The Levels of Right & Wrong

RIGHT OR WRONG?

RIGHT OR WRONG?

Sounds like a simple question. And sometimes it is.

1 + 1 = 2: Right.

1 + 1 = 3: Wrong.

This is Level 1 of Right & Wrong: The Binary Level

It can either be right or wrong. True or false. 1 or 0.

The Binary Level is the level we find the simplest to navigate through.

Our minds create binary dichotomies all the time:
Right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, up or down, left or right, now or later, black or white, hero or villain, wine or beer.

Historic facts, most of mathematics and physics and much of the other natural sciences usually play on the Binary Level.

• “Napoleon was 2,25m tall.” False (I think)

• “The angles of a triangle sum up to 180 degrees.” True

• “The Earth is flat.” False (believe it or not)

• “Raising the prices of our t-shirts is the right way to increase our revenue.” Righ… ummm, wait a minute!

Welcome to Level 2 of Right & Wrong: The Continuous Level

Although we love to squeeze reality into boxes of right and wrong, most things in life aren’t so clearly right or wrong — but they can be less right, more wrong, less wrong and more right. Better or worse. Anything between 1 and 0.

Raising t-shirt prices to increase revenue might work better than other things you could do (like trying to sell airplanes instead of T-shirts).

But it also might work worse than some alternative changes (like placing your highest priced t-shirts more prominently in the front of the store).

Who knows?

It’s neither clearly wrong nor clearly right.

It’s somewhere in between — ideally more to the right side.

Most of what we value in life plays on the Continuous Level.

• Which is the right strategy to increase revenue?

• Which career path is the right one to choose?

• Who is the right life partner?

• Which hobbies are the right ones for me?

• What is the right political party to vote for?

• …

There are better and worse answers to all of these (and maaaaany more) questions. But they all lie on a spectrum between right and wrong and it’s not so clear where exactly.

But wait, doesn’t it also depend on how you look at it?

Yup, it usually does.

Introducing Level 3 of Right & Wrong: The Perspective Level

Not only is it not so easy to tell how right or wrong something is, usually your answer depends on your perspective — your frame of reference. For different reference frames, the same answer might be more or less right or wrong.

How right or wrong a career path is for you heavily depends on what you expect your career to provide:
Just money? Status? Great learnings? Meeting interesting people? Free coffee for life?

How right or wrong it is to kill an animal depends on the situation:

Are you killing animals for fun (very wrong) or are you being chased by a hungry bear (much less wrong)?

If raising t-shirt prices is the right strategy to increase revenue depends on things like customers’ price sensitivity, branding power, unit costs, etc.

How right a partner for you is depends on what you expect from a long-term partnership: kids, traveling, security, fun, freedom?

And so on.

Whatever we ask ourselves in our lives, there are almost certainly different ways of looking at the same questions. There are almost certainly alternative reference frames that will change our answer. Sometimes, these different perspectives are easy to differentiate — sometimes, though, they are really hard to identify.

Complicated enough?

Not quite. Let’s move on to the final level.

Introducing Level 4 of Right & Wrong: The Time Level

All of what I described above can change over time. Your personal situation, the environment you’re in, the goals you have — all of it changes with time. And so does the “rightness” of many of your answers to the questions of life.

“What brought you here won’t get you there.”

Good answers from yesterday can be bad answers for tomorrow — and vice versa.

The strategy that fuelled your business growth up until now might be detrimental in the future.

The career path you’ve been happily walking on until today might make you miserable a few years down the road.

What you regarded as the morally right thing to do might appal you today. What you once thought was stupid might seem great now.

Life is like a space that stretches out in front of us. How we move determines the quality of our lives. How right it is to move left, right, up or down changes with different situations and different mental states. And these change over time.

“Right” answers aren’t straightforward. Not at all.

Sometimes right answers are simple.

Often, they are not.

To levels,
Phil