See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 18 (Unpublished):
When seeing It
Fails to be clear,
Justice and piety
Come by decree.
When rationality
And forced piety endure,
Hypocrisy
Becomes sure.
When family associations
Are absent of conscience,
There come collusions,
Pretense and appearance.
When the shared vision
Is lost by the nation,
Patriotic exploitation
Shows up as division.
—
It’s tempting to believe history repeats because human beings fail to learn. The deeper pattern appears more troubling than that. Genocide, systemic oppression, cruelty, and dehumanization continue emerging because the conditions capable of producing them continue being recreated.
Barry Johnson, despite his remarkably sophisticated understanding of polarity dynamics, often begins teaching with the simplest examples imaginable: Inhale AND Exhale. Activity AND Rest. Human beings rarely argue with these tensions because we experience them directly. We feel them. We move through them naturally. He frequently has people physically walk the infinity loop because the body recognizes something before cognition fully organizes around it. The movement itself reveals the pattern. Once people experience the interdependence directly, orientation begins shifting almost automatically.
As systems scale from individuals to families, organizations, nations, and civilizations, the tensions do not disappear. They become more difficult to recognize clearly. And once tensions become difficult to see, distortion enters much more easily.
That’s where culture becomes extraordinarily important—not as decoration or symbolism, but as the operating system influencing what remains visible and what disappears from awareness. Culture reinforces preferences. Over time, preferences harden into identity structures. Those identities gradually organize themselves around preferred poles within multiple interacting polarities.
Political parties do this constantly. So do nations. Religions. Economic systems. Ideologies. Human beings begin organizing around combinations of preferred poles and treating those combinations as complete solutions. The neglected poles never disappear. They become projected onto others.
This is part of what Either/Or-thinking to the neglect of Both/And-thinking produces at scale.
Interdependent tensions gradually become simplified into competing sides. Once that simplification hardens into identity, the world starts organizing itself into “us” and “them.” Data becomes selectively interpreted. Assumptions fill informational gaps. Conclusions solidify into certainty. The process feels internally coherent because partial truth still contains enough truth to feel convincing.
And from inside the system, people rarely experience themselves as distorted.
The capacity to see the humanity of the other gradually weakens from there.
The system begins feeding itself. Stories reinforce identity. Evidence gets selected increasingly in service of defending existing conclusions. The feared downsides of the opposing pole slowly become the defining description of the opposing group itself. Over time, the other side no longer appears mistaken. They begin appearing dangerous, irrational, immoral, or inhuman.
History reveals where that movement can eventually lead.
Genocide rarely begins with violence. It begins with failures in seeing.
And once those failures combine with concentrated power, the consequences deepen systemically.
Poverty offers one example. When societies frame resource tensions as Abundance for Some OR Basics for All, those with power frequently protect accumulation while projecting scarcity and blame downward. Claim Power to the neglect of Share Power gradually normalizes inequality until exploitation starts appearing inevitable or deserved.
Racism follows similar structural patterns. Once belonging organizes itself around Us OR Them, projection becomes institutionalized. The dominant group defines normalcy, safety, morality, competence, and legitimacy while assigning feared or rejected qualities onto those marked as other. The stronger the projection, the stronger the perceived justification for maintaining power over the projected group.
Sexism operates through many of the same mechanisms. Power concentrates disproportionately. Leadership becomes identified with one group. Structural imbalance slowly normalizes itself across generations until exploitation appears natural rather than constructed.
These patterns are historical, political, psychological, spiritual, and systemic. They emerge predictably whenever Either/Or-thinking combines with concentrated power across multiple interacting polarities simultaneously.
Barry Johnson explored this directly in Chapter 29 of And, Volume 1. A single poorly leveraged polarity creates strain. Multiple poorly leveraged polarities interacting together generate what eventually became described as a hyper-vicious cycle. Problem Solving OR Polarity Leveraging. Claim Power OR Share Power. Abundance for Some OR Basics for All. Belong with Us OR Love All. Once enough of these tensions become polarized simultaneously, the resulting system dynamics begin reinforcing one another.
As Barry wrote:
“An alternative to an ‘evil intent’ or ‘evil source’ as a root cause for chronic issues like poverty, racism, and sexism can be found in a stack of polarities in which Or-thinking is used when And-thinking is required.”
That observation matters because it shifts attention away from simplistic villain narratives toward the larger conditions generating recurring outcomes over time.
And now AI enters the system.
AI did not invent these dynamics. It amplifies them.
Algorithms trained on historically distorted systems absorb historical distortions. Hiring systems inherit previous hiring bias. Predictive policing systems reinforce over-policing patterns already embedded within the data. Facial recognition systems reflect disparities in whose faces were represented during development. Credit systems reinforce previous exclusion patterns.
AI scales whatever human beings embed within it. Faster decisions. Wider reach. Less friction. Less visibility into how conclusions are actually being generated.
Which makes the interaction between Either/Or-thinking, concentrated power, and AI deeply consequential. Human beings are no longer dealing only with individual prejudice or isolated institutional failures. We are building systems capable of scaling distorted patterns globally at speeds exceeding ordinary human oversight.
That’s part of why Both/And-thinking increasingly feels less like intellectual preference and more like developmental necessity.
This chapter lands especially hard because the compensations it names rarely arrive looking monstrous at first. Imposed morality. Declared righteousness. Public virtue. These often emerge as attempts to restore order, coherence, identity, meaning, or protection during periods where people feel something valuable slipping away.
And sometimes those responses become fused with institutions originally intended to preserve compassion, wisdom, or justice.
Religion has not escaped this pattern. Faith traditions capable of extraordinary compassion have also participated historically in crusades, inquisitions, extremism, exclusion, domination, and violence once identity fused itself too tightly with certainty and power.
Yuval Noah Harari repeatedly raises a question that keeps lingering underneath all of this:
If human beings are so intelligent, why do we repeatedly behave so destructively?
The issue increasingly appears less related to intelligence itself and more related to limitations in seeing.
As systems grow more complex, greater developmental capacity becomes necessary to hold larger wholes simultaneously:
Self AND Other.
My Group AND Their Group.
Nation AND Nation.
Without reducing difference into enemy-making.
Once that capacity weakens, interdependent tensions simplify themselves rapidly into competing absolutes. Right versus wrong. Us versus them. Worthy versus unworthy. Interdependence gives way to opposition. And once the system organizes itself around opposition, polarization starts feeding itself structurally.
This is part of what makes Truth AND Reconciliation efforts so historically significant. Since the mid-1970s, nations around the world have attempted versions of this work after genocide, dictatorship, systemic abuse, colonization, or civil conflict. South Africa. Rwanda. Canada. Imperfect efforts, certainly. Though still profound attempts to restore conditions where reality, accountability, grief, dignity, and shared humanity can re-enter relationship with one another.
Truth without reconciliation prolongs division.
Reconciliation without truth destabilizes trust.
Both remain necessary if systems are going to recover coherence after profound damage.
None of this is easy work. It asks people to face what they would often rather avoid. It asks societies to acknowledge harm without surrendering entirely to despair, denial, revenge, or fragmentation. It asks human beings to remain in relationship with complexity long enough for deeper forms of seeing to emerge.
Which eventually brings this chapter back toward something both simpler and more demanding:
seeing.
Seeing, in this sense, means allowing enough of the whole person, group, nation, history, fear, dignity, harm, and possibility to remain visible that real differences can still exist without erasing shared humanity.
Jack Gibb once said:
Seeing is loving.
I’ve spent nearly two decades bringing Polarity Thinking and the Tao together because both illuminate different dimensions of this same challenge.
The Tao preserves relationship with Mystery. It reminds us that reality resists forced simplification and that many of the deepest truths of human life cannot be reduced fully into categories, ideology, certainty, or control.
Polarity Thinking reveals Patterns. It helps human beings recognize how tensions behave over time, what happens when one pole expands beyond relationship with the other, and how interdependence shapes consequences across systems.
Together, they create something neither fully offers alone:
Patterns AND Mystery.
Enough structure to recognize recurring dynamics.
Enough humility to remember reality always exceeds our maps of it.
And perhaps that combination matters now more than ever.
Because Either/Or-thinking to the neglect of Both/And-thinking does far more than create intellectual error. It creates the conditions where human beings gradually lose relationship with one another’s humanity.
Polarity Thinking cannot solve poverty, racism, sexism, extremism, or oppression by itself.
The Tao cannot eliminate them either.
Still, both may help human beings see more completely.
And perhaps seeing more completely remains one of the few places where wiser participation can still begin.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Either/Or-thinking AND Both/And-thinking from And, Volume, 1 Foundations:
INVITATIONS:
To use an AI-trained “Chat w/Cliff” for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
