This old joke is clever but it in fact describes the world much more accurately than it appears.
This morning I watched a new Ami Horowitz video where he interviewed Muslim Brotherhood leaders and members. They openly described how they view the West as irredeemably immoral and how it must be overthrown. But they also mention how the far Left are natural partners for them - because they think the same way.
All extremists, whether Muslim or nationalist or progressive, have a core argument that is based on truth. Hollywood really does make money off of immorality; unlimited immigration can have negative effects on a nation, there are huge inequalities in society that feel unfair. The problem is not that they are completely wrong: the problem is that their response is to inflate their particular grievance as the overarching problem in the world and then to use it as a reason to tear it all down.
The idea of fixing society's ills is not even considered. Indeed, when institutions try to meet the extremists halfway and try to fix the most egregious practices, the response is not appreciation but scorn and it is seen as an opportunity to pressure them further.
The problems are binary, and the solutions are as well - keep or destroy.
There is an intense irony here. That binary thinking is a direct outgrowth of Western thinking centered on Greek philosophy. To the Greeks, theory is the only playing field, and if reality doesn't conform, there must be something wrong with reality.
Western civilization has unconsciously adapted this mindset. Western culture trains people to think in binaries long before they encounter ideology. The scientific worldview, the legal worldview, the political worldview, the media worldview, the academic worldview — they all default to classification and clarity. Messiness feels like a failure of analysis. Ambivalence feels like incompetence. Contradiction feels like corruption. So when a radical movement arrives and offers a crystalline schema to explain everything, it does not feel alien. It feels like coming home to a familiar mental grammar.
The radical takes Greek categorical thinking to its logical endpoint. If reality does not fit the theory, reality must be trimmed, silenced, or eliminated. If people complicate the story, they do not represent human nuance but moral threat. If exceptions arise, they are not instructive but dangerous. In a binary frame, deviations from the theory must be treated as impurities to be purged.
This is why extremists always end up with cleansing rhetoric. They cannot fix the brokenness because fixing requires grappling with gradients. They cannot coexist with disagreement because disagreement muddies the purity of the scheme. They solve discomfort by eliminating complexity. They are not thinking differently from the culture around them, but rather that they are thinking more intensely in the style that Western culture already rewards.
The Jewish tradition approaches reality differently. It does not begin with abstract categories but with lived obligations. It does not demand purity of moral identity but acknowledges perpetual imperfection. It does not treat contradiction as a threat but as a condition of human life. It assumes that moral growth happens through tradeoffs, humility, and slow internal repair rather than through sweeping external purification. This derech model accepts that the world is murky and that we must navigate through the murk rather than pretend we can eliminate it.
Most importantly, the Jewish model is centered on the idea of repair. (Yes, even the Tikkun Olam people have a grain of truth behind their thinking.)
When someone fails, Judaism does not say “purify the sinner from society.” It says “how does one return, how does one repent, how does one regain integrity?” When a system fails, the question is “how do we fix it” rather than “how do we destroy it.”
In Jewish thought, the obligation always starts inward before it moves outward. One changes oneself first and only then engages with the world. Binary thinking reverses that. It demands that one change the world first, and eliminate one’s enemies (metaphorically or physically) as the prime driver.
Pornography is enormously popular in the Muslim world, but viewing it is a major sin. So the guilt gets externalized to "destroy the people who are making me feel this way."
The progressive movement is dominated not by oppressed minorities or by overworked factory workers but by privileged whites who feel guilty at their own societal advantages - so they must assuage their guilt by calling for revolution.
Many on the Right cannot reconcile their bigotry with their primary Christian personal obligation to love your neighbor, so they turn the other into a threat to their faith who deserves only loathing.
Each example is guilt projected outward.
The extremists exploit this very human need to resist feeling guilty. They create an irredeemable enemy because that enemy stabilizes their identity and allows them to externalize their guilt and avoid fixing themselves.
If the defined enemy changes or improves, the binary collapses. If the system can repair itself, the crusade becomes pointless. If nuance is admitted, the absolutist dissolves.
Abortion rights activists must be murderers. Gun rights advocates must be trigger happy hillbillies. Muslims must all be terrorists. Israel must be committing genocide. The definitions describe the required binary, not the reality.
All of this stems from the same inherited cognitive posture: the belief that the world must be forced to fit into a conceptual grid. The radical merely inverts the categories but preserves the structure. They are not thinking outside Western civilization; they are playing inside one of its deepest and often unnoticed legacies.
The antidote is not “be nicer” or “be tolerant” or “be moderate.” The antidote is an entirely different relationship to reality. It is accepting that truth is not categorical, that people are mixtures of impulses and histories, that institutions can fail and recover, and that moral judgment must allow space for growth. It means replacing the demand for a final theory of everything with a method of navigating the world that is iterative, responsive, humble, and relational.
Some people are drawn to extremism not because they crave hatred but because they crave simplicity. They crave cognitive closure. They crave a tidy story with clear sides. They mistake simplicity for truth. The real challenge is: can we build a culture that helps people tolerate ambiguity? Can we help them see nuance not as a lack of conviction but as a mark of maturity? Can we build a moral language that replaces purity with responsibility and replaces binaries with obligations?
Once you see the underlying error, you realize that the real divide today is not Left vs. Right, secular vs. religious, West vs. Islam, or elites vs. populists. The real divide is between those who think the world must fit the theory and those who think the theory must bend to the world.
The problem is the people who think there are only two kinds of people.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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