The danger of being a toggle switch.
The danger of being a toggle switch.
People are not simply a category.
A light switch is a kind of toggle switch. It is either on or off.
In my downstairs living room, one of the light switches doesn’t work quite right and so if I’m not careful, it might stick in a middle position. That means that when I go to use the switch at the bottom or the stairs, it does nothing.
As long as that other light switch sits in the middle, I can’t control the light.
When we allow ourselves to be toggle switches, we are easier to control.
This is because we have limited ourselves to only have two sets of principles to choose from and once you choose a set, that’s all you get. Any variance and you’re accused of being a traitor for the other side, or ostracized by both.
Republican or Democrat.
Egalitarian or Complementarian.
Rich or Poor.
Calvinist or Arminian.
Ally or Foe.
You get the picture. In fact, out of all the categories out there, I can think of only two sets that truly are one or the other.1
Toggle categories (one-or-the-other living) make thinking, deciding, and existing easier, but aren’t true reflections of the human condition. And just like it would be easy to decimate an immune system that could only recognize two pathogens, so is a population who has happily settled themselves into two-set either-or categories.
Oddly enough, we seem to innately know we don’t function that way, even though we give lip service to one-or-the-other. I’ve seen complementarians give their wife much more control in the home than their official position would allow. I’ve seen Republicans act like fiscal and social Democrats.
Either we allow ourselves wiggle room to live out actual lives and understand there’s more complexity in four-dimensional real-life living than what we’re willing to verbalize, or we’re just liars to ourselves or others.
That begs the question of why we revert to toggle-switch categories.
Categories do three things:
Make it easy to divide people.
Make it easy to con/sell to people.
Make it easy to dismiss people.
By simply stating you belong to a category, some people immediately trust you and away you go with whatever lie you need to sell them to get ahead.
In our current angry global culture where everyone’s fighting mad about something, the overlying category at work in nearly every case is Friend or Foe. The LGBTetc. group has a magazine in which they publish an issue dedicated to “allies.”
Why do that?
You’re literally saying that anyone not in full lock-step agreement with you is an enemy, one more frontline of fighting and anger. As a Christian, I have to keep reminding myself that my battle isn’t with people but is a spiritual battle instead. Yet this full-court press of “are you a friend or a foe” everywhere I turn makes it very difficult to live that way. Enemies spring up everywhere if I simply say I support Israel, am Pentecostal, would like a hamburger, or am excited to go to the Ark Encounter. In each of those statements I’ve tripped over a category group.
We’re required to be a sort of Flat Stanley, two dimensional people in a two-category either-or world.
If you won’t check all the boxes for one side or the other, at least you’re bringing unity to the two competing categories by making sure people in both camps come to agreement that you’re the enemy of both. They’re unified in their disgust of you, so that’s nice.
Stereotypes are necessary to prop up the either-or toggle switch system of flattened living.
There’s the saying that “stereotypes exist for a reason” because when you see a person seemingly fulfilling a stereotype, there’s an internal justification you feel about holding to that stereotype as a way to measure people before you get to know them.
To be fair, stereotypes probably do exist for a reason.
Perhaps they’re the average, the lowest common factor across a defined demographic that makes it easier to understand motivation and behavior. Perhaps they’re the only way an entirely different group of people has of even starting to understand another group.
Gen-X, my generation, was known as the slacker generation, a small group of apathetic people who checked out of a culture they didn’t like. It hasn’t held true, but maybe it seemed true for a while. And it probably helped parents understand what the heck was going on with all the flannel shirts and Doc Martins.
We aren’t two-dimensional, we wander in and out of categories through life, and if we’re honest, we know that categories are nothing more than a listing of stereotypes for people of a certain type. They are not a list of what it’s like when the rubber meets the road.
“Julie, are you an egalitarian or a complementarian? Does God have foreknowledge of what people will do or do we have free will?”
“Yes.”2
I say yes because it’s both. There’s a deeper functionality at work, much bigger than our human minds can quickly grasp because we are people who prefer simple this-or-that existence.
I mean, this isn’t the conclusion that sails a thousand angry ships on social media and garners clicks and influence, or makes for a good sound bite, but it’s more the reality.
You’re either for God or you are against him.
Your were born either a biological male or a biological female and that is who you are.
There may be others I haven’t thought about; certainly there are beliefs that seem as if they are inherently mutually exclusive. But these two came to mind immediately as strong either-or contenders.
The egalitarian and complementarian thing really gets people worked up. Over the years I've taken the late Dr. Michael Heiser’s approach on it: https://drmsh.com/tag/women/