About Yin and Yang, nonduality and binaries

[Vasishth, Ashwani]

MP, to clarify, when two words are linked—like Yin and Yang—the twoness does not make a binary.

If you look at that complex of Eastern philosophies from which the concept emerges, it’s a rejection of dualistic (binary) thinking.

It’s not “good OR bad,” “light OR dark” and so on.  But rather good AND bad, hand in hand.  We can’t have one without the other.

This is the antithesis of this OR that thinking.

That’s where I begin.  You CANNOT have good without bad, in this view.  Then choice-making is not about picking the better one over the other.  Rather, we need to make peace with both. 

AI, for instance, is BOTH good and bad. Our job is to reconcile that apparent contradiction. 

It’s not to pick good over bad, but learn to live with the reality that good comes WITH bad.

Defeating the current power systems does not get us to a fairer world.  It only replaces one power structure (which oppresses US) with one that oppresses the “oppressors.”

-- 

    Ashwani
       Vasishth      
Professor of Sustainability (Retired) from Ramapo College of New Jersey
vasi...@ramapo.edu         
(323) 206-1858 (cell)
                  

[mp]

On 22/06/2026 17:10, Vasishth, Ashwani wrote:
> MP, to clarify, when two words are linked—like Yin and Yang—the twoness
> does not make a binary.
>

Thanks.

I obviously agree with the basic proposition here, but we should
probably not conflate 'binary' in the general sense — composed of two —
with the particular and much narrower 'either/or binary' most starkly
formalised in digital gate logic.

Anyway...

Where I think the argument becomes politically weak, or the chain falls
off, however, is in the move from relational thinking to what sounds
like reconciliation with power...

To say that good and bad, benefit and harm, creation and destruction
often arise together does (surely?) not mean that we should/can simply
stop judging, choosing, opposing, or transforming - or does it?

To my mind it rather means that judgement has to become more situated,
less purity-seeking, and more attentive to consequences.

With AI, for instance, “it is both good and bad” is only the beginning
of the analysis, not the conclusion. The real questions concern
ownership, governance, labour, energy, pollution, surveillance,
epistemic authority, and who captures the gains while others absorb the
losses.

Likewise, resisting an oppressive power structure does not automatically
mean replacing it with an inverted oppression of the former oppressors.

That is a (binary?) caricature of transformation; and, it seems to me,
quite unhelpful; rhetorical and ideological even.

A "genuinely non-binary" (?) politics would hopefully not make peace
with domination; it would ask how to dismantle domination without
reproducing its form.

After all, the one who sits on the fence gets splinters in their behind.

...
..
.