kinds of hatred, and love lies between them. Just ask anyone who’s been through a messy breakup.
I’ve argued that these functions of mind and body, of emotion, thought, and action, aren’t as separate as we think. Notice how when someone is extremely rational, the robotic nerd who analyzes everything, they also fall at the emotional extreme of having too little feeling capacity. And the most irrational thinkers seem to be those who feel emotions most often and profoundly. We think our best when our emotions are in a state of balance, neither repressed nor chaotic.
If you’re wondering about the ways that actions fall into the extremes, well, that’s where we started. Virtues and vices are essentially habitual categories of behaviors. Those that give the community an advantage are held in esteem, while those that others perceive as harmful are discouraged. While we can act with great vigor, or lie down and do nothing, and while both are called for at times, most of our lives are spent somewhere in between. You’ll notice that almost anything done to excess causes harm. It’s fine to sit, but let me tell you, sit for eight hours straight, five days a week, and some part of you will curse you, eventually.
Balance is the state of life. Homeostasis is not the end of the road, it’s the center of the circle. The farther we stray, the more things wobble until at last they spill over for good. So if that’s the case, then why do we have such a habit of bringing imbalance into our lives? Why do we think the easiest thought, or predict the worst? Why do we eat too much? Drink too much? Why do our emotions whip back and forth like a mast in a storm? There are many answers for many instances, but not all human societies in the present or the past have been so inclined. What’s different about us?
A World of Good and Evil
At the heart of our common thoughts lies a binary—a choice between two, and only two, options. Our digital world is built upon 1’s and 0’s. The dominant theologies of the West and Near East are monotheistic Christianity and Islam, and regardless of your faith, the philosophical underpinnings of our society and its laws assume a battle between good and evil. Even those who claim to have no religion have simply transformed many of the same habits into a secular binary between right and wrong, progress and reversion.
We seek perfection. That very notion strains under a minute of examination, but still we strive for a state which is the culmination of all errors before it, blameless and just out of reach. Often the notion of perfection means “more.” Life would be better if we just had more money, more good people, more technology. With more data, we could model every process of life down to the quantum level, know the future to the nth detail, and recreate any reality we choose through a careful formula.
It’s strange to think so, given that we would grant a beautiful work of art is “perfect” because it could not possibly suffer one thing more, or one thing less. It strikes the balance. But even when we do wish for less, we so often rush past a small reduction to champion the complete elimination of the “damned spot” that Lady MacBeth couldn’t bear. It’s the noble quest to eliminate threats to make the world a better place that leads to the elimination of entire classes of behavior, opinion, and even people.
One man’s perfection is of course another’s misery. When we’re forced to always progress to an unreachable ideal, we covertly hold that whatever is going on right now is flawed and needs to be fixed. There’s no contentment. The only victory is the elimination of all wrongs and evils.
Ternary thinking offers another suggestion. Where we seek to arrive is the point of balance. It isn’t right, because it isn’t static. It isn’t true, because there are lots of other options. It’s the homeostatic center that an organism passes through again and again in its efforts to sustain itself. It isn’t perfect, either, because your perfection isn’t mine, and I have my doubts that the many conflicting claimants have a clue what God’s might be.
Though the balance may not always be the best place, a fighter will tell you that from a place of balance, any strike or defense is possible. Once you commit violently to a course, your options disappear and don’t return until you once again pass through that place. In other words, it allows for a nimble life that adapts to the situation.
How to Think in Ternaries
Recall that the generation of the third option doesn’t limit you to three choices, but opens up the infinite. The counterpart of the binary and the digital is the analog—think cassette tapes as opposed to MP3’s. Instead of a sharp break between 1’s and 0’s, the analog encompasses the entire gradient. You can have any color of the rainbow instead of a few catered options.
Ternaries become infinite, because any two points have a midpoint. Once we have point C, halfway between A and B, we can again divide the distance between A and C, and between C and B. Then we can do it again with the new points we found, and so forth. Instead of yes and no, true and false, we can take into account the context in all its glorious complexity and weigh in differently on each situation. When you only have two options, though, you remain blind to the range between them.
In it’s simplest form, ternary thinking works like this: take any opinion. Rather than accepting it whole cloth, look for the opposite opinion. Many times, it will already be provided for you by the other side, but there are cases when you’ll have to flex your imagination. Then ask yourself how each might be justifiable in some ways and problematic in others. Seek a balance between them, even if you don’t believe it yourself.
Remember that you don’t have to stop there. The option you settle on may leap off at a right angle from the entire segment into a third dimension, entirely. Wherever you arrive, remember that this, too, can become one half of a binary if you’re unable to reassess it against new information.
To say that ternary thinking is always the best practice is itself an extreme. There may be some rare cases when the most extreme position is in fact the most appropriate. That said, it isn’t 50% of the time, and I doubt it’s even 1% of the time. Nassim Nicholas Taleb does a fine job of explaining how the tails—those unlikely percentages—can offer fragility or antifragility in certain situations, with tremendous consequences. For our purposes, the important thing is not to “avoid the rare dangers of ternary thinking,” but to understand that we aren’t just substituting it for what is “right, true, and good,” while relegating binaries to “evil.”
Exercise
6. Each day, take a popular opinion. Figure out the opposite position. Then strike a compromise between the two.
It’s better to use other people’s opinions than your own dear beliefs at first. You don’t have to believe your ternary, just find it for the sake of experiment, then dismiss it if you like. There’s no shortage of material in the daily news, and remarks from friends and strangers can work as well. Keep your exercise to yourself, though. Beating people over the head with it isn’t helpful.
Once you’ve had a few weeks to practice, it’s a good idea to move to your own beliefs, especially those you feel most strongly about. You can even begin to find not just one but several possibilities. Doing so too soon will disenchant you with the power of ternary thinking.