"When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white"
About this Quote
Patricia Sun is taking aim at one of the mind's favorite cost-cutting measures: moral and intellectual shortcutting. The opening move - "when we don't have information" - is a quiet indictment of our default settings. Uncertainty doesn't make us cautious; it makes us binary. We reach for black-and-white not because it's true, but because it's manageable. In that sense the quote reads like a field guide to how certainty is manufactured, especially when facts are scarce or too messy to metabolize.
The sharper turn is the accusation that simplicity requires self-deception: "then we have to lie to ourselves". Sun isn't merely arguing that nuance exists; she's exposing the emotional bargain behind certainty. A neat story delivers relief - someone is the villain, someone is the hero, a situation is "good" or "bad" - but the price is a kind of internal propaganda, where you edit out inconvenient shades so your narrative can hold. The subtext is less about ethics than about self-soothing: binary thinking isn't just wrong, it's comforting.
Her final line works because it refuses the cheap middle-of-the-road pose. It's not "everything is gray" as a shrug; it's a warning about distortion. "Black is never as black... and white is never as white" suggests that our extremes are projections, amplified by fear, anger, loyalty, or tribal need. Contextually, the quote fits a world of hot takes, crisis scrolling, and algorithmic outrage: information gaps are everywhere, and so are the incentives to fill them with certainty. Sun is nudging the reader toward a harder discipline - living with ambiguity long enough to tell the truth.
The sharper turn is the accusation that simplicity requires self-deception: "then we have to lie to ourselves". Sun isn't merely arguing that nuance exists; she's exposing the emotional bargain behind certainty. A neat story delivers relief - someone is the villain, someone is the hero, a situation is "good" or "bad" - but the price is a kind of internal propaganda, where you edit out inconvenient shades so your narrative can hold. The subtext is less about ethics than about self-soothing: binary thinking isn't just wrong, it's comforting.
Her final line works because it refuses the cheap middle-of-the-road pose. It's not "everything is gray" as a shrug; it's a warning about distortion. "Black is never as black... and white is never as white" suggests that our extremes are projections, amplified by fear, anger, loyalty, or tribal need. Contextually, the quote fits a world of hot takes, crisis scrolling, and algorithmic outrage: information gaps are everywhere, and so are the incentives to fill them with certainty. Sun is nudging the reader toward a harder discipline - living with ambiguity long enough to tell the truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
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