How to be a
Professional
Bawbag

Lesson 04 · Advanced oversimplification

Ignore Nuance

Two sides. Zero context. Maximum certainty.

The professional method

  1. Reduce everything to heroes and villains.
  2. Remove any awkward context.
  3. Treat every explanation as an excuse.
  4. Call uncertainty “sitting on the fence.”

What you’re actually learning

Simple stories feel satisfying. They give us someone to blame, something to defend and no untidy details to carry around.

Unfortunately, reality is often a badly organised committee meeting: several things can be true, causes overlap and decent people can disagree.

The clever bit hiding underneath

This is black-and-white thinking and the false dilemma: squeezing a complicated question into two options when more possibilities exist.