The Rainbow Argument
By Jacob Mills
When mum started talking about what she should do with the boxes in her shed I completely zoned out and started thinking about what I should do with the boxes inside my head. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. Why do we take sides? Why do we identify with material things? Why aren’t we allowed to change our minds or say I mostly disagree? Why do we tear each other down for being wrong when, in all probability, we’re both right in some way?
What I’m getting at is categories and dualistic thinking, boxes and binary absolutes. This way of thinking is a real issue to me. It’s like mob-mentality mixed with a little insecurity, a dash of narcissism, and a heavy dose of the fact that we actually perceive very little of what’s really happening around us. I could witness something and remember it completely differently to you, but we could both be right because we each only saw a fraction of it. Perhaps we just saw a different fraction to each other. Nature itself is an information overload.
Further to this overload is that as human history has compounded we have generated so much knowledge that we can’t personally know it all. Just a little bit of it. So in a society that frowns upon people being brave enough to say, ‘I don’t know’, we get insecure and up the bravado and give a confident answer that leaves out pretty much all of it. Little know-it-alls, we are.
In the process of not understanding how complex the world around us is, we deliver a series of bullshit answers that sound like hard truths or jump into neat boxes because we feel safe and understood there. Surely somewhere in the multi-verse, it’s okay to not understand and to not be understood.
If someone gives us a short, hard, confident answer, it’s probably wrong – the media does this regularly. And if we argue back, strong and unyielding in our position, defending some material part of the world as though it was actually our identity, then we’re probably wrong too. There’s a rainbow in every argument, the colours form a spectrum of understanding, no colour is more of the whole than another.
When we go to vote we can flip between parties depending on who we agree with the most at the time. We don’t have to be married to the greens, or the conservatives, or the liberals because of some categorical ideals. We can decide what we think is right at the time and accept that others will come to a different conclusion, and that they’re right too.
When someone tells you that you should be vegan, just remember the fact that it doesn’t matter what we do, something has to die to make way for it. So you can be a more conscientious and ethical consumer, but you don’t have to give yourself a hard label that you’re only going to feel guilty about when you inevitably eat a cheeseburger at 3am, or when you come to the realisation that thousands of animals died or got displaced to make way for the organic cotton field that your t-shirt came from.
When your mate is four pints down and three skims to the wind and starts mouthing off about a minority group that they’ve never met, you can tell them you disagree and what they’re saying is hurtful and ill-informed. But you don’t have to unfriend them, what good would that do? ‘You can kick someone out of your house, but you don’t have to stop loving them.’ I wish I could remember who said that.
When someone tells you that boys are boys and girls are girls, just remember the 70-year-old father of four who went in for a routine surgery and they found a uterus. And the mother who got checked for genetic disease variants in her genome only to find that she was mostly XY – the male chromosome configuration. Sex is a spectrum, as is gender, and not every summers day is hot.
And when we’re feeling fed-up with our partners behaviour, we need to remember that they don’t always do anything, just that some things happen too often. There are no absolutes.
Arguing just gets our backs against the walls and our heels dug in. We become self-righteous, all knowing. And boxed in. We forget to love each other and forget that we’re all living complex lives, in need of compassion and a hug out there in the middle ground. We forget the pleasure of finding things out and the excitement of changing our minds and adjusting our bearings. We forget to look for the colours. Instead we’ve found cancel culture, incels, gender reveal parties and the death of empathy. But we’re smarter than that.
I read the first draft of this piece to my partner and she told me that it made me sound arrogant. Like I was above everything. Ironically, I’d become the object of my own thesis. I wrote it full of steam, head strong and sure I had something to tell the world. I was so ‘right’, and the world was so ‘wrong’. Which brings me to Jordan Peterson, a man who says some of the most ridiculous shit I’ve ever heard. But, I (mostly) loved his book, it helped me a lot during a dark time, and I’m reminded of one of his rules for life. ‘Rule number 6; set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.’ And I realise that my house will never be in perfect order, so I need to have compassion and empathy for the world. And I realise that it’s okay to simultaneously agree and disagree, it’s not zeros and ones.
So now I’m sitting here, writing away, taking short jabs on a cigarette, no longer wandering if I’m a ‘smoker’ or a ‘non-smoker’ because I only smoke ‘sometimes’. I’m just enjoying watching the colours go by.