Truth Vs. Black And White Thinking
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For the common thinking, it’s easy to understand what black and white thinking is. However, what does black and white thinking really mean that we’re not seeing? In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom present some very interesting facts about the truth and black and white thinking using the whole climate change debate and an article about electric cars and fuel cars that Tom read as examples to explain more about the black and white thinking. They also get down on truth versus partial truth. Join Bill and Tom as they dive deeper into truth and the true meaning of black and white thinking.
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We’re going to talk about truth and black and white thinking. That’s pretty self-explanatory on its phase. It’s easy to understand for the common thinking of what black and white thinking is. I’m wondering what black and white thinking really means that we’re not seeing?
I’m glad that you’re asking that question because the way I like to talk about truth versus black and white thinking is, black and white thinking is a little bit like unless I see it personally, it’s not true. We might have talked about this a little bit hands over the face.
I’m thinking of when I had toddlers, when they would put their hands over their eyes and think you couldn’t see them. I know that’s not the same thing you’re talking about, but there is some parallel there.
There is a parallel there, as well as the challenge of when a kid puts his hands over his eyes, it’s the, “I don’t see it.” A connection can be restored. Even though you’re not there, you’re there. That’s a big part of the importance. This is the best thing ever. It’s the importance of the Peekaboo game in childhood. It’s a child development, belonging, consistency and stability will be there. If I don’t see this person it doesn’t mean that they’re not there, it’s got to be this way. That creates the truth. Truth becomes stable because what I’m seeing is connection is stable. This person is there, connecting. I’m a part of the tribe. They’re a part of my tribe and there is a truth to it. It gets a little wiggly when we start growing up. There are nuances that the persons is away, but they might be away forever because they had past or because they’re no longer in my life or because of the fallout that took place. They might be gone. Then the idea is I’ve got to choose to mourn the loss of the connection and then feel sad about it, and that’s exactly the right feeling to have. What happens with truth and black and white thinking is unless a person sees it for themselves, they get to claim that it’s not true.
I can think of lots of examples of this in our current culture. I would think the whole climate change debate is one of those. It’s what’s driving this polar vortex. It’s the coldest it’s ever been in my lifetime here in the middle of America. Therefore, this whole global warming thing must not be true because I certainly haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that temperatures are really rising.
I have this evidence of this cold day as the senator is holding a snowball. I have this evidence that it’s cold outside and the snow is telling me that this planet isn’t warming because I’m having this cold thing in my hand. That is an example of black and white thinking. It’s this way because I’m proving this to be true. The problem is truth doesn’t work like that. The way truth works is more like an apple pie at Thanksgiving. There’s a fly that lands on the pie, you see it and I don’t. If I look and the fly’s not on it, my truth is the fly was never on it. I’ll be with joy eating the pie that the fly had jumped on in several different parts of the pie. Your truth is, “There’s no way I’m getting near that pie,” because your truth is, “I’ve seen this thing. It’s contaminated.”
If we look at the experience of the complexity of global warming, I am going to talk about all the flies on the pie, which people don’t want to do because then they have to do a behavior change. Stop putting flies on the pie. I like putting flies on the pie. I like using my car. I don’t want to give up whatever that’s going to make. By the way the give up is not really a give up. There’s no give up. You still get the thing that you’d like, but it’s got to come in a different format. You still got to get the car and the transportation you like. It comes through electricity and wind instead of other sources. It doesn’t come through oil. It’s not the way you would like it, but you’re still getting the thing you would like. The truth is that with my adult mind with general sense of research or understanding or taking a certain level of advice from experts. This is the data that I have and this is the data they have. This is problematic or this is not problematic.
I have a little example maybe to add to this that happened with me. I’m on Facebook and one of my friends, probably a friend of yours too on Facebook, posted an article written by some Belgian magazine about diesel fuel cars versus electric fuel cars. They were referencing a German study that claimed that electric cars are no better than a diesel fuel powered car in terms of the amount of CO2 it would emit into the atmosphere over its lifetime. They cited some evidence, one which is notable was the fact that in Germany, the majority of their electricity is generated from burning coal. To me reading this article, what was glaringly obvious is that they ignored all of the CO2 generated in the manufacturing and distribution process of producing diesel fuel. They were very happy to cite the coal CO2 emissions for producing the electricity that would fuel the electric car.
This was one way of trying to make a black and white argument about the electric car not really the green choice that people think it is. To me the word that came into my head and that I commented was, it seems like fuzzy math to me. If we’re going to make this comparison, you’ve got to look at the entire cradle to grave cycle of both vehicles, manufacturing and fueling them, etc. You could compare the two. Is black and white thinking a convenient way for people to ignore truth or is it making their own truth that they can live with?
They’re validating a partial truth that’s in alignment with their belief structure or advocacy. I am advocating.
I think in a more common language narrative we hear a lot about these days, they’re supporting the narrative they want to.
That’s an advocacy. I’m advocating. I’m supporting the narrative. I’m going to create the narrative. There are flies on the pie in the political system. There are problems inside the Obamacare or the Affordable Health Care Act. There is a problem with global warming. There are problems with these things, but when we get advocacy truth and partial truth being advocated for to validate somebody’s identity, we’re in big trouble because this is the identity that I am advocating for.
Isn’t this what capitalism and marketing does? Maybe not always, not that there are not products that are perfectly in integrity that are being marketed. Don’t you think the majority of marketing is supporting a narrative you want to, to get people to believe? “I should buy that product.”
You’re not going to tell what it doesn’t do or what its limitations are. This is one of the reasons why drug companies are required to put down the side effects. Whereas in other countries, they won’t even let them do it. They don’t let them advertise.
The government does not let them?
No, you cannot advertise drugs.
I thought that you were saying you can’t give the disclaimers.
They can market to doctors. They have to go through the gatekeeper that knows if they’re going to recommend this to the other person or not. They go like, “There’s no way I’m recommending this to this person. They’re going to go down in a second.” Meanwhile, happily if the customer comes in, “Doctor, can I try this? I saw this ad.” The doctor goes, “Yes, I saw that ad too.” All of a sudden it’s like, “Don’t drive heavy machinery when you’re doing this and it causes sleepwalking. You may get drowsy and find yourself on a tractor somewhere.” You notice I did a counter-marketing spin in a humorous way towards something that I could poke a stick at. You could poke a stick at anything. The main thing is can we, as human beings, come back to an honest discussion of truth which is called the truth’s truth? You’ve got to put the two words together. Here’s a truth which is a partial truth. You put a second truth next to that and that’s called the truth’s truth. Here’s the truth and the truth is you are holding a snowball in your hand. That’s true. I see you. That snow ball is cold, but the truth is that this is the difference between weather and climate.
Weather is you’re holding the snowball. Climate is it’s not hot. It’s the measurement over time and across the globe. That’s what you’re sitting with. That is what that’s looking for. It’s such a different way to think about it because the truth’s truth is going to be more comprehensive and fuller. To put those two words together as real word, it provides a broader perspective and expands our perception of what the truth is because otherwise, you’ll have a group of people that might be advocating that the world is flat. Can you imagine that people could advocate for that? The person says, “I haven’t been to space, so I only see the world as flat and this is the way it looks. I only know that to be true. There’s this whole other group of people that believe the same way I do.” That’s called a tribe or an advocacy for that belief. Does it mean that those other people are going to make your truth truer because they agree with you? It just means that you’re not looking at the flies on the pie.
Isn’t it broadening your perspective and taking in more information? It’s very interesting. There was another example that my wife and business partner, Tracy, shared with me. I’m going to keep this general because I don’t remember the specific names. It was about the son of David Duke, the major white supremacist who’s always in the news. He was also one of the characters in the BlacKkKlansman movie that has been popular. David Duke’s son who was raised with the narrow perspective of white supremacy ends up going to college and learning through experience so much of what he was brought up to believe was not true. He ends up broadening his perspective and his narrow truth at that time growing up as a child. His family and community completely changed and he became much more open-minded. I don’t know enough to vouch for whether what a lot of people would consider a good person or not. I was pleased to hear that even someone brought up in such a narrow belief structure can change their belief. I would think what we’re seeing here is see a different truth.
That’s a big part of this because the strong messaging can reinforce the limited or the partial truth that we’re talking about. The message is this is not big of a deal. It happens in business all the time. People in capitalism and competitive thing is about winning the game. It’s not about being collaborative and all. It’s a competitive system that has a series of lines on it. You don’t cross this line because then it becomes either unethical, that’s the first line and criminal if you cross that line. There are lines that have been crossed that are called ethical lines and there are lines that are crossed called criminal lines. What happens if somebody decides that this thing that was done is no big deal? That happens all the time. In other words, get rid of the ethical line. By the way, the criminal line, that’s not such a big deal anyways because it’s whether you’re caught or not. It’s whether you have enough money or not. It’s whether or not you’ve been messaged enough. It’s whether or not you’re rich enough. I get to wipe away that line too.
The struggle is the strong messaging. The black and white messaging that’s coming up is not a big deal. Meanwhile, “It is a big deal.” Are we going to get in that game of who’s competing for eyeballs? We get to have other countries get their viewpoints. They get to weigh in and tip the scale on our elections. Is that where we’re going? Good. I’ll hire a marketing firm from China then and bring money from there because I’m going to be a stronger advocate for China and loosen the rules over there. I’m going to break down the rules that we have here to fit their rules over there. It gets difficult now.
We’re seeing this play out in our culture and politics. I don’t know if you saw it. I saw Rudy Giuliani interviewed. He tried to say that if no laws are broken, it’s okay to receive help from Russia through your campaign, which from a legal perspective, he may be right. Until there’s a law passed and unless you participate in working with them to steal the information from somewhere, which is part of what came out in the Mueller Report. As long as the campaign did not coordinate or participate in gathering the information with that foreign adversary, receiving the information is okay. That’s what he tried to say. Maybe from a legal perspective, he’s right but from a moral or ethical perspective, that line is gone. He would like us to believe and want us to normalize, I think.
That’s the thing that’s getting unsettle is some people don’t have it, that there is a moral line regarding all kinds of different things. Some people have an ethical line. I’m glad you brought the word moral into this because there’s a moral spiritual line. There’s this ethical line and then there’s this legal line. The United States provides a lot of flexibility on the first two before it rises to the place of being legal because as a nation, we’re trying to include a very tricky concept called freedom of speech.
It is tricky. You’ve got to live with that, don’t you?
You’ve got to live with it, but you and I cannot plan a bank robbery and not being in the legal line and have evidence about that. We could talk about planning it as a joke, initially as a talking point. That’s freedom of speech. We’ve got to use that as a talking point. The moral line and the ethical line of it is different than the legal line of it.
What I wonder sometimes is it seems that the people that write laws, our legislators do their best to try to predict any potential condition that may arise and to establish what that legal line is. They also do it within the context of what is morally and ethically acceptable at the time in the context of history at the time in our culture and society. We sometimes hear this term in the media, “A new normal.” I think that those ethical and moral lines get pushed and while some people think, “No one would ever elect someone who was caught on tape regarding women as horribly as Trump did in the accessed Hollywood tape.” Once we do, we all realize the ethical and moral line has been pushed. Maybe that’s not a great example because there’s not necessarily a legal line.
That’s a great example, let me show you why. The taking a value or a need like a fairness. If I embody the message of fairness and I can fuse the truth about fairness. The new normal is fairness looks like if I’m smart enough, I can steal from others just so I don’t get caught. If I’m on a person’s team or identity and I am in a church or in a religious party or an upstanding contributor in a community that donates much, so what that I got the money from selling drugs? Now, I took the left turn. I crossed the moral line. I crossed the ethical line and I crossed the legal line. On the surface, my identity looks like, “Look at this hospital I built. Look at this thing I did over here. Look at what I’ve contributed to society.” This is actually playing out with one of the owners of the big drug company that has been charged with the opioid crisis.
The truth is they donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various different museums. They are upstanding in society with their generosity with wealth to put their names on top of these different museums. Meanwhile, it’s been pushing drugs that were on the legal line, but clearly not ethical and not moral in their strategy and tactic because it’s been messaged that the guy said, “Make it the drug user’s problem. It’s their fault, not our substance. Let’s blame and demonize them. Label and diagnose them as bad.” That’s black and white thinking. “We’re good because we donate all this money to society and look how much better we get from the money that we’ve made. It’s killed a couple of hundred thousand people, but what’s it worth to lose a couple hundred thousand? I don’t know those people.”
You could see that people push for forgiveness if the person is on our team. “I’m going to give this unethical and unmoral behavior a pass because it’s on my team and the other person’s not on my team.” That’s why you’ll hear a supporter say, “They said that but he’s just being a fifteen-year-old boy.” They don’t say fifteen-year-old boy. They just say, “He just talk like this. This is the way men are. Boys will be boys.” Meanwhile it’s not an adult conversation and you can’t win it from the moral, ethical or legal place because the team effect takes place. The term his cult of personality takes place. The new normal has changed if you spin it well enough and you have good enough identity.
That’s a very interesting conclusion there, Bill. What we’re seeing play out for the last few years, Donald Trump harp every chance he gets, “There was no collusion.” Meanwhile, there is no law against collusion. He created this belief that collusion was the problem, not Russian interference in the election or conspiracy or obstruction. It’s like what you were saying tapping the elephant brain. He created this belief that collusion is the bad thing. There hasn’t been any collusion. He probably knew he would never be charged with collusion because there is no law against collusion. He created this belief among so many Americans that collusion was the issue.
He can say after the Mueller Report, “There was no collusion, I was right.” He wants to have everybody make this thing go away. A lot of the country does want this thing to go away, but there seems to be something else starting to happen now. We’re starting to see as people dig into the details, they’re finding all the moral and ethical things at minimum that are off the rails it seems with the administration. Is that going to be enough to convince people that it’s time to make a change in 2020 or that they’ve been duped over the last few years? Is that going to be enough to change people’s beliefs or enough people’s beliefs or is it their truth that is going to be changed? What do you see potentially happening here?
What potentially will happen and what’s going to play out is the people that are in black and white thinking will not move off of the vote. Their vote is already cast for Trump. That’s my identity and I’m in this place. There are a lot of people that are in pain about what they’ve been taught and what they’ve been experienced or the strong messaging that the other side is bad. That there’s been a truth called an associative truth. Here’s socialism, the bad part of communism and here’s democrats. They’re in this together. The democrats are the new socialist or the new communist. I’m setting a belief that my elephant brain has been demonized to label and diagnose. I’m going to set it next to this party versus setting it next to Russia.
I’m not going to set it over there because that system shifted to this king with his thirteen men, with his autocrats. Their system has moved away from socialism too, which is everybody’s trying to contribute for the greater good. They’re not doing that now. Here’s a bunch of these powerful men that are rich and they’re deciding on how much of the pie each of them are taking? What can Putin do to keep that system in place? It’s essentially what Americans fought for against England with the nobles and the king. That’s what we fought against for our freedom and independence. Right now, we’re coming back and putting the truth is that’s a better system because it looks cleaner and it looks easier for people to believe. I’m just going to advocate power to these rich and smart people. Yes, they have wealth but smart. All they’re doing is figuring out how to collect and steal from everybody and start a collaborative and cooperative society, which works way better.
To come back around to the word collusion and the reason why the word is working. I’m going to pull the word apart and watch what happens, “Collusion, co-illusion.” It’s two people agreeing on the same illusion. That’s why it’s not a legal term because if there are two people and if there’s no collusion, then there’s no collusion but there is an illusion that I would like you to focus on. The illusion is, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” We’re left with the illusion. What we’re left with language-wise is the illusion is dangling and people don’t know that the illusion is dangling. It’s a little weird, but that’s what happens. That’s not to say that there’s no illusion on both sides of the aisle at the same time. There are choices and laws that were made from the democratic side of the fence. It’s like, “Really?” That’s like “I don’t think that looks fair. That doesn’t look like it’s going to help us at all. It will help this thing.” That’s trying to bubble wrap somebody from getting hurt. That one’s not going to work either. It’s over-protection, overkill, over-regulation. We need some of it because if we swing it all the way to the other side, all of a sudden it’s black and white thinking as regulators are bad. Excuse me, regulators are safekeepers. They are police officers for a certain product or service.
Let me see that I got this right. You’re going to get rid of the police officer to protect food. Does that sound like a good idea? Get rid of the police officer and say, “This person that’s making this gets to have it any way they want because no one is looking over their shoulder.” Let’s get rid of the regulators for the bank industry. Let’s do that. That means that these people are going to regulate themselves and not put their own interests ahead of the public. I want to get rid of my police force called regulators. What’s going to need to happen truth-wise because the rebranding of regulators being bad, the word regulation or regulators has to get rebranded in a different way. This is weird but it’s true. If a brand gets polluted by a bad mistake, people don’t buy it and don’t use it anymore. They don’t want it anymore and they don’t buy in. They’ll throw the baby out with the bath water. That’s black and white thinking. They’ll go, “No, I’m so against abortion. I am going to get rid of the number one system that provides women’s healthcare, Planned Parenthood.”
It’s like 2% of what they do and the brand is polluted. “I don’t want voters to be registered. I’m going to get rid of ACORN. I don’t want minorities to be registered. I’m going to pollute the company called ACORN. I’m going to demonize them.” You could see that in the purchasing of truth, it depends what message that people want to use language-wise and where that messaging is going to take us to go back to a place where, “It’s okay if we pollute the planet more. The asbestos is no problem. Lead is okay.” No, it really isn’t. “We want to support coal.” No, you don’t. It did take us somewhere. The coal industry and all those people who work and had worked in that industry helped this nation and this world and human beings get to this next level. We have grown past and grown through. Now, we’re ready to move to a new system because there are more of us on the planet.
I’m wondering, Bill. You may not be able to move people off of black and white thinking, you made that clear. Their minds are made up. It’s their guy. When you’re faced with as you were talking about this branding one way or another to suit your purpose, your narrative, both sides do that. Can we agree? This is not, “They only do it. We don’t.” It seems to me that more politicians have been struggling to be in a defensive position to battle against the tapping of the elephant brain, no collusion or collusion or whatever it is. Is there a way that the politicians that are on the defensive can use language and words better? To not allow the other side to get away with stealing the narrative and doing that branding, which is try and manipulate who they’re trying to sway. How would someone combat this?
This is where it gets interesting because there is a way to do it. I could give you the answer to that question. If I gave you the answer to the question, people’s brain will reject it right away. It has to do with the seven different types of language that we speak from. The reason why is because most politicians get stuck. The ones that get stuck are trying to solve a problem and explain how it’s going to work. That’s where they get lost. Most of the democratic field are doing that right now. They are identifying these various different problems and then they’re over-explaining why this is a problem and they have the solution for this problem.
I tuned out. I stopped reading already. That’s the problem, their tactics are not effective.
What winds up happening is that leads to the third style of language which has to do with rewards, deals and punishments. People take bribes and in the marketing narrative, they’ll push a bribe in front of the person. They even call it an ethical bribe instead of a gift. It’s like, “Here is a gift.” If it’s a gift, it’s authentic. You can use it free and let’s see what you can do with it but when it’s a deal, it starts to get a little yucky. Even if the person takes the deal, they usually don’t do a very good job on the thing they’re working on.
For example, I had this discussion with my twelve-year-old, “Tristan, you’ve got to study for your history and I know you want to play Fortnite. I hear you want me to wake you up at 5:30.” He goes, “Yes, I want to play the game first and then I’m going to do the study guide.” I go, “Tristan, I can appreciate the plan that you’re coming up with, but I want those two things separate. You’ve got to focus on both of those two things separate because if you do, if we make it a deal, your brain will sandbag the assignment and not study at all. You’ll be trying to get the assignment done as quickly as possible so that you can play the game. Don’t make your mind do that because you’ll start fighting with yourself. Tristan, get these things separate. We’re going to look at the study guide, get it to completion and then we’ll see how much time is left and then you can play the game.”
When he showed up that way, he finished in about a third of the time. If he would have shown up as a deal, he would have been half there, been fighting me the whole way. Dad get this done for me. He wouldn’t have participated and then he’ll go, “I’m done.” Then he bails at the end. If it was the other way, he would’ve bailed. Once I got his brain to separate those two things, he played full out on the assignment and then he was surprised. He was amazed. He goes, “Dad, I thought there was only half-an-hour left. I have an hour-and-a-half left to play the game.” I go, “Did you see how when your mind participates fully in what you’re doing, it gets done quicker?” He goes, “Yeah.” He goes over and plays Fortnite and he got more time. That’s the difference between black and white thinking, which is deal making between one way or the other way. The truth is play full-out in both spaces and then you get both things to take care of.
It seems that there’s no silver bullet quick answer on how to combat the narrative that black and white thinking can set up. You said there are seven states of languages.
There are these different seven states of languages that make it difficult to compete or to create a deficit. What’s missing is that underneath those seven things, there is a vein of gold of language that can be used to combat anything that’s set up here.
Are those seven states of language, are they each a topic we need to dive deeply into in future episodes?
That’s correct. The answer is there. It looks like a simple answer but try to execute it. Try to be compassionate when somebody says a very tragic sentence without getting activated. That’s what we’re going to be working on, Tom. That’s one of the things that I provide with the consulting, coaching and training that I do.
Which is why I’m here and participating with you because I’m one of those students and I love it and it helps me in my business. I look forward to that journey and I hope our audience do too, to go through those seven different states of language or use of language. It must take discipline. That’s probably why it’s so hard.
A little bit. It’s hard to swap out the word stupid with the word awareness. I would like awareness instead of saying, “You’re stupid.” “I’m not sure if we’re getting full awareness here.” Instead of saying, “What an idiot.” You see how easy it is to do the label, but if you’re getting used to swapping out language going like, “Tom, I think Americans need a little spoonful of awareness.”
That I would think would land in a very different way.
I’d like to talk to you a little bit about awareness. Tell me about what you’re aware of and how that works. I’ll think about the things that I’m aware of and we’ll see if we can find the truth in the middle.
I think that’s a great place to leave off for now. I look forward to starting to get into those details and take those deep dives.
Hopefully, readers, you will as well.
Thanks.
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