The Pitfalls of Binary Thinking

My ‘guru’ had an answer for everything.

That was, I realize now, the first warning sign I missed. He had a complete system, a framework of beliefs so total and so internally consistent that every question I brought him disappeared inside that system.

Good and evil. Right and wrong. The material world and the spiritual world. Us and everyone else. Every binary you could think of, he had already resolved. And I foolishly bought into his claim that he was generous enough to share his resolution with those wise enough to receive it.

It took me fifteen years and a book I almost didn't read to understand that the completeness of his system was not a sign of its truth.

It was the mechanism of my captivity.

Binary thinking — black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, true and false — is not simply an intellectual limitation. It is a vulnerability. And it is a vulnerability that we are not warned about. And it is a vulnerability that our culture and upbringing often facilitates.

And it is vulnerability that certain people are extraordinarily skilled at finding and exploiting.

I want to be careful here, because I am not making an argument against moral clarity or ethical conviction. I am not saying right and wrong don't exist, or that every belief system is equally valid. What I am saying is this: the moment you encounter someone who claims to have resolved all the complexity, who has a clean answer for every difficult question, who offers you a framework that explains everything and requires you to surrender nothing except the exhausting work of thinking it through yourself, that is the moment to pay very close attention to what is actually being offered. Because what is being offered is not wisdom. It is relief. And relief, when it comes at the price of your own judgment, is one of the most dangerous things you can accept.

The completeness of his system was not a sign of its truth. It was the mechanism to my captivity.

I grew up in a household where the rules were clear and non-negotiable. My mother was decisive and certain in a way that I both admired and resisted. Right and wrong were not subjects open for discussion in our house. They were settled. As a result, I internalized that framework, even as I rebelled against the specific rules it produced. I believed there was a correct answer to every important question. I just hadn't found the person who had them, that is, until i found a 'guru’ who did. Or, I should say, appeared to have them.

He spoke with a certainty that felt like solid ground after years of standing on something unstable. He had a philosophy, a cosmology, a specific account of who I was and why I was here and what I was supposed to do. Every loose thread in my thinking had somewhere to go inside his system. Every doubt had a resolution. Every question about my own worth (and I had many) had an answer that happened to confirm my value while also confirming his authority.

In retrospect, the trap was elegant. He offered me the comfort of binary certainty: You are chosen, not ordinary; spiritual, not material; awakened, not asleep. He did this while quietly positioning himself as the arbiter of which side of every binary I occupied on any given day. The categories were fixed. Only he could decide where I fell within them. And that, I understand now, is how binary thinking becomes a cage rather than a compass.

I have been fortunate to travel across Europe and parts of Africa, Asia and South America during my days as a fashion model and one of the things that sustained travel does to a person, if they pay attention, is make binary certainty feel geographically provincial. What is polite in one country is rude in another. What is modest dress in one culture is restrictive in another. What is considered spiritually elevated behavior in one tradition looks, from the outside of that tradition, like something else entirely.

This is not moral relativism. It is the recognition that the world is genuinely complex, and that a framework built for one specific context — one family, one community, one moment in history — does not automatically scale to every human situation it encounters. The person who has never left their own context can believe their framework is universal. The person who has stood in enough different contexts knows better. I understand now that this is how binary thinking becomes a cage rather than a compass.

What I have come to use instead of binary judgment is something closer to comparison.

When I observe someone else's behavior, I ask myself not whether it is right or wrong in some absolute sense, but whether it is something I would want to emulate, whether it produces effects I admire, whether it treats people in ways that seem to serve them well. This is an internal process. It is the building of a personal moral compass, not the pronouncement of a universal verdict. It is mine and it applies to me. It does not automatically apply to you.

That distinction between a personal compass and a universal law is exactly what sucessful cult leaders erase. The guru's moral asssertions were not offered as his own personal framework. Rather, they were offered as the truth, applicable to everyone, available through him. The fact that I found it resonant did not make it universal. It made me a recruit.

I am aware of the irony in writing a piece that cautions against absolute certainty while making, at several points, fairly confident claims. That irony is intentional. I am not arguing that nothing is knowable or that all beliefs are equally valid. I am arguing for something more modest and more practical: that whenever someone presents you with a complete system or a framework that has resolved all the complexity, answered all the questions, and requires only your assent to function, you should feel the ground carefully underneath you before you put your full weight on it.

Complete systems are not suspicious because they are coherent. They are suspicious because life is not complete nor coherent. A framework that has no exceptions, no areas of genuine uncertainty, no questions it has not already answered, is not more likely to be true than one that acknowledges its own limits. It is more likely to be a product.

I spent fifteen years inside a complete system. I know what it feels like from the inside. The relief of it, the belonging it produces, the specific comfort of waking up every morning under the guise of knowing who you are and having it attached to your life's purpose cannot be understated.

But I also know what it costs. I know what you surrender when you trade the hard work of your own uncertain judgment for the comfort of someone else's certain answers. I know what it looks like when a complete system begins requiring things of you that a less complete system would never dare ask.

Build your own compass. Let it be imperfect and provisional and subject to revision. Let it hold questions it has not yet resolved. Let it be uniquely yours.

And when someone offers you theirs as a replacement.

Run.