There is a kind of violence in our thoughts and language that often goes unnoticed.
Not the loud, vitriolic kind we associate with slurs or hate speech — but a quieter, more systemic kind. The kind that hides in headlines and hashtags, in casual conversations and immigration policies, in evaluation rubrics and editorial op-eds. It’s the violence of the Boolean. The belief that people, behaviours, and even worth can be sorted into neat little buckets: good or bad, worthy or unworthy, us or them. A One or a Zero.
But people are not Boolean. They are contradictions in motion — full of nuance, context, and becoming.
Still, we do it all the time. We talk about good immigrants and bad immigrants, as if human migration is a morality contest. We praise model refugees — those who assimilate quickly, speak the right language, and keep their trauma photogenic. We distinguish good moral conduct from bad, often without noticing that our definitions are shaped by privilege, by dominant norms, by power structures disguised as ethics.
And we don’t stop there.
We do it to ourselves. To our colleagues. To our neighbours. We do it in boardrooms and break rooms and dinner tables. We turn people into performances — and then reward them for fitting the part.
The trap is in how efficient this feels. Binary thinking gives us the illusion of clarity, of decisiveness. And let’s be honest: it’s addictive. In a world that’s moving too fast, with attention spans too short, the need to sort and judge instantly feels practical. The algorithm demands it. The media profits from it. Institutions enforce it. And somewhere along the way, we forgot that complexity isn’t a bug in the system — it is the system.
The “good immigrant” is praised for being hard-working, grateful, humble. But when did gratitude become a condition of belonging? When did humility become a transaction for safety? Why does economic utility become a prerequisite for dignity? It’s the same trap that evaluates human worth based on productivity — that worships the high-performer and punishes the one who stumbles, who slows down, who speaks up or simply shows up differently.
You see it in how we talk about leaders, too. The good ones are confident but not arrogant, decisive but not autocratic, vulnerable but not emotional, strong but never rigid. It’s an impossible checklist designed to both inspire and exclude. And it’s rooted in the same Boolean delusion: that people can be measured by linear, opposite categories, rather than understood through layers.
These binaries are seductive, but they are not neutral. They shape systems. They form the basis of policies, performance reviews, hiring decisions, even humanitarian aid. They show up in immigration courtrooms and university admissions. In “refugee camps” and “merit-based visas.” In praise and punishment.
What makes it more insidious is that it’s often well-intentioned. After all, what’s wrong with rewarding good behaviour? But even that question assumes that the rewarder is objective. It assumes that what’s “good” has already been defined and agreed upon. It assumes a God’s-eye view — when, really, most of us are just peering through peepholes of perspective, culture, and personal bias.
This isn’t just about semantics. This is about structures of power. Because the moment you define “good,” you also reserve the right to label someone “bad.” And when those labels start to inform policy, access, opportunity, and safety — then that Boolean lens becomes a tool of gatekeeping, not guidance.
What if, instead, we learned to live in the grey?
That doesn’t mean abandoning discernment. It means upgrading it. It means moving from binary to spectrum, from rulebook to context, from fear to curiosity. It means understanding that two things can be true at the same time — that someone can be both hurting and healing, both messy and magnificent, both disruptive and necessary. That a refugee can be exhausted, angry, even ungrateful — and still worthy of safety. That an immigrant can speak with an accent, resist assimilation, and still deserve full citizenship — not just on paper, but in presence.
This way of thinking isn’t new. Many Indigenous worldviews, African philosophies, and Eastern traditions have always emphasized relationality over polarity. Ubuntu. Yin and yang. The Bhagavad Gita’s nuanced approach to dharma. Even modern complexity science, with its embrace of emergence and feedback, points us away from simple inputs and outputs. What’s ironic is that in the name of progress, many of our systems have regressed to simpler thinking — Boolean logic, machine learning binaries, flattened categories — all in pursuit of efficiency.
But people are not programs. And dignity is not conditional.
We need to teach ourselves — and our institutions — to value discomfort over decisiveness. To reward listening over labelling. To understand that the story beneath the behaviour matters more than the label on the surface. Because the moment we reduce someone to a Boolean — to a one or a zero — we erase their humanity. And often, their possibility.
It’s not easy work. It’s slower, messier, less satisfying than a tidy headline. But it’s the kind of work that makes room. For more voices. For more stories. For more accurate, honest, full versions of who we are.
So the next time you find yourself judging — this person is good, this one is bad; this act is noble, that one is unacceptable — pause. Ask: what complexity am I ignoring in order to feel certain? And what might open up if I just allowed this to be more complicated than I’m comfortable with?
The danger of the Boolean is not just that it flattens truth. It’s that it convinces us we’re seeing clearly — when all we’ve done is squint hard enough to erase the nuance. And if there’s one thing the world needs more of right now, it’s not certainty. It’s clarity. The kind that comes from depth, not division. From understanding, not sorting.
We are not here to fit neatly into boxes. We are here to expand them. Or better yet, to outgrow them entirely.