Why you and your political group will fail without a doubt
Tofu sausage. Pussy rap. The war in Ukraine. Well, does that get your blood boiling? Do you have a clear opinion on these things? And that feeling of belonging to the right side – that feels good, doesn’t it? Clarity provides direction and organises a complicated world into understandable categories. Good or bad, right or wrong. But: the world rarely works in such black-and-white terms. In any given situation, there can be different truths that don’t simply resolve each other. And sometimes it’s precisely these contradictions that help you understand what’s actually going on.
I’m not contradictory, your mum is contradictory
We encounter contradictions in our private lives: for example, when you don’t buy fast fashion because of the appalling production conditions, yet you’re still delighted to get your hands on your friends’ discarded Shein clothes. Today you might share a post about animal suffering in the meat industry, and tomorrow you’ll end up ordering a kebab at 3 am anyway.
But contradictions also run through political spheres: for example, when your Antifa group argues over whether a national flag at a demonstration symbolises solidarity or aggression. Or when the neighbourhood initiative against luxury developments collapses over a foreign policy issue.
We believe it’s necessary to move away from thinking without contradictions. In general, and above all from a left-wing perspective. And we consider contradictions and doubts so important that we’re dedicating an entire issue to them. Why?
Of course, not everyone thinks in black and white, and there are clearly nuanced voices. But when we look at the major public debates, we get the feeling that the need for clear-cut sides is growing stronger. Doubt seems almost suspicious, and ambiguities and simultaneous perspectives are disappearing from conversations. This is a problem, because an increasingly complex world cannot be understood with ever-simpler answers.
Your brain is playing tricks on you.
The human brain works by taking shortcuts. It looks for patterns, assesses situations quickly and jumps to the explanation that seems most plausible (to us). From an evolutionary perspective, this made sense: in the past, anyone who spent too long wondering whether a rustling in the bushes was a tiger or just the wind stood little chance of survival. Our brains love clear explanations. We favour information that confirms our existing beliefs and tend to ignore contradictions. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias. As soon as information emerges that doesn’t fit our world view, an unpleasant feeling of tension arises: cognitive dissonance. We often resolve this inner unease not by rethinking our opinion, but by downplaying or ignoring contradictory information. Clarity feels more comfortable to us. It feels good to know exactly who’s the culprit and who’s the heroine. But a person can be both offender and victim – sometimes even in the same situation. And enduring this duality is exhausting.
So if we want to understand the world in all its complex truth and disorder, we must consciously train our brains not to think in terms of neat, unambiguous categories. This takes practice and willpower, but the effort is worth it: after all, it is not only situations that are contradictory, but we ourselves as well. Tolerance of ambiguity (that is, the ability to cope with ambiguous situations) is the art of dealing productively with this disorder rather than denying it. It determines whether we are susceptible to manipulation, whether we make good decisions, whether we remain fair, and whether we can continue talking to each other when things get complicated.
Can there be more than one truth at a time?
Sometimes, yes. Why is that? There are facts: these are things that can be verified, for example through data, measurements or specific events. There are interpretations: ways of making sense of these facts. And there are values – the things that matter to us, such as freedom, security, justice or solidarity. Many disputes do not arise because people see different facts, but because they interpret the same facts differently or prioritise different values. Two people can therefore look at the same set of facts and reach different, yet both reasonable, conclusions. It is thus necessary to put these three elements into perspective: clarify the facts, recognise interpretations as just that, and highlight differences without directly dismissing them.
Complexity costs energy. You have to read more, listen more and think for longer. You have to allow contradictions to exist and sometimes even accept that you have been wrong. That can be a blow to the ego – but there are tools that help when dealing with complex situations. This issue provides you with a few initial resources.
Breaking down stereotypes against Nazis
There is yet another reason why simple certainties are currently booming. Today, many things we used to take for granted have become fragile. War in Europe, climate catastrophe, economic uncertainty – a lot seem more unstable than it did just a few decades ago. Clear answers can be reassuring and provide guidance in a world that feels increasingly uncertain. To a certain extent, this is understandable, as nobody can constantly keep the full complexity of the world in mind. Sometimes even the brain needs a break. It becomes problematic, however, when complex issues are not only simplified but also divided into moral camps, thereby creating enemy stereotypes. This gives rise to narratives of the good and the bad, in which contradictions are simply swept under the carpet. False simplification is not only unsympathetic – the problem is also that pigeonholing further solidifies the bad things in this world.
In many respects, our society is characterised by unreasonable demands: by the supposed constraints of capitalism, performance, competition and nationalism, and by exclusion and devaluation in the form of sexism, racism, antisemitism, ableism, and so on and so forth. But anyone who, like us, questions these things is quickly dismissed as unrealistic or naïve. Right-wing movements in particular benefit from this way of thinking. Their political agenda often consists precisely of reducing the complex conflicts of the present to simple dichotomies: us against them. Order against chaos. The natives against the foreigners. In this sense, authoritarianism is the most drastic form of false clarity. Extreme pigeonholing. That is why the far-right party AfD is not an ‘alternative’ at all, but rather presents a lack of alternatives as a political concept. And that is why we urgently need to think beyond our comfortable pigeonholes. We need dissent and we need doubt.
Enduring contradictions doesn’t mean: nothing matters
One thing matters to us here: doubt doesn’t mean arbitrariness. There are facts. There is violence. There are political projects based on exclusion and oppression. Between these positions, there is no need for an round table or a neutral middle ground, but rather a clear stance and a firm distinction. Our call to question things is not a call to abandon this stance. For there is right and wrong, good and bad, the pursuit of a better world and the inhuman hatred of the weak. Tolerance of ambiguity therefore doesn’t mean accepting everything as equally valid, but looking more closely: Which facts are established? What interpretations are possible? What values underpin them? Only when we untangle these layers can political debate become productive at all. That is why the ability to tolerate contradictions is more than just a personal trait: as a political skill, it helps you to recognise manipulation, because simplistic slogans lose their impact. It helps you to make better decisions, because more perspectives become visible. And it also helps you to develop a politics of solidarity that does not focus solely on your own group.
We are against war. We are for feminism. We are against capitalism. We are for justice. We are against selfishness and for solidarity. We are for a left-wing movement and for communism. But we simply do not believe that this covers everything. These positions should not be the end of an argument, but rather a starting point for new questions. After all, a world characterised by competition, inequality and crises cannot be changed by simple answers. If we, as anti-militarists, feminists and left-wingers, are to navigate these shitty times in solidarity, then our arguments should at least be on a par with these shitty times. We believe that this sometimes requires more doubt, more contradictions and a greater willingness to endure them. We’ve been trying to do this for years with this newspaper project, and we’re aiming to do so explicitly with this issue. Not because we think that doubt solves everything, but because we believe that left-wing politics, which aims to create a better world, must take the contradictions of this world seriously.
For further Reading:
Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson & Nevitt Sanford: The Authoritarian Personality. 1950. archive.org
Leon Festinger: Theorie der kognitiven Dissonanz. 1957. 30 €.
Karl Meyerbeer: Worüber wir streiten müssen. Konflikte, Spaltungen und Gemeinsamkeiten in der radikalen Linken. 2026. 12 €
Ali Almossawi: An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. 2017. bookofbadarguments.com
Heidi Möller & Jannik Zimmermann: Zur Bedeutung der Ambiguitätstoleranz in stürmischen Zeiten. In: Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie. 2024. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11612-024-00750-8
