When the World Is No Longer Divided

Recently, people have begun to question whether democracy is still functioning well in many parts of the world.

Deeply divided elections.

Growing political polarization.

Increasing social conflict.

These problems are often discussed as institutional failures. But sometimes I feel their roots may lie somewhere quieter.

Perhaps they begin within us.

With what we call being right.

In today’s society, being right is strongly valued.

The correct opinion.

The proper way to behave.

The appropriate words to use.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being right itself.

But when a person becomes strongly convinced that they are right, the world suddenly divides into two.

Those who are right.

And those who are wrong.

In that moment, the world becomes divided.

But is the world really so simple?

The real world is far more ambiguous, far more overlapping.

And each of us can only see a small part of it.

If that is true, then dividing the world neatly into two may already be a somewhat strained way of seeing it.

And yet, why do we feel such a strong need to divide the world this way?

Right or wrong.

Friend or enemy.

Good or evil.

These distinctions are easy to understand.

Living in ambiguity can be unsettling.

Standing in a place where things are not clearly decided can feel uncomfortable.

But once the world is divided into two, our position becomes clear.

We are on the right side.

And when we feel that, we experience a sense of relief.

Perhaps this sense of reassurance is one reason binary thinking spreads so easily.

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Earlier I wrote that the real world is ambiguous and constantly moving.

Perhaps the same is true of human beings.

Sometimes we are right.

Sometimes we are mistaken.

Some days we are strong.

Other days we are weak.

We live while holding both.

Human beings have long used language to understand the world and to share that understanding with others.

But language has a certain nature. The moment a word has meaning, it separates what it includes from what it does not.

This is not only about right and wrong.

Without realizing it, we may be dividing almost everything in the world.

Division helps us understand.

But the moment we divide something, we also step a little away from its deeper reality.

In Zen teachings, it is often said that when we divide things too cleanly into two, we begin to lose sight of their true nature.

What began as a tool for understanding the world can slowly start to look like the world itself.

And when that happens, the world we see may become smaller than it truly is.

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In a previous piece where I wrote about self-love, I mentioned that loving oneself does not mean believing we are special.

Rather, it means accepting our own weakness and incompleteness.

When we are able to accept the ambiguity and contradictions within ourselves, the world may begin to look a little different as well.

And returning to the idea of being right that I mentioned at the beginning—

Being right may not always create the best future.

Perhaps the future emerges in another way.

Not through perfection, but through something unfinished.

A future that continues to take shape moment by moment, changing little by little as we live through it.

And perhaps it is within that unfolding time that we find what we call happiness.

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