Being wary of simple oppositions

Reality is often more complex than the categories we use to describe it.

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Introduction

The further I go, the more wary I become of simple answers.

Not because I believe that all views are equal, that no truth exists, or that every attempt at understanding is doomed to fail. Quite the opposite. I deeply believe that the pursuit of truth is one of humanity’s noblest aspirations. But I also believe that this pursuit requires a quality that has become rare: humility.

The humility to recognise that reality is often more complex than the categories we use to describe it.

This intuition repeatedly returns throughout my reflections. As time passes, I increasingly feel that the most important subjects are also those that most resist definitive answers. Psychology, politics, morality, religion, education and even self-knowledge constantly overflow the frameworks in which we try to contain them.

Yet human beings seem particularly fond of simple explanations. Perhaps because they are reassuring. Perhaps because they create the impression that we can quickly understand our surroundings. Perhaps also because uncertainty is uncomfortable.

We therefore divide the world into oppositions: good and evil, reason and emotion, freedom and determinism, left and right, victims and perpetrators, heroes and villains. These distinctions are not necessarily useless. They sometimes help us think about a reality too vast to grasp in all its complexity. The problem begins when they cease to be tools for reflection and become supposedly faithful descriptions of reality.

Most significant human phenomena seem to resist precisely these simplifications. They rarely arise from a single cause, intention or explanation. Instead, they emerge through complex interactions between psychological, social, cultural, economic, historical and sometimes accidental factors.

This complexity is probably what makes the world so difficult to understand. But it is also what makes the effort so fascinating.

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The human need to simplify

In hindsight, simplification is probably a human necessity.

We cannot permanently analyse every factor that makes up a situation. We need intellectual shortcuts, categories and concepts. Without them, thought would become almost impossible.

The problem is therefore not that simplifications exist. It begins when we forget that they are simplifications.

A map is useful for finding one’s way, but nobody confuses a map with the territory it represents. Yet we often do exactly that with our ideas. We end up confusing our categories with reality itself.

From there, individuals become labels, disagreements become camps, and nuance gradually disappears in favour of narratives that are simpler, more comfortable and easier to defend.

This tendency seems particularly visible today. Public debate can make every question look like a binary confrontation: freedom or security, social justice or individual responsibility, openness to the world or attachment to a culture, sovereignty or international cooperation.

As these subjects are simplified, nuance disappears. People cease to be perceived as individuals and become positions. The aim is no longer to understand an argument, but to identify a camp.

This logic produces a strange illusion: the feeling that we understand more while the complexity of the problem is progressively removed.

Perhaps this is one reason why so many debates now seem to go in circles. The answers become simpler while the problems remain stubbornly complex.

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The black wolf and the white wolf

“I have a black wolf and a white wolf inside me — of course I’m a dualist.”

This thought recently returned to me while listening again to a song by Django, a rapper whose lyrics — sometimes depressive, sometimes furious — have accompanied me for several years.

The line stayed with me. At first it simply felt accurate, because I recognised myself in it. On further reflection, however, it raised a question that seems more complex than it first appears.

The story suggests that a permanent battle takes place within each of us between two opposing forces. One represents anger, fear, jealousy, hatred and selfishness. The other represents love, compassion, generosity and peace. The wolf that wins is simply the one we choose to feed.

I understand why this image is so compelling. It often speaks to me as well. I sometimes reason in this way, especially when emotions are intense, time is short or a situation seems to require an immediate response.

This way of thinking has genuine value. It simplifies reality, helps us decide quickly and gives meaning to certain experiences.

Still, with a little distance, these simplifications deserve to be revisited. Not because they are necessarily false, but because they never tell the whole story.

How can we know with such certainty what belongs to the black wolf and what belongs to the white one?

Does anger necessarily belong to the bad wolf? Blind anger can destroy a relationship or lead to violence. Yet without anger, how many injustices would have gone unchallenged? How many people would never have found the strength to defend themselves or those they love?

Is fear bad? It can paralyse us, but it also protects us from danger.

Even jealousy — an emotion I often regard as one of the most destructive — may be more useful to understand than to condemn. Beneath it may lie wounds, fear of abandonment, low self-confidence or a need for recognition.

This does not make jealousy desirable. But it raises the question of whether deciding that it is good or bad is really the most relevant approach.

Perhaps it is more useful to understand why it appears.

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Understanding or judging?

This is probably the heart of the reflection.

Trying to understand an emotion, behaviour or decision does not mean abandoning moral judgement.

Some actions remain condemnable. Some decisions cause real suffering. Some responsibilities cannot be erased in the name of personal history, social context or determinism.

Yet understanding and judging do not seem incompatible to me. Quite the opposite.

Understanding why an emotion appears, why someone acts in a certain way or why a society produces particular behaviours does not excuse them. It simply enables us to move beyond superficial explanations.

Responsibility remains necessary. So does understanding.

This reflection may not have begun with philosophy, psychology or sociology. It may have begun much earlier.

Periods of doubt, suffering and distress gradually led me to question certainties that had once seemed obvious. Not because they supplied answers, but because they revealed how insufficient some explanations were.

Over time, a simple intuition emerged: human beings are often more complex than the stories we build about them.

It is sometimes harder, but also more useful, to understand that complexity than to reduce it to a reassuring formula.

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What suffering taught me

It is possible that this reflection was born long before any interest in philosophy, psychology or sociology.

Looking back, periods of doubt, suffering and distress probably shaped this way of seeing the world more than many books did. They did not provide answers; they weakened certainties that had previously seemed self-evident.

When everything appears to be going well, simple explanations have considerable seductive power. They make life look understandable, manageable and ordered. But when emotions persist despite every effort to make them disappear, when we act against our own interests, or when certain wounds endure for years, those explanations begin to reveal their limits.

Perhaps many philosophical questions are born in such periods. When life is comfortable, accepting the world as it appears is relatively easy. When doubt, suffering or disillusionment arrives, certainties become more fragile and formerly obvious answers suddenly cease to be so.

Philosophy, psychology and sociology were probably not born from boredom. They often emerged through confrontation with questions for which ordinary answers were no longer enough.

Suffering did not make the world easier to understand. It may simply have taught me to distrust conclusions reached too quickly.

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Jung, the shadow and what we refuse to see

This intuition probably explains why some of Carl Jung’s ideas speak to me more than other psychological approaches.

One of them is his concept of the shadow.

The idea is easy to state, though its implications are deep. Each of us carries a part we would rather not see: emotions, desires, fears, contradictions or behaviours that conflict with the image we wish to have of ourselves.

We sometimes ignore or repress these aspects, or project them onto other people. Jung regarded this tendency as widespread, even though it clearly does not take the same form in everyone.

The problem is that what we refuse to acknowledge does not disappear. These elements often continue to operate silently, sometimes with all the more force because we refuse to observe them.

This idea interests me because it breaks with a purely moral vision of the human being. The issue is no longer simply to distinguish what is good from what is bad, acceptable from condemnable.

Instead, it is to understand why some dimensions of our personality exist, what they reveal about our history, wounds, aspirations and fears, and how they influence our behaviour.

Acknowledging excessive anger does not legitimise it. Acknowledging jealousy does not celebrate it. Acknowledging a destructive impulse does not mean yielding to it.

But ignoring their existence rarely seems to provide a lasting solution.

Perhaps self-knowledge begins precisely there: in our ability to look at what we would sometimes prefer not to see.

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The trap of single explanations

This reflection extends far beyond psychology.

When Pierre Bourdieu examines the influence of the social environment on our trajectories, when Spinoza seeks the causes that produce our thoughts and behaviour, or when Jung invites us to explore the shadow rather than condemn it, they appear to share an intuition: understanding is often harder than judging.

Single explanations, by contrast, are immensely seductive.

They offer an identifiable culprit, an apparent cause and sometimes even an immediate solution. They reassure us that the world can be understood through one interpretive framework.

Yet experience, history and the human sciences repeatedly suggest otherwise.

Human phenomena rarely have a single cause. A reprehensible act, a social crisis or a major historical event may tempt us to identify one culprit or decisive factor. That is reassuring because it simplifies reality and makes it seem intelligible.

But closer examination usually reveals interactions between psychological, social, cultural, economic and historical factors, none of which can explain the whole by itself. Human realities are almost always multifactorial. That makes them difficult to understand — and makes single explanations so often inadequate.

This is why I mistrust theories that claim to explain everything through economics, biology, culture, religion or psychology. Each approach often contains part of an answer. None appears to contain the full complexity of reality.

The problem begins when our model of the world becomes more important than the world itself, when theories cease to be tools and become complete truths.

Perhaps this is one of dogmatism’s most discreet forms: not believing that we possess all truth, but believing that one explanation is enough to account for all reality.

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Politics and camps

This reduction of reality to simple oppositions seems especially visible in contemporary political debate.

The most complex questions are regularly transformed into binary confrontations: left against right, progressives against conservatives, sovereigntists against European integration, globalists against patriots. Understanding a subject comes to mean choosing a side.

The more time passes, the less satisfying I find this approach to politics.

Not because ideological disagreements are unreal — they can be deep — but because society’s problems rarely follow the borders of these categories. Economic, social, ecological, democratic and geopolitical issues constantly overflow the frameworks in which we try to contain them.

Political life itself encourages simplification. A politician must convince quickly, a party must distinguish itself, and a media outlet must capture attention. In this context, nuance becomes a handicap while certainty becomes an advantage.

This is not an accusation against any one political movement. The phenomenon exceeds individuals and is partly embedded in the system itself. Political actors operate in an environment that rewards clear positions, sharp oppositions and simple narratives more than the patient exploration of complex problems.

Perhaps this helps explain the fatigue and mistrust many citizens feel towards public debate. Not because they reject politics, but because they see ideological confrontations in which camps talk more about one another than they seek to understand the issues at stake.

This subject deserves an essay of its own. Yet it is directly connected to the present reflection: in psychology, philosophy and politics alike, the same temptation returns — reducing reality’s complexity to categories simple enough to be understood immediately.

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Determinism, freedom and responsibility

This reflection also led me towards a philosophical opposition that runs through much of intellectual history: freedom versus determinism. When I first encountered Spinoza on one side and Sartre on the other, their visions were often presented as incompatible. Either human beings were free and responsible for their choices, or they were determined by history, environment, biology and education.

The more I considered the question, the less obvious that opposition became.

It is difficult to deny the existence of determining forces. We choose neither our birthplace, family or era, nor many experiences that shape us. Social environment, culture, education, encounters and trauma all influence how we think and act.

Bourdieu’s work is especially illuminating here. It reminds us that individuals are never formed in a vacuum. Everyone develops within a context that profoundly influences their representations, habits, aspirations and even the possibilities they imagine to be available.

Likewise, Spinoza argues that our thoughts and actions have causes of which we are often unaware. What we call freedom may sometimes be ignorance of the mechanisms that determine us.

These analyses contain an important share of truth. Yet I cannot embrace absolute determinism. If every thought, decision and behaviour were merely the mechanical product of prior causes, it would become difficult to understand responsibility, effort, learning or change.

Nor do I believe in an absolute freedom that makes everyone the sole author of their existence, independently of outside influence. That vision seems equally distant from reality.

Human beings seem to exist in permanent tension between these poles. We are influenced by countless factors we do not fully control, yet retain some capacity for action within those constraints.

Perhaps freedom does not mean escaping every influence. Perhaps it means understanding more clearly the influences that move through us, so that we may act with greater lucidity.

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Understanding is not excusing

This is probably where I most often disagree with some interpretations of determinism.

To understand is neither to accept nor to excuse. This distinction seems essential.

Understanding why a person acts in a certain way does not make the behaviour acceptable. Understanding the causes of violence does not justify it. Understanding social mechanisms that encourage certain behaviours does not make those behaviours morally permissible.

Yet the opposite position seems equally problematic.

Refusing to understand in the name of moral judgement often condemns us to acting ineffectively upon the causes of a problem.

Behaviour condemned without being understood rarely disappears. Injustice denounced without an analysis of its mechanisms often returns. Suffering judged without being explored generally continues in other forms.

Understanding therefore matters not because it replaces responsibility or abolishes moral judgement, but because it is often a prerequisite for lasting improvement.

It allows us to act with greater precision and sometimes to prevent rather than merely punish.

It also helps us know ourselves, because this logic applies not only to others but to our own behaviour, mistakes and contradictions.

Trying to understand is often an attempt at lucidity.

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Conclusion

As the years pass, simple answers seem less and less adequate for important questions.

That does not mean abandoning all convictions or retreating into permanent doubt. But many of the greatest intellectual, political and human errors seem to begin when we confuse our simplifications with reality itself.

“What do I know?”

This question feels increasingly relevant to me. Not as an invitation to relativism or absolute scepticism, but as a reminder of our limits. It does not prevent us from thinking, judging or acting. It simply reminds us that our certainties must remain open to examination.

Perhaps wisdom does not consist in accumulating definitive answers. Perhaps it lies in continuing to ask questions, accepting reality’s complexity and nevertheless continuing the effort to understand.

This text is not exempt from that rule.

Its ideas are not fixed truths. They are products of my reading, encounters, experiences, mistakes, doubts and present state. They will probably evolve, as they have many times before.

In a few years, some may seem incomplete. Others may appear naive. A few may have withstood the test of time.

And that is exactly as it should be.

If one thing currently seems more likely than the rest, it is that the search for truth resembles less the discovery of a definitive answer than an ongoing dialogue with the world, with others and with oneself.