Americans are suffering from “binary whiplash”: the back-and-forth pull between extreme positions fueled by frenetic media, polarizing online influencers, and insidious algorithms that point us toward extremes.
Simplistic binary choices permeate our thinking on everything from parenting to politics, leaving us disillusioned and overwhelmed. We’re pulled daily between red and blue, black and white, left and right.
This one-dimensional thinking is not only an inaccurate representation of our shared moral, political, and social lives, it’s actively harmful.
Forced choices between one extreme or another, like #Black Lives Matter versus #Blue Lives Matter, polarize communities, obscure the causes of problems, and narrow the range of potential solutions.
Even worse, they turn possible collaborators into antagonists.
What we really need in our extremist world is moderation, but of a very particular kind.
The simplest definition of moderation comes from the Oxford Dictionary, and it’s “the avoidance of excess or extremes, especially in one’s behavior or political opinions.”
Why Radical Moderation?
But moderation, like most aspects of human life, doesn’t work well in one dimension.
One-dimensional moderation - picking a point between extremes on a one-dimensional line - is apt to look like weak compromise, principle-free neutrality, or simplistic “whataboutism.”
After all, if the middle ground between two opposing views of an issue isn’t accurate or useful, what’s it good for?
I offer a moderation that is truly radical, exploding one dimensional thinking and embracing the complexity, humility, trade-offs, toleration, and optimism that the real world requires.
Instead of seeing the world as simple and one-dimensional, consisting in only binary choices, we can live in the world as it truly is, a shared moral, political, and social landscape in four dimensions, playing out across all four dimensions, including:
breadth in the form of social networks,
depth in the form of profound challenges and heights of achievement, and
historical, generational, and developmental time.
This landscape is the truest decision-making framework for real human beings.
Instead of oscillating between polarized extremes in one dimension, we can escape the either/or binary that we’re sold by influencers, politicians, and algorithms. Together, we can rediscover the real human social world, a world where both/and problem solving is possible.
And one that exists in all four dimensions.
Why Radical Moderation Now?
Whether we think about the world one-dimensionally or four-dimensionally fundamentally impacts how we think about everything, from our morning routines to our opinions on immigration reform.
One-dimensional thinking gives us simple answers that don’t match reality. In our personal lives, we end up exhausted, cycling between extreme fads whether in wellness, parenting, or productivity.
In our public discourse, one-dimensional thinking keeps us polarized over slogans instead of focused on real policy solutions in areas like criminal justice, immigration, and housing.
In both our personal and the public lives, we’re distracted by false extremes while real life and real people suffer.
We don’t make any progress because we’re missing the most important dimensions of the problems themselves.
And the costs of one-dimensional thinking are increasingly clear.
On the individual level, it fuels anxiety and antagonism, oversimplifies decision making, and fractures families, friendships, and workplaces.
On the societal level, it polarizes voters, prevents problem solving, and leaves the most vulnerable among us stuck in pits of other people’s making.
We feel like we’re failing when it’s the framework that’s failing us. It’s missing depth, height, and time.
How We Escape One Dimensional Thinking
Four-dimensional thinking is admittedly hard work.
Humans like simple explanations and our brain is burdened with cognitive biases that push us toward one-dimensional tribalism, zero sum dilemma, and either/or thinking.
Making matters worse, we also face a range of people and organizations with powerful incentives to keep us thinking in one dimension. These agents gain votes, advertising dollars, and market share when we think in black and white.
But we can and should fight back. This Substack is about finding out how.
Rediscovering all four dimensions of human life means that we must explore our personal and social challenges in all four dimensions, recognizing the impact of social relationships, the existence of pits and peaks in human life, and the importance of time, whether it be historical, generational, or developmental.
Once we accept that our lives are lived in four dimensions, we must work to understand complexity and tradeoffs, practice humility and toleration, recognize that human problems are fundamentally socially embedded, and that humans always matter.
Living in four dimensions also gives us cause for optimism about our shared future, as tough as things feel right now.
What Radical Moderation is Not
Radical moderation avoids some of the traps that well-meaning but one-dimensional attempts to solve our problems fall into. By thinking in all four dimensions, radical moderation:
· avoids both relativism and dogmatism by exploring a shared landscape that we all navigate in different ways;
· rejects approaches to pluralism and civil discourse that leave us agreeing to disagree instead of focusing on impactful problem solving that works around – and often with – our disagreements;
· avoids relying on contentious and debatable terms like dignity or rights – important as they are – instead emphasizing a practical and hands-on approach to exploring and mapping our shared four-dimensional landscape, together; and
· avoids a stark separation of the personal and public, bringing the two back together, as they exist in real life.
· doesn’t support mere compromise for the sake of avoiding conflict. Conflict can be a radically moderate thing, particularly when it leads to the truth.
· doesn’t advocate a blanket “moderate” approach to any and all social issues. Moderation will look different in different situations. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, but the simplest solution is often not. Human life is complex and messy.
Radical Moderation Takes Humans Seriously
Radical moderation is the most defensible way to live our lives because of the following facts about human beings:
First, human affairs are necessarily complex, diverse, and contingent. A lot of complex individuals come together to create human communities, and that complexity means simple solutions often won’t work. Immoderate people and approaches tend to want simple uniform solutions to complex problems. Human social life just doesn’t work that way.
Second, every “solution” to any given problem involves tradeoffs. The refusal to recognize that tradeoffs exist is the prime reason for much of the immoderation we see in daily American life.
Third, human nature is predictable and relatively stable and our nature is a pretty mixed bag. Humans are empathetic and innovative and capable of incredible wonder and profound awe; we’re also tribalistic, prone to harmful cognitive biases, and can be unimaginably cruel.
Radically Moderate Principles
Because of these realities, Radical Moderates approach life with a cluster of interrelated characteristics:
A mindset of humility and constant growth, where we recognize that we sometimes (often!) have incomplete data, narrow experiences, or simply a lack of omniscience. We expect to be wrong! A lot!
An appreciation for the ways in which community can help (or hinder!) moderation. True communities need moderation to flourish, but community can itself support or hinder moderation, depending on the kind of people involved, the dialogue those people engage in, and the way the community is structured. Like we said, it’s complicated. But because community is so central to moderation and particularly to what we’re trying to do here, we need to go about community in the right way. That leads us to…
An approach to dialogue that emphasizes civility, not because all viewpoints are worthy of being civil about, but because those viewpoints are held by human beings, who matter. Civility is also linked to humility: being uncivil often accompanies the conviction that one’s position is absolutely right. As radical moderates we encourage humility, which can and should encourage civility by extension. Incivility destroys dialogue, destroys viewpoint diversity, and lends itself to siloed groups where immoderation can flourish. All bad things!
If we can summarize radical moderation in a few key concepts, they would include humility, a respect for complexity, an appreciation of real diversity, a commitment to community and civility, an awareness of tradeoffs, and ultimately a deep respect for individual human beings, because humans are what this is all about.
Radically Rethinking How We Navigate Our Shared World
This kind of moderation is radical because it requires rejecting the entire one-dimensional worldview that media, politicians, and algorithms want to convince us exists. It’s a bit like the Matrix, except the world we discover is much better than the one we current inhabit.
But this kind of moderation is radical in other ways too.
It’s uncommon. In our current polarized society, people are taking sides for reasons they don’t fully understand (partisanship, family loyalty, online clickbait, habit, etc.) or not taking positions at all because they’re scared or overwhelmed or even lazy. Radical moderates want people to take positions because they understand their values, they understand the tradeoffs such values require, and because they believe their position truly contributes to human flourishing. Weird, right? Radical? Yes!
Second, we’re redefining the way moderation is characterized by many of its opponents. Moderation is not the lack of a position or a lack of commitments or a lack of understanding. Instead, moderation stems from deeply held and investigated beliefs about how the social world of human beings work. True moderation is a form of radicalism because it requires rethinking and questioning our biases, unexamined beliefs, and habits.
Third, radical moderates are, well, deeply radical about moderation. We believe that it is *almost* always the right answer; that it leads to human flourishing in most situations; and that it is worth preserving and fighting and sacrificing for. We believe that moderation properly understood might be the answer to most of humanity’s most pressing problems (those that are soluble, at any rate). And that’s partly why this project exists: as a way to explore the depths of moderation with other smart and thoughtful people who will hopefully challenge us and push our understanding even further. (It’s worth noting that there are lots of other people doing this work too and we hope to link to them and their work in subsequent posts).
As always on this Substack, I would love to hear from you! What about you? What extremist thinking are you currently fight against? What are you optimistic about? What challenges do you see ahead? What are the principles of radical moderation you want to see more of in discourse and modern life?
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I think John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1855) is a testament to radical moderation as well as the foundational argument for free speech. He suggests that considering opposing views has three potential outcomes: 1) Even if you discover your original position was completely accurate, you will have benefitted by organizing your stuff to address the concerns raised, or 2) Your position is completely wrong, so you can abandon it without delay. Mill admits that neither of these outcomes is very likely. He suggested that in most cases your position will be partially correct; in this case, it will be strengthened by incorporating ideas from your adversary. Free speech is not really free, but it is affordable.
This is one of the cleanest explanations I’ve seen of why the “middle” isn’t a midpoint but an entirely different framework. Your four-dimensional model captures something that often gets lost: most of our political dysfunction isn’t about disagreement so much as the collapse of depth, context, and time into a single flat line. That flattening is what turns potential collaborators into combatants.
One thing I’d add from my own work is how emotionally powerful that one-dimensional frame is. Populists weaponize simplicity — they sell clarity without costs — while anyone trying to talk in tradeoffs gets drowned out. Your model gives people a way to understand complexity without slipping into mushy centrism. It’s a valuable contribution, and I’m glad to see others pushing for a more rigorous, reality-based form of moderation. Looking forward to more.