Simplistic thinking - 12 steps to beat your addiction

It's great you're here. The world needs more people willing to let go of simplistic thinking, ready to join the complexity revolution. 

Simplistic Anonymous (SimpAnon) is an international fellowship helping addicts resist the appeal and pervasiveness of simplistic thinking in our culture. It opens the door to living well with complexity.

If you are willing to let go of some simplistic illusions, experience the discomfort AND awe of complexity and contradiction, and embrace the rewards of living in an amazingly rich and incredible world - Simplistics Anonymous is for you. 

The Twelve Step program was created as Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. It has since been used for many types of addictions - gambling, shopping, prescription medication, etc. Although it has been adapted over time, the premise of each step remains the same for all recovery programs. The original program emphasised healing power of the Christian conception of God, but recent adaptations use the idea of 'a higher power' however the person conceives it. 

The Simplistics Anonymous twelve-step program provides a guide to a lifestyle that embraces the rich fullness of our amazing world and your place within it. 

This page outlines the 12-step program for recovery from addition to simplistic thinking. On this page, you can read a background to addiction and the appeal and many dangers of an addiction to simplistic thinking.

Overview of The Twelve Steps 

Step 1: Honesty

Step 1 can be the biggest step! After many years of denial and seeking refuge in illusions, the recovery can begin by admitting you are powerless over your addiction to simplistic thinking. The first step is realising that while simplistic thinking makes you feel better in the short term, it is limiting your life, degrading our communities, and leading to dangerous flashpoints for society. It also requires admitting that you are avoiding stress and the 'negative' feelings that come with not fully understanding other people and the world.  

Step 2: Faith

Before healing can begin, in step 2 you must affirm that you believe and trust that 'a higher power' (however you conceive it: god, other deities, the universe, Gaia, group consciousness, fate, etc.) can operate. According to the 12-step approach creators, trust in a power greater than ourselves can restore us to reality. Someone with an addiction to simplistic thinking needs to accept that the world is complex well beyond human understanding - and that is okay. In fact, it is amazing. 

Faith includes trust that you can live well while embracing the unpredictable and messy nature of the world. Trust means realising the world won't change when you let go of your addiction, it's you who will change.  

Step 3: Surrender and feel  

You can start to change your destructive simplistic thinking in step 3 by recognising that you cannot recover alone; surrender to the idea that a 'higher power', something you don't understand, will help you recover and learn to live well with complexity and contradiction. 

Surrender to feeling the discomfort of complexity: holding still without quick simple answers, simple judgements, confident assertions of understanding, any sense of control. Sit and feel the discomfort, maybe even rising panic, in your body, deep in your chest and your gut, resist the impulse to 'fix' this feeling with a simple answer. 

Think of a 'wicked problem' and just sit with it. There is no simple answer. There may be no answer. 

But we can l learn to live with that.  

Step 4: Soul searching 

In step 4, you must identify the many times and ways you resort to simplistic thinking, how it controls your decisions and creates problems, and get a clear picture of how your behaviour affects others around you and the wider community.

This step explores how simplistic thinking hurts you and hurts other people. This step will explore examples of various thinking short cuts (heuristics) - wrongly attributing causality, filtering out relevant details, confirmation bias, false dichotomies, rapid and rigid impressions of others, prejudices, following the crowd - that all serve to hurt others and disconnect you from other people.  

Step 5: Integrity

Step 5 provides great opportunity for growth. You must admit how wrong simplistic thinking is to your 'higher power' and to another person in your life. Saying this aloud is a weighty challenge, but admitting the damage caused by simplistic thinking brings great relief. It will allow you to begin to heal and grow into a person who embraces the world and people as they are. 

This step explores the use of loaded language, slogans and icons that ignore and cancel out the complexities of real life. Rather than condensing and representing complex ideas to achieve our values and our aspirations, they avoid or disguise what's really involved - they are not simple, but simplistic and often dangerously so. By admitting they are wrong, you will be able to see how these simplistic sayings and arguments are often used against you in politics, advertising, etc. You can begin to take steps to avoid being a pawn in someone else's game and hurting others at the same time.  

Step 6: Acceptance

The key to Step 6 is acceptance. Once you accept that resorting to simplistic thinking is something you do, you can see it is a tendency shared by humanity and an addiction for many. Once you accept the solace you find in simplistic thinking is a dangerous illusion, you have taken a major step toward become willing to let go of simplistic thinking. You can begin to accept your own complexity and contradictions, your own thinking flaws, and your complex feelings about the real world.

This step explores how the human tendency to quick and easy answers does help in some situations, and was probably important in human evolution. It is the addiction to it, the unwillingness to think about contradiction and complexity at all, that causes problems - for you and for other people. The addiction is a decision you've made, so you can make another decision. You can reject defective black-and-white thinking. 

When you accept your addiction, you can start to see the deep fears you avoid by simplistic thinking are also shared by others. Fears that we all prefer to avoid, and many struggle to accept. This is the beginning of real change. 

Step 7: Humility

The focus of Step 7 is humility: trusting that complexity and contradiction are everywhere and inevitably part of life, and that we cannot possibly understand everything. While we might naturally seek simplicity, we need to be humble and accept that reality cannot be contained within a set of 'pure' simple ideas. 

This allows us to see that simplistic thinking results in a fragmented sense of reality; it destroys our sense of being part of the incredible wonder of life. The world is phenomenally complex and interconnected. We need to develop the humility to see ourselves as a tiny part within a complex web of life beyond our understanding. 

Humility allows us to see that dogmatic moral conviction is not really about being right, but about soothing our own fears and feeling in control. 

Each of us is still important, and we can find a way to live well in the world. However, we must always remember, that this is only OUR way. We must be humble enough to stop thinking we have THE answer, the only way to see things. 

Step 8: Willingness

Step 8 involves making a list of those you harmed before coming into recovery. It's time to identify those you have hurt, dismissed, discarded, exploited, ignored, etc., because you assumed you understood them through superficial, simplistic ideas and prejudices. 

Simplistic thinking leads us to 'hyper-certainty' which leads to social divisions. We can make simplistic judgements about other people, putting them in rigid categories that reduce them to boxes. When we see people as either 'good' or 'bad' only, we have indulged in simplistic thinking. We give up on trying to learn anything about them. There is no room in a black-and-white world for positive relationships to be built. When we cling to simplistic thinking so we can feel certain (and safe), it can easily morph into an urgent 'moral quest', and opens the door violence, subversion and deceit to achieve the quest. It hurts and disconnects us even further from other people. 

Once you acknowledge the harm your thinking has caused, you will avoid following simple slogans uncritically, jumping to quick conclusions about other people's motivation, reducing people to clichéd categories of 'good' and 'bad', etc., and automatically dismissing information that causes you discomfort. 

You will become willing to learn, curious, open and respectful of other people that you don't understand.  

Step 9: Forgiveness

Making amends may seem challenging, but allows you to start healing your relationships with your new deeper understanding of other people as well as yourself. 

First you need to forgive yourself. It is human to look for quick and simple answers, and you have been encouraged by others to cling to simplistic thinking when it suits them, so be kind to yourself.  

Secondly, you can now seek out where you need to heal your relationships. Start with a genuine apology that includes saying you were wrong, expressing your regret and remorse, taking responsibility for the hurt you caused, promising to change your behaviour, and inviting ongoing communication with the other person. Your apology might not be accepted, but that is not in your control. 

After you have successfully completed Steps 7 and 8, you will find that saying sorry no longer threatens your self-concept. Apologising allows you to move forward in your relationships. You will be more able to maintain your personal integrity (Step 5), and most importantly, to forgive yourself more fully. 

Step 10: Maintenance

In step 10, you will establish a personal inventory and notice those times when you resort to simplistic thinking. Your growing awareness will make this less often, but it will still happen. Nobody likes to admit their thinking is simplistic. But it is a necessary step to maintain progress in recovery from the addiction. When you realise you have slipped into simplistic thinking, admit it, and take a step back. Remember, everyone makes mistakes. Admitting this quickly allows the simplistic thinking error to be corrected before harm is caused to others.

This step introduces the idea that there will always be more to learn, there will always be experiences and ideas that might create fear or anxiety, and you will need vigilance to identify inappropriate and simplistic thinking. The ongoing personal inventory will highlight the disturbing emotions that can trigger a person to resort to simplistic thinking. Watching for these disturbances on a daily basis, including them in your inventory, is an important part of recovery. 

As part of your daily inventory, allow time to reflect on your day - both your successes and your slip ups. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Did you resist jumping to quick and easy answers to complex problems?
• Have you been curious, open and respectful to others?
• Were you dishonest or resentful of others?
• Did you say or do anything that would warrant an apology?
• Have you been feeling anxious about specific complexity or contradictions?
• Did you become obsessed about finding a simple answer to something specific?
• Have you allowed yourself to be carried away with the emotions related to not fully understanding things?
• What steps can you take to do better tomorrow?
• What do you have to be grateful for today?

Step 11: Making contact

The purpose of Step 11 is to discover the opportunities and richness in the plan your 'higher power' has for your life.

Explore just 'sitting' with the complexity of life, let it fill your mind, and allow it to generate awe (as well as some fear). Make real contact with the natural world, not as a consumer of the products and experience of the world, but as a living being within a complex web of connections. Sit by yourself near a waterfall, don't take any photos, just sit, feel, and experience it. 

As you gradually learn how to sit with the intense feelings generated by experiencing the world's amazing complexity, you will discover that the discomfort has less power over you. As your capacity to hold complexity grows, you can stop using simplistic thinking to numb yourself to the world and to other complex and contradictory people. 

Your addiction will still be there, but you can avoid letting it restrict your relationships, your personal goals, your engagement with the wider community, and your connection to the natural world. 

Recovering addicts emerge into more nuance, seeing other people as unique individuals with a rich range of feelings and behaviours. We don’t need to accept or respect what they’re doing necessarily, but we can still break free from simplistic thinking, and set a new tone for interaction.

Step 12: Service

To strengthen recovery, you must carry the message to others and put the principles of the program into practice in every area of your life.

Step 12 allows people who have worked through the program to give to others who are still trapped in a simplistic mind frame, struggling to admit to themselves they don't understand everything. Assisting others can benefit both the person in recovery as well as those who are still going through the program. 

When you are sharing the message, you will no doubt remember your initial resistance and the discomfort and fears of facing complexity and contradiction. 

It will also give you a sense of purpose to help others, to connect more authentically to other complex and contradictory humans, and to feel more trust in your ability to face the world as it is. 

The complexity revolution starts with you and me!

To start the program you only need to find the courage to take step 1, to admit that are addicted to the false comforts of simplistic thinking. 

Try this sentence: My name is [….] and I'm addicted to simplistic thinking. 

Take the first step! 

You only have the whole world to gain.

Disclosure

From Melancholic Joy: On 
Life worth living. 

If only there were a program like Simplistics Anonymous. Maybe, someone could make one.  

Simplistic thinking is a human tendency. Not much we can do about that. But addiction to simplistic thinking is in plague proportions; refusing to consider more than a superficial scan of ideas and issues, fighting along us versus them lines. Clinging to simplistic thinking stops us having feelings we don't like at the time, but it causes no end of problems for individuals, communities, and the entire world. 

We need a treatment or a cure. We sure need a complexity revolution!

Instead, this is just a blog post. It was intended to be humorous, but when I thought about the widespread addiction to simplistic thinking and all its negative implications, I got depressed about humanity. 

Making badges helps. Made by the author using Canva. 

References and quotes

• Either-or thinking is making your life worse. Matthew Legge, Psychology Today, Aug 2019 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/are-we-done-fighting/201908/either-or-thinking-is-making-your-life-worse 
• “Too many important conversations are derailed by persuasive but overly simplistic stories, and because we don't take care when choosing what questions to ask. In their most basic form, these arguments turn into binary logic, where cake is either a pure one or a pure zero. Binary logic can be extremely useful in many cases, but applied to the wrong questions it can drive us apart. It might even contribute to our appetite for violence.”
• False dichotomies - this is simplistic thinking at its peak: in politics, debate is increasingly framed as two black and white choices: you're either a patriot or you're un-Australian.
• Extremist politics: Debating the nuts & bolts, The Association for Psychological Science, Sep 2012 http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/full-frontal-psychology/extremist-politics-debating-the-nuts-bolts.html
• “Psychological scientists have a name for this easy, automatic, simplistic thinking: the illusion of explanatory depth. We strongly believe that we understand complex matters, when in fact we are clueless, and these false and extreme beliefs shape our preferences, judgments and actions—including our votes.”
• How language can polarize us. Matthew Legge, Psychology Today, May 2019 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/are-we-done-fighting/201905/how-language-can-polarize-us
• “Consider an example offered by linguist George Lakoff: the term “tax relief.” These two simple words imply multiple assumptions: a) taxes are negative, b) reducing taxes will help people (much the way that a pain medication provides pain relief) and c) it is moral to lower taxes. So “tax relief” isn’t just a neutral choice of words – it’s a whole frame that may sway our emotions and the decisions we make.”
• Heuristic, at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic
• “Stereotyping is a type of heuristic that people use to form opinions or make judgements about things they have never seen or experienced. They work as a mental shortcut to assess everything from the social status of a person (based on their actions), to whether a plant is a tree based on the assumption that it is tall, has a trunk and has leaves (even though the person making the evaluation might never have seen that particular type of tree before).”
• The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown podcasts https://brenebrown.com/podcasts/
• How to Win at Forecasting - A Conversation with Philip Tetlock, The Edge, June 2012 https://www.edge.org/conversation/win-at-forecasting
• “In our work on expert political judgment we have generally had a hard time finding support for the usefulness of fast and frugal simple heuristics.”
• If It Only Was That Simple: The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth, May 2016 https://realbalancewellness.wordpress.com/tag/simplistic-thinking/
• The ‘melancholic joy’ of living in our brutal, beautiful world. Brian Treanoris from Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living (2021) Psyche, Sep 2021  https://psyche.co/ideas/the-melancholic-joy-of-living-in-our-brutal-beautiful-world
• Yes, the world is full of suffering, marked by death, rent by entropy; but it is also filled with beauty, wonder and opportunities for love and compassion.
• Merriam Webster definition and original of the word 'simplistic' https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simplistic
• Simplistic theories are generally one-sided and partial, wrote the American clergyman James Freeman Clarke in the 19th century, (1844) nicely illustrating the difference between plain, ordinary simple and the then-new adjective simplistic. Simplistic is generally synonymous with oversimplified, but we didn't have the verb oversimplify and its participle oversimplified until well into the 20th century. Simplistic is sometimes used in the neutral sense of "not complicated" (in which case it is synonymous with simple) but this borders on misuse - simplistic is generally understood to be pejorative.
• Simple thinking in a complex world is a recipe for disaster. David Green, The Conversation, Dec 2016 https://theconversation.com/simple-thinking-in-a-complex-world-is-a-recipe-for-disaster-69718
• “Above all, remember that complexity arises from the richness of interconnections between things. To ignore the wider context, to fail to consider the side effects of actions and ideas, is to do so at our peril.”
• Very Well Mind - these blog posts draw heavily on this site https://www.verywellmind.com/the-twelve-steps-63284
• Using Simple vs Simplistic. Richard Nordquist, ThoughtCo, Aug 2020 https://www.thoughtco.com/simple-and-simplistic-1689612 
• “Many political slogans are simplistic; for example, 'you pay too much in taxes' is catchy, appealing, and might even be true, but it ignores the underlying issues of what services those taxes pay for, whether you want or need them, and whether they provide good value for your money. Rather than condensing complex arguments about the balance of costs versus services, it avoids them—hence not simple, but simplistic."