There has been much said in contemporary texts concerning the way that an ostensibly "postmodernist" position enables one to avoid an "either-or" position (supposedly the narrowly rational approach) to decision making, in favour of a "both-and" approach.
I have reservations that "postmodernist" is the best term to apply to the latter mode of processing ideas. "Postmodernist" here implies that one has found the limits in Modernistic processing, and is thus taking an alternative line. Yet one may come upon a "both-and" approach through pre-Modernist thinking -- which is to say, if one had never experienced the discipline of Modernistic linear thinking, to begin with.
Either-or thinking is a way of telling untruths to oneself and others. Organic beings(as humans are) are variously all things to one another, depending on the roles that one is called to play. But either-or thinking demands something impossible of an organic creature -- that one be something not organic but mechanical: that is, "this quality" but "not that".
Either-or thinking is the province and speciality of trolls everywhere, who take delight in pronouncing, "I have found evidence that you at this, and therefore you can never, ever, ever, be that!"
But the troll's way of seeing things is necessarily methodologically inaccurate. The troll always thinks he sees something, upon catching a glimmer of this or that. But the troll effectively avoids seeing the whole -- seeing the organic quality of his changing object.
How much stupidity would we get over all at once, if we could recognise that most people have both {this quality} and {the opposite quality} in various measures. Nobody is wholly good or evil, right or wrong, masculine or feminine.
It should be possible to see this.
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