Too many times I read posts, ideas and articles that espouse a vision of the world that is simplistic and black and white. Extreme ideas seem intuitively inviting, and yet on in-depth inspection are often found wanting. Ideas that sometimes lead to endpoints that are harmful and dehumanizing, especially toward a person holding an alternative opinion or belief. This article looks at the psychological benefit of extreme thinking.

About ten years ago, I worked with a seventeen year-old boy who had stopped going to school. Instead of talking about his mental health challenges, he used up much of our weekly sessions trying to provoke me to argue with his views on the world. Each week, the views he presented became more and more offensive as he tried hard to provoke me to respond to the content of his view. Whenever I tried to broach the subject that brought him to my office, he told me that schools were a waste of time. He complained that many of his teachers were “left-wing” and he felt he was unable to express his opinions safely and that he was not allowed full freedom of expression.

Each week, I worked hard to avoid getting drawn into his rhetoric. What I really wanted to do was discuss the psychological or emotional benefit to him of these extreme ideas, although such deconstruction of a person’s beliefs can be risky. After all, I think it would be hard for all of us to answer the question about why a strongly held idea is so important emotionally or psychologically. We are used to our ideas being separate to our emotional state. And yet they are not. There is a delicate balance in exploring how ideas and thoughts mold our feelings and emotions. It is hard to develop a meta-awareness of how what we say impacts others around us.

In short, I wanted to help my young patient to think about the benefit to him of holding extreme views. It was not necessarily that I wanted him to change his views, but rather to contextualize what it meant to have such ideas about the world and how to communicate them without having to offend people.

The problem of course exists in many different realms: politics, religion, society and of course history. Let’s break the question down: what is an extreme view? After all, at some moment in our lives we must have entertained an opinion about something important to us that was likely different from another person's thoughts and ideas. At what point does a particular idea become “extreme”? Perhaps there is always the possibility that having a differing opinion is to be considered extreme. I think the answer, in part, has to do with thinking that a particular idea is only one that is correct and anyone who cannot share that ideas must be wrong. If that is the case, then all of us must have been extremist at some moment in our lives!

I remember being obnoxiously correct about everything when I was younger. This included all sorts of views about how to be a religious Jew and that kind of Judaism represented some absolute truth about how live a life. This was quite a curious world view to have expressed given that most of my family is either not Jewish or un-Jewish in their lives. I, alone, was the black sheep. Even more ironic, was that I lived with my non-Jewish family for several years following my return from Yeshiva at the height of my inflexible thinking about how I must act as a Jew.

Many years after this time, at a point in my life in which I was perhaps slightly less inflexible in my thoughts about the world, my aunt spoke of religion being a crutch for my life which had been somewhat challenging throughout my childhood. At first, I was a little offended, thinking that my religion is something more central to my being than just a crutch. Actually, now I reflect upon my initial religious fervor, I think that there may be something to this, and this perhaps can explain the power of extreme thinking.

What I loved in my late teens and early twenties was the pure simplicity of what seemed me to be the religious life. There were answers to difficult questions and there was a lot of comfort in that. It made me feel safe in a world that seemed threatening in its complexity. Simple replies to other people (not even that many, but enough) who did not fit the boxes in the structures that religion gave me. Even answers to purpose of life and what happens after death, without me having to do much work. Religion provided a method to everyday life.

This is the crutch of extremist thinking: a black and white version to the bright colors of the universe that we inhabit. Too many colors are confusing and chaotic, and often overwhelming. There is beauty to be had in the Mandelbrot fractals of life, but often the brain searches for the simplest structure to process and make sense of. The heuristics of the brain are mirrored in the simple life offered by many religions – the avoidance of complexity. The brain seeks out short cuts in an avoidance of effort. Religion for many people seek answers in avoidance of having to accept that most existential questions are unanswerable.

For my patient, while he perceived extreme ideas to be correct, they also reflected a desire to control and subdue a world he often perceived as threatening. While he would say to me that he was not afraid of anything, he was unable to go to school. He described being concerned about not being able to contain himself. He was afraid that he could not maintain his composure. He would run out of the classroom, triggered by seemingly inexplicable cues, that he himself was unable to explain. His answer was that he would stay safely at home. He would read the websites he liked and post his unique view on his friend’s Facebook and Instagram posts. The more emotional response he could generate in others, the better he felt about his own views on the world. A wonderful distraction from the chaos of his own mental health challenges.

This is the lure of black and white extreme thinking. It makes simple the complex nuanced world in which we live. It accords with gut-based responses to how we see the world, and fits in with a simplistic good and bad vision of society around us. It is something to which we are all susceptible, and I think, of which we should be wary. It often biases us against the reality of complexity and can push us to think, speak and act in harmful ways, especially toward other people we don’t understand or who disagree with us. This is not just the work of the therapist, but also upon all of us: to recognize our own extremism and become able to tolerate the possibility that what we think might actually be wrong.