The Dualistic Mind Trap: Six Steps to Mental Freedom

Nowadays everyone is so convinced that everything is either “right or wrong” and it seems like everywhere you look you will find side A against side B. This view and this black and white world are one of the easy mental traps to fall into that will give you struggles in life. This view is rooted in a concept known as “dualism” and seeps its way into our everyday lives in social, business, and political environments.

Why do I tell you this?

I tell you so that you avoid the traps of life that have been set around the dualistic mind. Advertising and other rhetoric exist that activates these dualistic principles and sucks people in.

Don’t fall as a victim, think for yourself and be strongly independent.

Why is dualism so prevalent in our minds and thought processes?

It comes from an early age when we are still dependent on others around us to help us survive. As we develop when we are young we cling to the authority figures around us, whether they be our parents and family, religious and education instructors, or our coaches. What they tell us becomes law in our mind and we generally develop similar beliefs to what they give to us and show us.

As we get older we run into moments that challenge these previously cemented views that we took as laws and sometimes we may even see our authority figures falter. And with the development of technology, we have access to more information than ever, and we should be able to find all the support we need to answer various questions. However, the internet is infiltrated with support for both sides and large amounts of unprocessed data that have been skewed or misrepresented. Few people have the mental capacity and time to critique or fact check.

What happens to our thoughts then?

Chances are the majority of people either cling to their original beliefs and brush off this adversity, or we go through somewhat of overcorrection and decide that our previous notion was completely wrong and bad. This can be explained by terms like confirmation bias (the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms one’s prior beliefs) or selective perception (the tendency not to notice and more quickly forget stimuli that cause emotional discomfort and contradict our prior beliefs), which may ring a bell. Both of these options, however, put us in a formulaic mindset that can cause us to make mistakes in the future.

In order to get ahead, we must recognize where we are stagnant in our preferences; and allow more room for critical thinking. It is far too easy to create environments that say the same things over and over again; and when we do so, we are no longer challenging ourselves. There is no “one size fits all” almost every stance or schema that our mind creates has its limitations and weaknesses. Critical thinking is a term that spits at you throughout your life but rarely does people try and give you a framework for how to activate it or approach situations. Here are the six- critical steps to help you break down the material and help you develop an elite mind.

1. Remove yourself from your feelings after you read or hear something. Look into the origin of who is presenting you with the information and consider their motivations and influences.
2. Look for generalizations. The more broad statements you can find with definitive conclusions attached to them, the more likely there is to be a lot of dualistic messages contained. Normative words and statements like “good, bad, evil, best, etc” are good indicators, especially when used to compare two or more things without numerical measurements.
3. Take statements that stand out to you (positively OR negatively) and research the facts, figures, and messages they contain. Are you finding a lot of congruences, lots of opposition, or a mix of both? The less consistency, the less readily you should accept it upon the first encounter.
4. Question numbers and where they come from, learn the approach that was taken. Remember different people use different measures as their approach to answering a question. These different approaches may all seem logically rooted, however, they can also yield very different conclusions.
5. How do different conclusions fit into the bigger picture? Is this a larger, macro claim? Then what are the smaller scale situations where it does not hold up? Is it a smaller, more micro-scale claim? Then how does it fit into the bigger picture?
6. Finally, as a knowledgable forecaster, Nate Silver says “think probabilistically.” very few things in life are absolute and decision-making and planning should be based around the information you have available to you. Recognize the variety of situations and factors and that there is not a formula that works for everything, contingency plans are your best bet against the unexpected.