People like to thing about things simply. The reality is there just isn't time to sit down and reflect on your position on an issue or situation that's encountered you. We are going to make assumptions about that thing that make reflection easier. In most cases that leads to making one polarized decision.
My favourite example of "one polarized decision" is the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She said "When I'm sometimes asked 'When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?' and I say 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."
If you want to fix years where women have been excluded from this important decision making body, then the first place to start is to suggest doing the opposite. The goal of getting nine women on the supreme court feels nearly impossible, but to overcome the incredible amount of institutional prejudice that exists at this present moment, you need a "shoot for the moon" type goal to maintain momentum and avoid rebounding back to the status quo.
I get the sense that some people (particularly ones who were comfortable with nine men on the supreme court) are uncomfortable with that because it doesn't look like equality, but we never reach the idealized pictures that we present of the future we want. We can decide on a direction to move in, and maybe at some point we'll arrive at a more comfortable place but we need the momentum of a polarized decision in order to get momentum and get things rolling.
That's not to say that the future is about replacing one group with another. Personally speaking I don't think that helps anyone. But right now the entrenchment of individual groups of people in positions of power is so strong that giving nuanced opinions about what should happen in the future doesn't lead to meaningful change. People don't hear or listen to nuanced opinions very well. It's the loud brash clear opinions that we tend to go for. It's like we're moving a golf ball with a sledge hammer. Yes we're smashing it way too hard, but it gets things going in the right direction and we can always come back in later and correct things.
Maybe in the future we can argue that we need to move more towards an equal sharing of things, but for now I'm comfortable with the sledge hammer approach on some of these issues. I'm comfortable with a polarized decision. Let's get things moving and then later on we can come back and correct things later on.
