One the best tests to determine whether or not you are dealing with a harmful ideology that blinds you to the truth is whether or not it allows for history. The colonialism discourse is a case in point: reducing all to perfect evil versus perfect good = shallow, childish myth.
Extremism gets rid of the reality of human nature and sets up an all too easy decoder that its adherents overlay over that reality, dividing out good from evil in some simplistic manner. There’s no room for prudence or the middle earth we actually live in between a heaven & hell.
Instead, it’s all heaven or hell: utopia or dystopia. It’s not that there is no good or evil—far from it—but that any mature understanding of reality involves the human stance between the two, which makes the struggle and tension between virtue and vice possible.
It’s not that there aren’t good guys and bad guys, but that to understand what this means entails understanding what humans are—not reducing them to abstract and flimsy -isms of the present in a puritanical morality play that by definition sets you up as the hero in your own mind
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