Beyond Either/Or: The Practice of Complexity
A Monthly Series
Issue 1 • July 2026
In my introductory course in peace and conflict studies, I run many simulations to encourage learning from real-world cases. Students are assigned roles: government officials, armed group leaders, journalists, military commanders, humanitarian workers, and community activists. I ask them to represent those roles as faithfully as they can. At the start, everyone understands it is simply an exercise. They know they are stepping into someone else’s shoes for a few hours, or maybe even just minutes.
Then something remarkable happens. As the simulation unfolds, students begin defending positions they did not hold moments earlier. They interrupt one another, form alliances, challenge opposing viewpoints, and argue with surprising conviction. Gradually, they stop speaking as students playing a role and begin speaking as though they are that person whose role they are playing. The positions they have been assigned acquire an emotional weight that none of us anticipated when the exercise began. Sometimes, even after class is over, they remain in character. Friends who walked into the room together find themselves jokingly arguing over lunch, calling one another by their role names or political affiliations from the simulation.
One student, in particular, has stayed with me over the years. After one especially spirited simulation, he came up to me and said, “I think I would have killed for my team. I am terrified.”
We both laughed. But I have never forgotten that moment.
His team had been assigned to him less than an hour earlier. He hadn’t chosen it. He hadn’t spent weeks studying its history or carefully weighing its position. Yet, for those forty-some minutes, he was completely invested in defending it. And in those two sentences, he brought to the surface a question that I had been grappling with for years: Why do people want to take sides, and why, once they do, does defending that side feel like defending themselves?
I have watched this happen again and again with different students, different simulations, and different conflicts. The pattern is always the same.
What fascinated me was not simply that my students defended their roles. It was how quickly the room divided itself into two or more camps. “This is my team; you are with the other team.” Within minutes, people who had walked into the classroom together were seeing one another differently. That, I think, is the binary: with us or against us. That mentality, in my experience, emerges very quickly. Once a side is given to us, defending it can start to feel more urgent than understanding it.
Let me be clear about something before I go further. There are times when we must take a side, when something is morally unjust or wrong, and silence is not the answer. I am not arguing against conviction. What concerns me is the moment conviction tips into demonizing the other, into deciding we can no longer speak to them, never try to know or understand them, simply because we oppose them. It worries me when we no longer remember why we believe what we believe, and become content simply knowing that our side is right and theirs is wrong. That is not the same as having a position. It is closer to us seeing the world in binary terms: us versus them.
We have a deep human need to belong. We dread being alone. We often adopt other people’s style of thinking, talking, and behaving for the comfort of company. And in turn, our families, institutions, communities, and broader society often reward us for fitting in and being sociable, even if we end up taking extreme positions. At least we are assured we won’t be labeled a “loner.” Because a loner, or someone who does not belong to any side, is often viewed with suspicion. Where do their loyalties lie? Who will they target? Our natural tendencies and the dominant societal discourse around belonging feed each other.
But belonging is only one part of the story. Once we belong, something else begins to happen. We start to make sense of the world through the lens of the group we have joined. Each side becomes a paradigm in its own right, in which a problem is defined and resolved based on the thinking within that paradigm. We begin to see our group as more reasonable, more justified, and more deserving of our loyalty, while the other group increasingly becomes defined by what we believe is wrong with it. We begin to seek out and trust the knowledge that reinforces our group’s beliefs while paying less attention to information that challenges them. Group successes and failures become very personal. Groups also become clearer when there is another group to distinguish ourselves from. The stronger our sense of “us,” the easier it becomes to identify “them.” This is not merely theory. It is something we do, often without realizing it, in a classroom, over the course of a single simulation, with friends and strangers and in roles that were never truly ours.
And beneath belonging and beneath paradigm, I think, sits something older: we seek safety. There is safety in numbers. You belong to a team, to a group. If the other side comes to attack, you will not be alone. That instinct has served humanity well for thousands of years. It is not difficult to understand why it remains with us today, even when the dangers we face are no longer physical but social, political, or ideological.
The classroom is a microcosm of the real world. It simply makes visible something that happens around us every day. In the classroom, the sides are assigned. Outside the classroom, we often choose them or are born into them. But once we belong to a side, the pull to defend it can be remarkably similar.
The students in my class were responding to something that is deeply human. They were not overthinking. They were responding in ways that most of us respond every day. Most people pick a side very quickly. Not because they have been assigned a role, but because something about one camp appeals to them more than another. It is pro-life or pro-choice. Conservative or progressive. This club or that one. This nation or that one. Us or them. Once we have decided, like my students, we are prepared to defend our side with remarkable conviction. We inherit loyalties before we have fully formed convictions. And once we belong, changing our minds starts to feel like leaving our people behind. So we dig in deeper.
So, what is the bargain we make in choosing sides?
The prize is belonging. It is one of our deepest human needs, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it. The cost is that, once belonging becomes more important than understanding, curiosity quietly begins to disappear. We stop asking questions. We become less interested in understanding the people on the other side because, in some ways, we no longer need to. Our side has already explained the world to us.
So here is the practice I am trying, imperfectly, to build into my own life. Every time I feel myself rushing to choose a side, I pause and ask just one question before any other: Have I actually tried to understand this position, or has it simply offered me belonging, safety, and certainty before I had to do the work? That single pause invites other questions: Is it possible to belong to both sides at once? Could there be a third side, one that does not pit itself against the other two? Do groups have to be enemies to be distinct? Can they disagree on one thing and stand together on another?
I have more questions than answers. I suppose that is how it should be.
As a first step, though, the most courageous thing we can do is resist choosing a side just long enough to understand why we are so eager to choose one in the first place.
This is how the practice of complexity begins.
If this piece resonated with you, you might want to check out my weekly Substack series, What Can I Do?, where I explore practical ways of navigating conflict in everyday life. You can find me at @pushpaiyer.