Simpletons and the SSH

Why so many people have trouble grasping non-binary concepts

Simpleton is an expression that has unfortunately fallen out of common use, so much so that it was necessary for me to coin a neologism to express my observation of a primary thinking pattern, that upon further review, means exactly the same thing.

But part of why it has fallen out of use is that it became synonymous with various terms of disapprobation and thereby uninformative, as the dictionary definitions tend to demonstrate.

• A person who is felt to be deficient in judgment, good sense, or intelligence; a fool.

• A person of weak intellect; a silly person.

• A simple person lacking common sense

But in a more accurate etymological context, a simpleton is not a fool, a silly person, or lacking in common sense. A simpleton is merely what the word suggests, a simple person, or to come at it from the other side, a person who lacks the ability to comprehend complex concepts.

In other words, what I customarily describe as a binary thinker. Which, on the basis of the questions that are addressed to me, is about 95 percent of all people. The vast majority of people are totally incapable of thinking in gradiants, much less fractals or probabalistically, because binary thinking is the normal method of human analysis. IF Trump is bad THEN Harris is good. SINCE the USA is good THEN Russia must be bad. BECAUSE the South Korean president declared martial law, THEN the South Korean parliament must be in the right.

You’ll notice that none of these syllogisms are logically correct. There is no reason at all that both Trump and Harris cannot be bad. Moreover, their levels of goodness, or badness, are not necessarily identical, indeed, they almost surely are not. Binary thinking is only correct by accident, and yet it is the way you and nearly everyone else think about most things.

Even famous philosophers fall into this simple intellectual framework. The Socratic dialogue is based upon it; I demonstrated its fallacious nature in my critique of Euthyphro in 2007. Abelard was the worst offender in this regard, so much so that his customary distinction between “It is so” and “It is not so” is the reason that you will occasionally see me describe binary thinking as the application of Abelardian logic.

“It is so, or it is not so,” said the Castrate.

Which brings me to the comments that inspired this post…

A commenter under the previous Gamma post asked an interesting question that made me wonder about powerful Gammas. Are they just situational Alphas or Bravos? Or are there certain roles or guilds in which Gammas prosper (and subvert) at length without getting expelled?

Power is not hierarchy and high-status is only one of various routes to power and influence. Any and all situations are, by definition, situational.

How should we think about the Subversive Advisor type? Sometimes they seem to beguile a weak king who lacks the wisdom to expel them. Other times the wise King is wary, but might need this type to fulfill a certain function.

A subversive advisor is simply a Gamma in a situational Bravo role. There is nothing magic about this. Any behavioral pattern can be installed in any situational role; an Omega can become a literal king or wealthy CEO by nothing more than an accident of birth. But situations never last, and a mismatch of situation and behavioral pattern reliably spells failure. History is littered with examples of schemers who adroitly manipulated their way to power, only to discover, like the proverbial dog that caught the car it was chasing, they had no idea what to actually do with it or any ability to wield it effectively.

“Because I tell you what to do without taking any responsibility for the decision or experiencing any consequences for failure, I think I can do your job better than you.”

Which, of course, is why the SSH is so valuable to organizations, because it allows the SSH-aware to identify organizational mismatches that are detrimental to the organization and gives them the conceptual tools required to correct them.

How do you think about the SSH when looking at overlapping hierarchies, like when advisors "serve" the King while also belonging to distinct guilds with their own hierarchies and interests?

I don’t think about it any differently. This is an example of pure binary thinking, imagining contradictions and incoherencies where none exist due to an inability to grasp the fractal nature of the SSH. The same individual not only CAN fulfill very different situational roles, every single individual is necessarily assigned different situational roles by virtue of being a member of more than one hierarchy.

I am the Alpha in my family and in the publishing company. I am a Delta on my soccer team. And I am intrinsically a Sigma at all times.

So, don’t be a simpleton. Stop looking to constantly streamline everything into a simple binary that allows you to create a false conclusion that BECAUSE this is so, THEN that must not be so.