"There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him"
- Bob Wiley
It's interesting to me how we quickly divide up a population of people into one of two things. And not just people, but things in general. Awhile back I was having problems finding anything to watch on Netflix. While I think Netflix is an overall great service, there have been a lot of times where I wonder what they must think of me. I've given Citizen Kane five stars as well as The 40 Year-Old Virgin. For other movies I would give more moderate rating. While I enjoyed that romantic comedy with the reformed action star who smolders on screen, it wasn't something that I would feel the need to watch again. Three stars. The problem with this was that after awhile Netflix found that maybe I would enjoy more three star movies. I don't seek out movies that are visual smooth jazz. I want something that I can enjoy and not reach for my phone as something more entertaining. So in order to stop Netflix from wasting my time I started rating everything on a scale two or four stars. Three didn't exist anymore because it was worthless as far as making a recommendation. Don't tell me about movies that I may walk away from saying "well I didn't hate it". My time is becoming more and more precious. Since I still want to enjoy movies with a finite amount of time to do so, I can only watch those things which a computer tells me that I'll love. That has become my movie watching world; love it or hate it. If you're not one thing then you must be the other thing. The sad thing is though that seems to be the world in general.
When I was little I knew there were good guys and bad guys. The bad guys were easy to spot because they looked bad. Or they had names that made it obvious. If you grew up with the name Skeletor or Dr. Mindbender then I'm guessing your career choices are really limited. Plus people's expectations of you would already be colored. What were the motivations of these "bad" guys? It didn't matter because they were bad. The good guys stood for everything right and true. Even in history class we were taught about how the Nazis were bad (which they were, no doubt there) and the Allies were good. If you go and read more than your eighth grade history book you find out that not everyone saw things so clearly. Germany as a whole wasn't full of people bent on world domination and destruction of an entire people. Sure there were people within that country and within that particular power group that felt it was their duty and right to exterminate whomever they saw beneath them. We don't want that story though. We want to know that we're the good guys and we defeated the bad guys. It helped that they wore uniforms. Oh you're one of the bad guys. Here's your black uniform with skulls and lightning. Most German soldiers were just people from Germany who felt compelled to fight for their country, much like our own people who have served. To the enemy though our troops are the bad guys. Most likely though there aren't any good guys or bad guys. It's all just a bunch of guys (and gals) who are doing things that vary from good to bad. Even that is probably up for debate. A soldier or a police officer has to make decisions about that sort of thing in an instant and then live with the consequences, or maybe not if they made the wrong choice. It's made much more difficult when they are forced to make these decisions so quickly that everything is boiled down to a black and white scenario.
Is everything really black and white? We encourage people to play games where there is a definitive winner and an obvious loser. We watch teams, who work together and overcome their differences in order to accomplish a common goal. That goal is defeating another team, who was doing the same thing. Only one can be considered a winner though. The other teams, even if they are working well together, are now considered inferior because we can't allow for there to be something other than a winner or a loser. Granted I'm not saying we go so far as to give everyone a trophy for simply showing up because that doesn't help either. Still we're showing our children at a very early age that even if you give your best and work hard that you can still be considered a loser. For some children that will create drive in which they decide to work even harder so that they can become the winner. For other children they give up or accept their place in the world as someone who's best simply isn't good enough. Is it possible to play a game for the enjoyment of it without having there be people divided up into two different camps? Maybe it's just built into our brains that things are one thing or another. Our very survival meant being better than the next guy. While we're not really allowed to savagely murder each other for the sake of our own genes making it to the next round, we can certainly feed that primal urge in our brain by watching a couple teams play for relatively low stakes that feel very important at the time. Have we not really evolved beyond needing that feeling?
Life itself may not even be as simple as we once though. Sure when something is dead then it's dead, but now we've learned there is brain dead as well. Your body could be alive, but there isn't anyone in there. Are you still alive at that point? We can barely begin to agree on when life starts or what on our planet is alive in the sense that makes us comfortable. A virus may not really be alive if all it is is a set of genes that are using another life form to replicate itself. Somewhere in the vastness of the universe something could look at us and think we're not really alive because we don't meet some lofty criteria that they've set out for themselves. We don't even have to go into what happens when our physical body dies to have the issue being incredibly nuanced to the point of being vaguely unknowable. The world is full of nuance. Most things aren't clearly black or white. There are shades of...I'm not even going to say it because I don't want some search engine to mistakenly identify my writing with that book/movie.
I think about art or food or food that looks like art. Sometimes you just know what you like, even if you can't explain why. This thing is pleasing to my palette (visual or tasty kind) so if asked I'll probably say I liked it, but to varying degrees. If forced to choose between love or hate then a lot of things are going to get pitched over the side because I don't exactly want to say that I love it. I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes I wish the world would appreciate ambivalence about most things rather than forcing us to choose between being with them or against them. If asked about a complex issue one normally can't just say "I disagree" without at least explaining why. And in doing so we tend to find out that while we may fundamentally disagree with someone or something, there may be a lot of area that we do agree with. It could be that our brains haven't really caught up to the fact that there is more than two classifications for anything in the world. Then again maybe it all comes down to if you like Neil Diamond or not.
