Most of my life, I thought that there were only two stances for every issue. I was either pro-this or anti-that. Made things simple and direct. But it was stupid and stifling. I call this problem “the prison of two ideas.”
Below, I’ve made a list of things I’ve been wrong about, but initially thought I was right.
nuclear weapons will destroy the planet
nuclear weapons will save the planet
liberals are stupid, and worse, even dangerous
conservatives are intellectually superior
libertarians are annoying weirdos
libertarians have the right answer for everything
decriminalizing drugs is a bad idea
decriminalizing drugs is a good idea
Bernie Sanders is a dangerous lunatic
Bernie Sanders has some good ideas
climate change is a hoax
climate change isn’t a hoax
I think I could lift a car off someone in an emergency
I think I have a heart condition
Trump is a harmful jackass who must be stopped
Trump might be the greatest president I’ve ever seen
the media sucks
the media sucks except for me
religion is for the fearful
no one has come up with anything better than religion
Buddhism seems pretty cool
Bruce Lee is really dead
Chevy Chase is a comic genius
Thor could beat Hulk even without his hammer
I am smarter than most people
I believed in most of those things because of that last point. I just assumed that intelligence was the main driver behind my decisions. Therefore, I was infallible. But the fact is, the smartest people on earth have been wrong about a lot of stuff. Look at George Will. Supersmart guy, but still dresses like a roadie for Devo. And he totally missed the boat on Trump, as did a lot of so-called experts the world over. The cautious ones said, “Never Trump!” and waited. The really mentally scarred ones left the GOP and voted for Hillary, which is like treating poison ivy by cutting off the infected arm. I got the election wrong, too—but at least I happily admit it on a daily basis. And by admitting my fallibility—hell, you can too!
The people who end up being right are the smart people humble enough to know when they’re wrong. The people who do great on this planet are those who can see their mistakes and then share persuasively what the hell is really going on. Churchill had his Gallipoli. Spielberg had Hook. And I had that interpretive dance phase. Let’s just move on.
If you go over that list at the start of this chapter, you see that I must be wrong at least half the time. And that wrongness is due to what I call “the prison of two ideas.” I either had to be pro-nuclear, or anti-nuclear; pro-drug or anti-drug, pro-Bernie or anti-Bernie. And so on. It’s simplistic and stupid. For there is a range of beliefs that exists between those two rigid poles. And admitting that you’re often wrong allows you to look at all those positions that exist in between. And that allows you to get closer to the truth. Which brings calm, happiness, and on occasion, free drinks.
Some people might call it “going soft,” to abandon the strongest position for something more nuanced. But it’s the opposite. Complexity is what life is—denying it only weakens your position. It’s braver to leave the side of your pool and venture to the middle—even if it’s just slightly over—to the other side.
I am convinced that if we were able to eliminate the prison of two ideas that guide lawmakers’ decisions, we would all agree on exactly what to do with all our world’s major problems—from homelessness to climate change to overweight adults wearing leggings instead of pants on plane flights.
Political obstacles, based on being imprisoned in two ideas, prevent us from solving even the most glaring problems. In today’s New York Post (it’s October 26, 2019, so technically today was a while ago) you’ll find a perfect example: a story about a serial subway abuser who’s been implicated, allegedly, in seven hundred crimes (!!!). He was just nabbed again for shoving a woman face-first into a stopped subway car—previously he’d been arrested for exposing himself. (Which is a very different thing. He’s sort of the utility player of subway perps.)
Lawmakers repeatedly introduce laws to punish these maniacs—which get passed by the state senate with huge margins, only to die once they are put to a public vote in the assembly (I don’t get it, either).
So if you ask anyone about this violent nut case, everyone with a reasonable brainpan would agree to put this psycho away for years. So why hasn’t anyone done anything?
When interviewed anonymously, one assembly Democrat told the Post that it’s liberal lawmakers who don’t want to go on record in favor of “any tough-on-crime measures.” They’re afraid of going on record with a vote—and “if you had these bills voted on, and there was no record for who voted for what, I think you would see a dramatic difference in the laws in the state.”
But because people in one party must publicly stay in its own idea prison, they’d rather cast votes that end up allowing women to be assaulted in public places.
So a thug possesses an unlimited “get-out-of-jail-free” card, bestowed upon him by politicians who refuse to venture out of their self-contained prisons, for fear of being labeled bigoted by the media. He stays out of real jail, because they inhabit imaginary ones. “Irony” is one word for it. “Stupid” is another.
If there weren’t these prisons of left and right, and a hyperactive, punitive media who castigates anyone who steps out of them, problems like maniacs on subways would be solved (as well as other problems like homelessness, mental illness, and drug addiction—which are all intertwined). But that first moment—when that one liberal Democrat considers actually voting for stiffer penalties for psychopaths—what does he fear? That a “woke” columnist will call him a fascist (after all, isn’t the suspect the real victim!). That gets tweeted and activists will soon arrive to picket his office, with surprisingly uniformly printed signs. So rather than share that risk, he passes that risk off to female straphangers. They’re on the front lines, not him—so he doesn’t have to deal with the problem. But if we jettisoned these silly idea prisons, we’d be able to live better lives based on common sense. Sadly, current politics forces us into one of two positions, against the betterment of society.
Now, if you look at that list I casually tossed out, you’ll see how I’ve changed my views often.
But now I pick views that range between two prisons, between two poles. I like to think I’m above it all, or maybe I’m just a man who likes stilts.
For instance, climate change isn’t a hoax and we should pursue ways to protect the environment; but the conventional media has been plagued by faulty predictions and hysteria. Somewhere between hoax accusation and Greta Thunberg hysteria lies the truth: that even if the predictions are bad, we can work toward a cleaner environment—especially if we incorporate nuclear power (which is really the cleanest, most effective energy of all). As I put words to paper, President Trump just pledged to plant a trillion trees to reduce global CO2 levels, at the same time condemning the prophets of doom saying the world will end in a decade. That, whether you want to admit it or not, is a stance that puts him outside both idea prisons. He’s pivoted away from the “hoax” stance and walked outside toward practical action. But not without reminding us how hysteria works against actual progress.
Bernie isn’t an idiot, even if he favors an idiotic ideology. He just favors the whole of something (socialism) when in fact part of his prescriptions can be useful in certain situations (a safety net—what kind of crazy Wallenda complains about that?). I just favor a vibrant free market economy that allows for a strong safety net that Bernie could never create in his failed socialist fantasies. Occupy Wall Street was an urban-camping farce that culminated in idiotic gestures, litter, noise, and crime. But since its implosion, I’ve met endearing minds who were part of it. They had legitimate beefs about Wall Street that were worth listening to, and maybe I should have listened more than condemned them (which I would have done if a few of their ugliest elements had not assaulted people). I still don’t think Bernie has even two good ideas to rub together but I have to listen to him and respond, because dismissing him changes no minds at all.
Smart people can end up doing dumb things—watch me around last call—but writing them off entirely makes you a simplistic jerk. Bernie believes he’s right—and I want to know how he can justify some of his beliefs that I believe have no evidence to support them. I think of them as helium-free trial balloons—colorful but going nowhere. So I’m still looking for Bernie’s good idea. My guess is that he started with the goals first, and still hasn’t figured out how to get there, besides confiscating wealth. And I don’t like that, especially since he’s had decades to figure it out, and hasn’t. Joe Rogan just endorsed him (I am writing this in mid-January 2020) for being consistent. He’s right: Bernie’s been consistent… consistently wrong, like a stopped clock is consistently wrong. Throughout history he’s backed the wrong horse from the luxury of a capitalist country where he can do that without ever happening upon a gulag.
But I can still like him. The way you like your quirky uncle who wears Kleenex boxes on his feet and never picks up a check.
As for the president, I’ve written about Trump before. When I had other options, I could easily dismiss his pro-wrestling demeanor (which makes me a hypocrite, I admit, since I’m no different at times, too). I also dismissed his supporters, some of whom were my friends and relatives. But when he won, I gave up my pet animus, and could see the appeal that I missed because I was toggling between other candidates.
Fact is, I thought what I was seeing in Trump was old news, but what his supporters were seeing was actually new. I was jaded by the glare of my own profession, while my friends and relatives, being normal Americans, were enamored. Ironically, the radical that the Left had dreamed of for America—their version of Che or Castro—actually had arrived. He was just a rich guy with wild orange hair in a baggy suit, instead of a rich guy in designer fatigues who could quote Howard Zinn.
And, of course, he was on the other side. The Left should have seen that. But they didn’t. And neither did I! And the persistent obstacle of Trump isn’t what he’s done so far, but what he’s going to do next. Almost all the media is based on anxiety about the next horrible thing he will unleash. It never happens, of course; they’re just selling ratings and newsstand copies. When you can’t find what you want in reality, look to the future, where reality doesn’t exist.
The main problem today? That the media rewards the two-prison framework, in full “makeup and hair,” and sponsored by advertising. But they’re just giving us what we want. We may claim we want nuance and subtlety—but I wonder how bored we’d be if someone tried to give it to us.
Imagine televised politics as any sport. There can only be two sides; there are no three-team basketball games. And it’s not like you’re going to give in to the other guy. It serves the networks ratings to find only two sides, and nothing in between. Because one side feeds one audience and the other side feeds the other audience. But only allowing for two sides—a cemented framework found in all news—forces us to think we disagree about stuff we really don’t disagree about. Once we let go of this structure, we see how easy it is to agree and move forward.
When I was an editor in my previous life, I was asked to discuss a story on a major network. Before the segment was to air, they did a pre-interview—asking me how I felt about some celebrity, and I gave them my perspective. They told me, sadly, that it was exactly the same as the person I was going to spar with, and it would be great if I’d take the other side. That pissed me off, that they assumed I could simply trade out an opinion just because—oh boy!—I would get to be on television! I should sell my soul for that spotlight. I refused to. And not simply because I’m a big hero, but because it was an early morning program, and I’d rather sleep in than sell my soul. (If it had been in the late afternoon… who knows?) And my soul’s not worth that much anyway. I put it on eBay for $32.99. No takers.
Thing is, this producer was just doing her job. And her job was delivering debate to an audience that craves it. She was right: people come to TV for disagreements, as long as their side clobbers the other. It’s pro wrestling with inferior costuming and less humor and hair. The fire of a distant debate beats the cozy sweater of agreement. Everyone on the same page? That’s boring. That’s a panel on CNN debating something they all agree on, like the evils of memes that make fun of CNN. Boring. And what else is boring? Nuance, complexity, footnotes. Plus, such things take up a lot of time. If you’ve got four minutes for a segment on an average program and the host asks me about my stance on immigration and I respond with “I am for the lottery system, against the skilled worker visa, and we should build a wall while simultaneously increasing the numbers of refugees, provided they take a course in capitalism,” I guarantee I will never be asked to return. Yet, that’s pretty much my stance, I think. For now, anyway. It could change.
There are true polarities in this world. In the digital world there are ones and zeroes, and in life there is life and death, rich and poor, ugly and me. But there’s a load of upholstery in between that can make your life easier. Take foreign policy. We used to think of it as only war and peace. Tolstoy never wrote War and Extended Cease-fire Talks because he knew nobody would read it. Which is a problem—because with the war-peace dichotomy you’ve got a 50 percent chance you’re going to lose a nephew, a son, daughter, or dad.
But soon you realize that diplomacy is nothing more than an endless series of little steps, boring meetings that are placed between the polarities of “doing nothing” and “killing everyone.” An example: sanctions, which are the financial penalties enacted against a country that’s pissed you off.
Did you ever notice how there’s always one more sanction to apply after the previous sanction? Each new sanction seems always to be more severe than the one before it, until you’re finally sanctioning cuff links and novelty ashtrays. There never seems to be a final sanction—just another harsher, more desperate one that features tariffs, restrictions on financial dealings, and trade barriers. I feel like sanctions are always available and made to order, like an omelet station at a really boring buffet.
Yet, what do you see these days on cable and social media? Orchestrated polarizations. Men vs. women. Blacks vs. whites. Rich vs. poor. You don’t see community anymore—you see A vs. B. If you hate vowels, you know which side you’re on.
What you get from that is the death of real conversation. Of debate. Instead, everything becomes a fight—and these days, it’s often personal. In that case, supporting Trump, for example, is akin to being a storm trooper, a Nazi, a concentration camp guard. That’s where the prison of two ideas takes you. You have to keep getting more and more extreme, until you’re treading air like Wile E. Coyote. And how can you talk about anything if the person you’re talking to sees anything you say as an attack on their own “identity”? Instead, you just shut up. Believe me, I’ve been there.
You’ll be in a debate, and the other person will pause. Her voice softens just slightly as she shifts to a personal story. Because sentiment sells and sense doesn’t, this will only be encouraged. And even though emotion is normal, it’s becoming the replacement for actual thoughts. Take climate change: the personalization can come down to: “this is my planet—and you’re evil for polluting it and killing my kids.” That’s now how CNN looks at science. Or take snack foods (hash browns or fries?) or haircuts (a fade or a flop?) or losers (the Mets in 1962 or Hillary in 2016?). All of these ultimately are driven by emotional investment. Psychologist Jordan Peterson claims that when two men argue there’s always the understanding that it can end in a fight. It’s why I never argue with myself.
If you look hard enough, you can personalize every issue. Is it worth it? You have to ask because once it’s personalized, it kills debate. It becomes one person’s truth, instead of something you can rationally talk about. It creates one prison in the two-prison universe of ideas, where only a pure stance must exist, and anything that deviates is a personal attack. Normally, in a debate, “nothing’s personal.” No more. The personalization of debate deems any kind of hard truth harmful to one’s fragile health and eliminates any chance for real conversation. And, as Peterson suggests, it ends in a punch or a call to 911 or both. The stakes for any argument are ridiculously high.
Perhaps that’s the whole point.
How to add legs to your two-legged stool. Only journalists love binary thinking. That’s why poll responses that include “none of the above” and “no opinion” are despised—they get in the way of a story so simple even a journalist can understand it. It’s the “except in the case of” responses that open the door to complications, and that means research and that means work and that’s the edge of the media’s flat earth.
Your friends in the press love unbalanced political situations. Think of a stool with only two legs: Will we lean left? Right? Elites say “Left!” while the independents say “Right!” The hearings are at a deadlock. The decision could go either way. The result is always too close to call. Oh, and, uh, don’t miss the news at ten! No wonder anxiety is the cash crop of the media business.
Why live your life that way? When you don’t know which way to go, try straight ahead and down the middle. Commit to compromise. Allow for exceptions.
The fact is, everything, including breathing, where every inhale demands an equal and opposite exhale, boils down to a choice between two opposites:
Reading/not reading this book.
Moving/not moving.
Sending me a hundred dollars/sending me only fifty.
We refer to computers as digital for one simple reason: they’re made of units called bits that are either “on” or “off.” (There, you just got a degree from Gutfeld University in computer science. We also offer animal husbandry.) And if our existence is actually a simulation, as many mad scientists now believe (the simulation hypothesis suggests that all reality is in fact artificially simulated—likely designed via computer; it’s the egghead version of religion) what does that mean? Well, it means that our very existence is, at its core, a choice between on and off. Is it a wonder that almost everything we do can be boiled down to two choices, when that’s what we are literally made of? Yes or no? Now or then? On or off? Dead or Alive. (They had one great hit, remember? “You Spin Me Round.”) Pete Burns, we miss you.
In science, there is something called “wave-particle duality.” I won’t pretend to understand quantum physics—or even biophysical or electromagnetic physics—but the concept provides a direction to enhanced thinking: the wave-particle duality says that every particle may be described as either a particle or a wave. This helps describe the concept that a particle can be in more than one place at the same time. I don’t want to lose you (I see you, Tom Stevens, putting this book down in your Omaha living room to go make a sandwich), but in short: once you measure the position of a particle, the particle has changed position—making the position of said particle always an uncertainty (until it’s measured). Proving once and for all that physicists don’t need drugs.
But the explanation of wave-particle duality makes actual sense when you apply it to ideas and arguments.
Right now you’re in that dual prison, where each position on an issue is seen as fixed—a particle in space. When in Gutfeld’s reality, a position is a wave—a series of endless and uncertain positions that come into being the moment one wishes to measure it. Once you begin thinking this way, it expands your thinking, and allows for clever and surprising directions for your thoughts. And even more, when more people do this, the chance for overlap—meaning when your idea and their idea share the same wave—becomes much more likely.
Repeat after me: your argument isn’t a particle, it’s a wave. Dude. Now see where that wave takes you.
Note: this doesn’t mean that morality is subjective. This isn’t a way of escaping judgment for bad crap, and saying “murder isn’t really murder!” I’m talking about seeing what else is out there beyond a fixed stance. For example: a total ban of illicit drugs is a prison. Total legalization is also a prison. Somewhere in between is what humans want, because they attenuate the challenges of life. Also, it’s fun.
THE SHOE ON THE OTHER FOOT, REALIZED.
Here’s a Plus moment about the time I pushed the crème pie of hypocrisy into my face.
Usually incidents that reveal your own contradictions in thought and action happen too far apart to enable some kind of connective intellectual tissue.
For example: you’re driving to work one day, and you shake your fist at a careless jaywalker lost in the noise from his headphones.
A week later, you’re jaywalking, listening to your favorite Norwegian death metal, and you smirk at the oncoming driver who must slow down because unlike you he values human life.
We often don’t see these things side to side: if we did, we’d forever change our behavior.
Or go nuts.
But it happened to me recently. And it revealed to me a larger observation than the simple “We’re all hypocrites” and narrowed it down to “I am a hypocrite.”
What we see in others, for some reason, we cannot see in ourselves.
I don’t know why, but maybe when I’m done writing this, I will.
Here’s the story: At work we had a scheduled photo shoot for a show, and as usual, I’m a pain in the ass. I hate photo shoots, with impatient strangers pleading with you to smile and all that. I complained about it for weeks, until the day of the shoot. And on that morning, I got extremely physically ill. I called in sick. So I didn’t go.
Instead, I had to go to doctors, then the hospital, and undergo a litany of tests.
Because I missed the photo shoot, it created a problem for the other participants, who had all shown up in spite of whatever obligations they had elsewhere. The shoot was scrapped. There was a palpable sense of disgust directed at me, and for obvious reasons: they didn’t believe I was sick. They thought I had just played hooky (is that still a word?). After all, I had been complaining for weeks—and then coincidentally, I just didn’t show up? Please.
I was mad that people questioned my excuse. I ended up getting numerous MRIs and scans, so how dare they make light of such things! (It turns out I have a very unusual disorder that only tertiary characters in soap operas get—I’ll tell you about it on the book tour if you ask, or if it turns out to be contagious.)
Fast-forward a month. I’m supposed to have a meeting with someone at work who I know doesn’t really want the meeting and has been complaining about it for a while.
And sure enough, the day before the meeting, he says he’s ill. He can’t come in.
I didn’t buy it. I complained to my friends. I said it was total obvious bullshit.
Then of course, three days later, he’s going into surgery. I felt awful, but obviously not as awful as he felt.
Maybe because these two events happened one after another, I could see how easily I had switched sides. But could I see the mechanism that allows you to do that? How could I rip my coworkers for the instincts they had about me, when I had the same instincts about one of them just a few weeks later?
It’s a curse of being your own first person. You’re the storyteller and the narrator of your life. You portray your life the way you want it to be seen. Plus, you have no editor crossing out the bad stuff. So it’s just you covering up the flaws in you that you point out in others.
I find that I am most critical of others’ shortcomings if they are similar to mine. It’s probably why I am terrified of having kids. When I see coworkers (those younger than me) who share my talents and therefore my flaws, I am more harsh on them than on others. It’s pure transference: when I see you make my mistakes, I’m taking it out on you—for the both of us.
So. How do you know when you’re doing unto others what you don’t want done to you?
It’s a very simple Plus test: Pretend you’re them. Put that shoe on the other foot—and I don’t mean put your left shoe on your right foot. I mean, stand in somebody else’s place and see how it feels. Or pretend you’re their lawyer, and in your head, argue on their behalf. It might not change your behavior, but it might reveal the cognitive weirdness of perspective. It’s the truth of the perfect mirror—one step closer to wisdom and one step away from being a jerk.
One day when I was definitely not high, I started thinking about something called Zeno’s paradox. According to my friend Wally Wikipedia, in its simplest form, Zeno’s Paradox says that two objects can never touch. The idea is that if one object (say a ball) is stationary and the other is approaching it, the moving ball always passes a halfway point before reaching the stationary ball. In other words, any distance or amount can always be split in half. You can see why his friends would never lend this Zeno guy any money.
That means almost nothing to me, especially while trying to uncork a bottle of wine without an opener, until I read an explanation that is perhaps better, from a popular math book by some guy whose name escapes me. He explains the same theory that basically there’s an infinite series of numbers in between two numbers.
So I’ll translate: Let’s say you’re at the Marriott Express in Midland, Texas, and you’re walking from your hotel (room 100) to your manager’s room, which has the bourbon (room 101). There’s a halfway point between the rooms. When you get to that halfway point, you end up with a new halfway point between your current location and room 101. When you reach that next halfway point, the division continues. Even when you’re basically standing in front of room 101, there still is a tiny halfway point between the toe of your shoe and the door. And, yes, there’s a halfway point beyond that—and so on and so on until your head explodes. There are basically infinite halfway points—or in my translation: infinite positions you can take in life. There aren’t two positions, there are a zillion. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Especially any guy named Zeno—he’s probably an imposter, since the real guy’s been dead a few years.
Crap, maybe I was high when I theorized this. So was Zeno, likely. But here’s the plus: instead of hotel rooms 100 and 101, look at them as simply two positions on an issue. And between those two positions (rooms, or prison cells if you will) there are an infinite number of places to go. You shouldn’t feel pressured to adhere to either one. Just do what I did and pass out on the hallway carpet. (Those Marriott housekeepers are a grumpy lot.)
I can tell you that the smartest people I know navigate in that infinite space. These are the people who surprise you—holding a position on limiting immigration in one category, while pushing for unlimited immigration in another. You can be pro on one part, and against on another. The best minds on the planet—from Penn Jillette to Scott Adams to Bret and Eric Weinstein to Robert Wright and Dave Rubin—create their own positions, refusing to be placed in what others think is right. Eric Weinstein, in particular, has a brilliant way of looking at issues. Boiled down: you can hold ideas the way you hold investments. There are long position and short positions on everything, simply by looking at the “relative value” investment. I’d give an example, but my head hurts thinking about it. Ask him, he’ll explain it.
If I remember this correctly, Zeno was a Greek philosopher born half a millennium before Christ, and who spent most of his time pondering infinity. Since there is an infinity of terms in that progression, this dead Greek guy will never reach Point B, which I hope doesn’t stand for bathroom, because he’ll never get there in time, and then the housekeeper will be really pissed.
And in that fable lies a measure of happiness. Instead of being stuck between two poles—a prison of ideas—you have an infinity of options to choose from. You don’t have to be pro or con on anything; instead you can move a little this way, or a little that way—and eternally confound TV producers everywhere. It’s true, you will not get a hosting gig on The Daily Outrage, but you’ll probably end up being the smartest person in the room, which is easy if the room is at Columbia’s Journalism School.