False Binary Alert: Individualism vs. Structuralism

Individual choice matters and so do background structures. It's both/and.

Photo by Irina Berdzenishvili on Unsplash

When I was moseying through the Amazon a few decades ago (as one does), I watched an indigenous woman walk down to the riverbank with a laundry basket. I smiled, assuming I would be watching an example of jungle-frontier homemaking. Like Little House on the Prairie but with pirahnas. Instead, the woman tipped the basket over and shook it out, dumping what was actually a load of garbage into the water. I mentally deflated, watching the pile float downstream, heading (presumably) to the ocean or to clog up someone else’s village.

My first instinct was a kind of soft judgment. I mean, really? But when I thought about it for more than split second, it made sense. But before we get to why, let’s introduce the false binary of the day: individual choice vs. structural constraints.

The insistence that outcomes are either the result of individual action or the result of background structures is one of the most pernicious false binaries in our political discourse. Progressives tend to emphasize structural causes. Conservatives tend to emphasize individual choice and responsibility. Both camps often act as though admitting the other side has a point somehow weakens their own position.

This framing is not just politically convenient. It’s epistemologically wrong. It also animates tribalistic and polarized thinking, which makes the antagonistic mess that is politics in 2025 even worse. But I think the biggest problem is that it prevents us from solving problems that desperately need solving.

How the Binary Works

I see this pattern everywhere. When we discuss poverty, crime, educational outcomes, health disparities, or almost any other social challenge, the conversation splits along familiar lines.

From one side: people have agency. They could just work harder, make better decisions, delay gratification, stay in school, avoid drugs, get married before having children. If outcomes are bad, it’s because individuals made bad choices. The solution is to encourage better individual behavior through incentives, moral education, or simply expecting more from people.

From the other side: structures constrain choices. People are born into circumstances they didn’t choose. Discriminatory policies, inadequate schools, lack of healthcare, absent job opportunities, and inherited disadvantage shape outcomes before individuals have any say in the matter. The solution is to change the structures through policy reform, redistribution, or institutional transformation.

The problem is that not only are both explanations partially true and neither is sufficient on its own, but they’re also inextricably bound together in ways that are really difficult to tease out. Would I be the same person making the same decisions now if I were raised in a different environment? Would my neuronal connections be identical? Would my cost-benefit analyses be the same? How would my baseline for risk aversion change if I were raised with a completely different incentive structure?

Individual decision-making interacts with background structures in complex and difficult-to-predict ways. Individuals challenge and shape those structures. Structures frame and constrain individual decisions. Given the deeply social nature of human life, it’s not particularly useful to talk about where one begins and the other ends.

But our political discourse demands that we pick a side.

Garbage in the Amazon

Back to the Amazonian garbage dumper. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised, obviously, that people in the Amazon chuck their garbage directly into the river. Garbage in South America is an ever-present part of the landscape generally, not just in Amazonian villages.

There’s no garbage pickup in the interior of the Amazon. There were no roads to this remote village. I had arrived by motorized canoe, of all things. And there was certainly no extra money to pay for someone to boat garbage away, even if a garbage boat existed. There was no infrastructure for waste management of any kind. Convenience foods and packaged goods had arrived in these communities, but the systems for dealing with the waste those products generate had not followed.

What was this woman supposed to do?

She was living in a weird limbo, caught between the arrival of modern consumer goods and the absence of modern waste infrastructure. Her individual choice to dump garbage in the river was constrained by structures that offered her no viable alternative. Burying, if that was an option, required tools, time, and energy she might not have. Burning it, which probably also happens a fair amount down there, isn’t awesome either. The river at least carried the problem away from her immediate environment. The fact that it created problems for people downstream wasn’t her problem, in one narrow sense.

But did these constraints she was facing mean her choice was inevitable? Not really. Someone in that village might have organized a different solution. Individual initiative or joint ingenuity could theoretically have created some kind of local waste management system, however imperfect, that didn’t just send garbage downstream. Maybe some cooperative garbage management infrastructure. In fact, some communities are doing just that. While the structural constraints make initiatives like that more difficult than they would be in a context with existing infrastructure, resources, and institutional support, they’re not impossible. They require the right combination of background structures and individual/community agency.

The structural explanation does a lot of heavy lifting in this case. But it doesn’t make individual choice vanish from the equation. It means we need both explanations operating simultaneously if we want to understand what’s actually happening and then actually go about improving people’s lives.

Why the Binary Persists

If this both/and framing is so obviously correct, why do we keep falling into either/or thinking?

Part of the answer is cognitive. Our brains prefer simple explanations. Holding two causal frameworks in mind simultaneously requires more mental effort than picking one and sticking with it. The structural explanation feels complete. The individual explanation feels complete. Each also tends to reinforce priors of a certain kind that we all have. Integrating them, grappling with complexity, is harder.

Part of the answer is social/political. Each version maps onto deep-seated tribal identities that most of us have.

Emphasizing individual responsibility tends to support conservative policy preferences: less government intervention, more personal accountability, skepticism of redistribution. We’re the kind of people who care about individual virtue!

Emphasizing structural causes tends to support progressive policy preferences: more government intervention, systemic reform, redistribution of resources. We’re the kind of people who care about structural injustice and systemic oppression!

Each side has incentives to downplay the other’s preferred explanation.

But whatever its sources, this binary creates real problems. The more we insist on one explanation to the exclusion of the other, we animate polarization and, far worse, we prevent people from getting the help they actually need because we’re too busy arguing about whether they deserve it.

What We Miss When We Pick Sides

Consider how the binary distorts our thinking about poverty.

The purely structural view suggests that poverty is entirely a function of external constraints: lack of jobs, discriminatory policies, inadequate schools, absence of inherited wealth. On this view, individual effort is largely irrelevant because the game is rigged. The solution is to change the structures through policy intervention.

The purely individual view suggests that poverty reflects personal failings: poor decisions, lack of discipline, unwillingness to defer gratification. On this view, structural factors are excuses. The solution is to encourage better behavior and stop enabling dependency.

Both views capture something real while missing something important.

The structural view is right that circumstances constrain choices. A child born into a neighborhood with failing schools, absent job opportunities, and prevalent violence faces obstacles that a child born into an affluent suburb does not. Pretending these constraints don’t exist, or that they should be overcome through sheer willpower, is both empirically wrong and morally obtuse.

But the individual view is right that choices matter within constraints. Two people facing identical structural obstacles can make different decisions with different outcomes. The “success sequence” research shows that finishing high school, working full-time, and marrying before having children dramatically reduces poverty rates, even controlling for background factors. Individual agency is real, and treating people as mere products of their circumstances denies them dignity.

And yet (there’s always an “and yet”) the success sequence itself is much easier to follow in some environments than others, as many have pointed out. Some people do manage it, but on average it’s just much harder in unstable or high-risk environments (there are likely evolutionary reasons for this, which we can discuss in the comments if anyone is interested).

An integrated view recognizes that structures shape the choice sets available to individuals, while individual choices aggregate to shape structures over time.

When someone is stuck in a pit, you can throw ladders into pits all day, but at some point the person has to climb. And you can tell someone stuck in a pit to climb all you want, but it helps to have a ladder or climbing shoes or any number of other tools.

The Practical Stakes

This isn’t just an abstract theoretical debate. The binary has concrete policy consequences.

When progressives focus exclusively on structural explanations, they tend to design interventions that change external circumstances without attending to individual behavior that undermines those structures. They build affordable housing without addressing the choices that can contribute to housing instability. They increase school funding without examining how students and families engage with educational opportunities. As the nation saw so powerfully in Minnesota, they pump money into programs full of waste and fraud without oversight. They change structures without paying attention to the incentives those structures then create.

When conservatives focus exclusively on individual explanations, they tend to design interventions that demand behavioral change without addressing the constraints that make that change difficult. They tell people to work harder without ensuring that jobs exist or that people have the ability to learn new skills. They encourage marriage without addressing the economic instability that makes marriage risky. They support punitive three strikes laws the ignore the root causes of many kinds of crimes and fail to distinguish between crimes motivated primarily by poverty and those that display real moral failure. They insist that immigrants should just “get in line” without admitting that, for all intents and purposes, there’s no line to get in, no legal path, for most people. In an ironic parallel to the progressive blindspot, conservatives tend to hold people accountable for their behavior while completely ignoring the raft of incentives that push people toward less optimal choices.

The most effective interventions typically address both levels simultaneously. And they pay very close attention to the kinds of incentives that programs create. Programs that combine structural support with expectations for individual effort tend to outperform programs that focus on only one dimension. This isn’t surprising once you abandon the binary, but it remains surprisingly rare in policy design.

The most effective interventions address both levels simultaneously.

Both/And Thinking in Practice

What does it look like to actually integrate these frameworks?

It means asking, when confronted with a social problem, both “What structural factors contribute to this outcome?” and “What individual choices contribute to this outcome?” It means recognizing that the answers to these questions are not in competition. They’re complementary.

It means acknowledging that virtuous and resilient individuals make communities better, and that supportive communities help individuals become the best versions of themselves. The relationship is dynamic and reciprocal, not zero-sum.

It means resisting the temptation to score political points by emphasizing whichever explanation supports your preferred policy. Sometimes the structural factors really are doing (most of) the work. Sometimes individual choices really are the primary lever. But usually, it’s a mix of both at the same time. Either way, the honest answer depends on the specific situation, not on ideological priors.

It means accepting that solutions will often need to operate on multiple levels. We can and should work to create better structures that support better individual decision-making. We can and should encourage better individual decisions within existing structures. These efforts reinforce rather than undermine each other.

The Woman and the River

I think about that woman dumping garbage into the Amazon sometimes. She made a choice. It wasn’t a good choice from an environmental perspective. The garbage she dumped contributed, in some infinitesimal way, to the plastic accumulating in the ocean.

But she was also trapped in a structural situation that made better choices extraordinarily difficult. The arrival of packaged goods had outpaced the development of waste infrastructure. The resources and institutions that would have supported different behavior simply didn’t exist.

Was her action an individual failure or a structural failure? The question itself is malformed. It was both. And understanding why she did what she did requires holding both explanations in mind simultaneously.

This is harder than picking a side. It’s less satisfying than having a clear villain to blame. But it’s closer to the truth of how human social life actually works.

We can and should try to understand how to encourage better individual decisions. We can and should work to build better social, political, and economic structures that support those decisions. But it’s not an either/or situation.

It’s both/and.

And until we internalize that, we’ll keep having the same arguments while the problems we’re arguing about remain unsolved. And that will be both a failure of our virtue as citizens and a failure of our systems of governance.

Your Turn

Next week, I’ll talk about some examples of how this is working in local communities all over the U.S. with some concrete examples. But for now (as always), let me know what you think! Do you have examples of both/and policies to share? Are there situations where it really is as simple as either/or? Let me know in the comments. And as always, share and subscribe if you like what you’re reading.