“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
— The three witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
꧒This 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 and 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 vanquished 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 only ways of articulation.
🐷Are we to be ousted 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 our reach.
🦋Lucifer defied gender binaries. He was an angel. They were God’s people and then, when they failed to abide by the terms and conditions, they became sinners who became outsiders.
♔Like the ones who now face deportation under Donald Trump’s presidency in America. Or those who don’t identify as male or female.
They are to be condemned, cast out.
They are the unbelonged.
ꦯLike 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 women gaining political and physical power and therefore, the urgent need to segregate men and women and 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 campaign, Trump said he was going to “take 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 official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders—male and female.
🃏Sexuality is diverse, beyond binary 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?
ꦛTrump, Narendra 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.
ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚBut good and evil are morally equivalent and ambivalent.
🏅In Indian mythology, the two opposite figures of Ram and Ravan are characters with tragic flaws. The reductive approach to fit the complexity of narratives into a binary grid is unnatural.
But here we are.
ꦛBinaries present a complex grid. Popular culture has always trapped us in the binary political, social 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 contradictions.
⭕How does one then account for the personal and the political in a world that now seems to operate only in terms of binaries?
𒉰A binary opposition restricts everything involving two items. The problem is that these items are no longer open-ended but defined and outlined, where the struggle of opposites must be concluded with punishment or elevation.
🅺We are to be protagonists or antagonists, heroes 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, raw 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 binary 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 eliminate 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,” asserting 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 other. They also echo Western thought of a structuralist idea that encourages us to think in terms of opposition.
𒅌There is the anarchy of gender. There is the anarchy of pluralism.
ꦿThe three witches and the fallen angel are stories that resist binary opposites.
This issue of Outlook🐟 is a resistance to the binaries that make us less human and more programmed creatures who must function as told in order to belong.
🎉Majority 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, One language, One election, One people.
Else, face negation. Become zero.
Face the wrath of the Gods.
ওThis too for the sake of radical 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'.
