DISTINGUISHING DEGREES

“If we identify, we do not differentiate. If we differentiate, we cannot identify.” Alfred Korzybski.

To think in terms of degrees or percentages, to think in terms of what’s “in the middle” represents an advance in thinking. It is advance from what comes most natural to us, namely, to think in terms of polarities. As children we think in polarities in order to create our first categories: night and day, black and white, good and bad, etc. Such dichotomous thinking shows up in our either–or categories. “Either you are a success or a failure, either you are a teacher’s pet or the teacher hates you.”

What does not come so naturally and what has to be learned is to think in terms of degrees. When you can do that, then instead of asking, “Are you angry or happy?” you ask “How angry are you?” “What is the degree of your happiness?” “Is your resilience low, medium, or high?” “If you were to gauge the level of your relaxation from 0 to 10, where would it be?” This kind of thinking is less definite, less rigid, and much more flexible. It allows for degrees. It enables you to view and even expect that experiences and processes will be ever-changing.

A great deal of human misery is a function of polarized either-or thinking. Many who suffer depression, discouragement, high levels of frustration and stress, anger, fear, etc. do so because they fail to make distinctions of degree. Instead they use polarized language: “It is always this way!” “She will never change.” “My job sucks.” “My boss is an asshole.”

Use that kind of polarized language and you can get yourself stuck in a negative state pretty easily. That’s because when you use such language, things are definitive and rigid. There’s no movement or possibility of movement. That’s where the magic of degree language creates the possibility of change. “How much does your job suck? Does it suck 90% of the time?” “Is there the possibility that there is even 1% of the job that does not suck?”

Thinking in the polarized either-or way is known as Aristotelian thinking. It is characterized by an elimination of the middle. That is, there’s nothing in the middle, you are either at this end or that end of the continuum. But that’s the problem—the middle has been excluded. Yet the world that we live in is a world of degrees—processes. And that means that just about everything has a middle, something in-between conceptualized polar opposites.

Of course, it is a lot easier (a lot!) to reduce the world to a set of either-or categories. Do that and you don’t have to do so much thinking. Conversely, it requires a lot of cognitive effort to think about degrees, about how much a thing is one thing and not another thing. We see this in a raw and crude form in the current polarization of politics and from that comes the pressure to be politically correct.

Conversely, to see things in terms of degree, to identify the nuances of a subject, to recognize that different criteria apply in different contexts, etc., all of that requires a lot of conscious thinking, the “slow thinking” of Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011). And that requires effort.

When you learn what Alfred Korzybski called Non-Aristotelian thinking (Science and Sanity 1933/ 1994), you learn to think more systemically. Now you can include in your thinking many of the systemic factors that make up a subject. And with that, while your thinking will become more complex, it will also be more able to make sense of the dynamic processes.

Do you have “an internal critic?” Most people do. Next time you experience that, ask some degree questions: How loud is the voice? What tone is the voice? Where does the voice seem to be coming from? Where does it seem to be going? Once you ask these questions, you can also begin to play around with the variables which are inside of the degrees. “Suppose you move the voice so that it comes out of your left shoulder. What happens then?” “Suppose you make the tone and accent that of Elvis Presley. What effect does that have on you?” “Or what if you lower the volume so it becomes a whisper? Or so low you can’t hear it?”

Degrees— every human experience, because it is a process, has degrees. And if it has degrees, then its variables are variable. That is, you can change it! You can turn it up or down. You can alter it this way or that way. And as you do, you will start to discover that your subjective experiences are under your control to a much larger degree than you ever thought possible. And that then puts you on the pathway to unleashing more of your potentials and becoming more of who you can become.

For more: See Figuring Out People (2005) and the meta-program on Aristotelian thinking #7. Also, Systemic Coaching (2012).