Binary Contradiction

Here are some binary contradictions of winter.

Since early in life we are thought to think in binaries, good vs bad. Then religion and other cultural elements continue to reiterate the idea of binaries. Our thinking in binaries reaches a point where we cannot start to imagine other alternatives and we have conceptual problems when ideas don’t fit in a binary.

One easy attempt to think outside binaries comes from including the middle grounds. The “maybes” and the “grays” are easy finds but still do not satisfy the appetite for alternates to binaries. A next step could be, the contradiction of binaries. For this, we need to know how do we define binaries?

Binaries have two requirements. They need to be two elements in opposition to each other. The “on” needs to have the “off” as a binary counterpart. This definition of binary gives a road map to create alternatives to binary thinking. The options are 1) to have more than two elements that oppose each other without having a third element to disrupt the “bi” prefix and 2) to contradict the opposition. I will work on the first part on a future post. So let us talk about the second part of the definition.

A binary contradiction happens when you have a binary opposite, but in the opposite you find the original. One example of a binary opposition from life is beauty and ugliness and the binary contradiction would be when you find beauty in the ugliness.

For this series, I set out to find binary contradictions in the winter urban landscape. Drop a comment down in the section.