Foul Is Fair: The Power And Peril Of Binary Thinking

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

— The three witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

This sentence is a rejection of the authority of language that has synonyms and antonyms that are placed against each other. In yoking together these opposites, the witches challenged the old binary 💧of good and evil, the protagonist ജand the antagonist, heaven and hell.

“I am the spirit of perpetual negation…”

Mephistopheles in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust.

That sentence alone must be enough to collapse any🌠 binary identity that we are to assume in order to belong and to find meaning. Good and evil constitute the plots and evil is to be vanquisꦓhed and order must be regained over chaos. That’s how we are to exist in this world and participate in it. Insufficiently.

We are to be on the side of God, who is good. To be on the side of good. But how does one define good? Is good a code? 🦩Like the binary code where opposites become the only places of belonging, the onღly ways of articulation.

Are we to be ous♛ted from heaven? Like Mephistopheles, a fallen angel, who was cast out of heaven like many others for supporting Lucifer’s rebellion against God and for the💜 inversion of the accepted social and moral order.

Yet, Mephistopheles, Lucifer’s messenger in Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, is a character that demands to be understood and not rejected and condemned. He stands in the space between good and evil and only helps a fictional doctor obsessed with necromancy invite inevitable self-destruction by tempting him to sell his soul to the Devil. The fallen angel isn’t frightful. He defies dualism, and his damnation only reinforces heaven and hell, distant constructs beyond ourꦬ reach.

Lucifer defied gender binaries. He was an angel. They were God’s people and then, when they failed to abide ꧙by the te🐭rms and conditions, they became sinners who became outsiders.

Like the ones who now face deportation under Donald Trump’s presidencജy in America. Or those who don’t identify as male or 🦹female.

They are to be condemned, cast out.

They are the unbelonged.

Lꦬike Macbeth’s witches, they threaten masculine authority. Neither ugly nor beautiful, they wield heretic magic, disrupt order and shatter the world’s🌃 rigid binaries.

Trump’s campaign and executive orders border on the fear of womenꩲ gaining political and physical power and therefore, the urgent need to segregate men and women a🔯nd allow no fluidity, no spectrum that can challenge the gender binary that many now feel is biological and therefore, ordained by God.

In his speeches, God’s terms and evil terms constitute the binary opposition. They were presented as causes that✤ led to conclusions that were either chaos or stability.

During his October camp🧜aign, Trump said he was going to “takꦯe historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female.”

During his inaugural address, he said that it would be the offic♏ial policy of the Uni🐼ted States government that there are only two genders—male and female.

Sexuality is diverse, beyond binar𒀰y sexes. For 1.6 million trans Americans, this is a crackdown. When righteousness grips the majority, binaries justify their violence. Who is to challenge God’s men?

Trump, Narend🍬ra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu and many other leaders who operate on the politics of othering, which is not based on ecosystem politics but binary politics, often invoke God and project themselves as chosen shepherds to guide the lost to heaven and away from chaos.

But good 𓆉and evil are 🍰morally equivalent and ambivalent.

In Indian mythology, the two opposite figures of Ram and Ravan are characters with tragic flaws. The reductiv🧜e approach to fit the complexity of narratives into a binary grid is unnaturalܫ.

But here we are.

Binaries present a complex grid. Popular culture has always trapped us in the binary political, s꧅ocial and cultural grids. It is a matrix of this and that, us and them. Forever opposed in a morality battle, forever choosing sides.

The “analytic logic of contraries” leaves out the ambiguous. There is always grey. There is always doubt. There is always overspilling. We overlap, we intersect and we hold many contradic🗹tions.

How does ཧone then account for the personal and t🦩he political in a world that now seems to operate only in terms of binaries?

A binary opposition restricts everything involving two items. The problem is that these ite꧒ms are no longer open-ended but defined and outlined, where the struggle of opposites must be concluded with punishment or elevation𝕴.

We are to b☂e protagonists or antagonists, heroe▨s or villains. This fundamental contradiction makes us programmed people like algorithms.

Life and death, heaven and earth, day and night, right and left, up and down, sacred and miserable, rꦆaw and ripe, black and white, love and hate, us and them are all expansions of a myth content where twin concepts, while intrinsically related, are mutually contradictory. 

Plurality is now projected as having no achievable goals in a society obsessed with outcomes and purpose. The sharp differentiation of bi🌄nary oppositions makes it easy for us to identify bad guys and good guys, and being on the side of good justifies violence as a means to contain and eꦯliminate the other. There’s the benefit of that licence in such binary opposition constructs.

Former American President George W. Bush had claimed that “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make; either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” a🐼sserting a false dichotomy that has now become the status quo where anyone opposed to any war is liable for impeachment.

But who is the terrorist?

That’s a question that needs more than what we are willing to engage with. Binaries are easy to operate with. They are about the domination of one over the oth♏er. They also echo Western thought of a structuralist idea that encourages us to think in ter🧸ms of opposition.

There is the anarchy of gender. There is🔥 the anarchy of pluralism.

The three witches and th🦂e fallen angel are stories that resist binary opposites.

This issue of Outlook is a resistance to the binaries that make🌠 uღs less human and more programmed creatures who must function as told in order to belong.

Majori🍒ty vs. minority, us vs. them, friend vs. enemy, nationalist vs. anti-nationalist, conservative vs. liberal, rich vs. poor, citizen 🍸vs. outsider, white vs. black, etc.

You are either zero or one.

One nation, O🅘ne 🍨language, One election, One people.

Else, face negation. Become zero.

Face the wrath of the Gods.

This too for the sake of radic꧟al possibilities. To step outside the matrix and deprogram ourselves.

This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid', which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'Foul is Fair'.