When Centrism Gets Lazy

A friend texted me yesterday after reading a previous week’s piece.

“Isn’t both/and just centrism by another name?”

And I said, yes, maybe. It’s both a position and both positions. You can hold both.

That’s when I saw the iPhone’s iMessage “blinking three dots” which cause both dread and excitement.

He pushed back. Most centrists he knows have an opinion, keep it quiet, and then make their decision in the quiet of the night, at the ballot box, with their wallet, with where they choose to spend their attention. They don’t want to get pulled into either side’s fight. The both/and to him was someone can be both opinionated and quiet. And he wasn’t being mean about it. He was just describing how most people actually live.

I sat with that. He’s right. Most of what gets called centrism is exactly that - a quiet decision, made privately, by someone who has decided that this is not their fight today.

And honestly? That’s fine. Whether we call it “both/and” is secondary.

Which is a strange thing for me to write, given that I’ve spent a year arguing that holding two truths at once is a discipline, not a dodge. So let me try to tell you the difference.

Quick primer for anyone new: Both/And is the idea that two opposing things can both be true at the same time, and that the work isn’t to pick one, it’s to hold both with equal seriousness and let the friction sharpen your judgment. Not the average of the two. Both, at full volume.

Now back to my friend.

The trouble with the word “centrism” is that we’ve been using one word for at least three different things, and they don’t behave the same way.

As I see it:

There’s the disengaged center. Your neighbor who waves but doesn’t want to talk about the school board, your coworker who has a take on the layoffs but only over text, your dad who votes but never tells anyone how. They’re not absent. They just aren’t going to argue with you over brunch about it. They have a forest, and the forest has a fence. Mostly fine. Often wise.

There’s the empty-suit center. The leader who promises to “find common ground,” who never actually says what they think, who confuses the absence of a position with the appearance of wisdom. The French king Louis-Philippe took the throne in 1830 promising the juste milieu, the “happy medium.” A cartoonist named Charles Philipon drew him as a pear-shaped dummy with no head. (Philipon had a thing for pears.) Eighteen years later the king was on a boat to England and France was having another revolution.

The empty suit ran out of road.

And then there’s Both/And, which is neither. Both/And isn’t quiet. It isn’t headless. It’s loud about both things and willing to be wrong about how it’s holding them. Sales is right that we’ll lose the deal. Engineering is right that we’ll regret the shortcut. Here’s the call I’m making and here’s what would change my mind. That’s not splitting the difference. That’s standing in the difference (bold + italics means important, lol).

Aristotle, the original “mean-as-virtue guy”, said this 2,300 years ago and almost nobody quotes the part where he said it: the mean is not the arithmetic middle. It depends. Sometimes virtue is much closer to one extreme than the other. He called the skill that figures out which one phronesis. Practical wisdom. Context-reading. Taking action. The opposite of “let’s just meet in the middle and call it a day.”

So when my friend said, “Isn’t both/and just centrism?”, what he was describing was option one, with a little of option two mixed in. He wasn’t wrong that most centrism is one of those. He was just describing centrism without phronesis. Centrism on autopilot.

Here’s how I see where it shows up at work and at home.

Yin: At work, the quiet of the night is mostly Slack

Watch any office during a controversial org-wide decision. Two executives are at war maybe. Most of the company goes very quiet in the all-hands and very un-quiet in DMs. People text their take to one trusted person and say nothing publicly. The middle managers absorb heat from both sides without showing their cards. The reorg gets announced and the public Slack channel fills with “exciting times!” while the back channels turn into a group therapy session.

This is the disengaged center, and most of the time it’s fine. Sometimes it’s actually wise. Or cathaartic. Sometimes the fight isn’t yours and the smart move is to let it resolve and live with the result. The Plain, the silent middle bloc of the French Revolutionary Convention, mocked by the radicals as “the swamp” kept their heads down through the Reign of Terror, and many of them survived precisely because they didn’t make themselves targets.

After Robespierre fell, they were the ones who rebuilt the government. The quiet center turned out to be the foundation, not the cowardice.

But there’s a tipping point. There’s a version of “I’m staying out of it” that becomes “I never have a position on anything.” That’s when the empty suit shows up.

Think of the manager who absorbs every direction and takes action on none. The team learns to stop bringing the manager real issues or questions because the answer is always a soft yes that everyone knows means nothing. The disengaged center was a strategy. The empty suit is a personality.

Think of this scenario:

Picture a Tuesday standup. You’re shipping in three weeks. Engineering says the codebase has a problem that, if you don’t fix it now, will cost you eight weeks of pain in six months. Sales has already promised the customer the ship date. Marketing has the launch deck loaded. Your CFO has the number in the forecast.

Everyone in the room has a take. Most of them are texting it to one other person.

The disengaged-center move: let’s hear more from both teams next week, and now you have a follow-up meeting and the deadline is two weeks away.

The empty-suit move: we need to balance velocity with quality, a sentence that means nothing, that you can quote back to anyone, that commits you to nothing.

The Both/And move: Engineering is right that this debt will cost us. Sales is right that we can’t move the date. We’re shipping on the 21st with the workaround, and engineering gets the next two sprints to fix the underlying thing which means the Q3 roadmap slips by one item. Tell me what I’m wrong about.

The reality is a scenario like this was always going to cause friction for all involved. But naming the polarities and standing in them as opposed to opting for disengagment or outright avoidance goes no where by default.

People disagree out loud. Good. Now you’re having the conversation. That can lead to somehere.

Yang: At home, the quiet is harder to see

The family group chat with the political posts that get the read-receipt-and-no-reply treatment. The friend who never tells you your partner is being a jerk. The friend who did tell you, but only after the breakup. The marriage where one person has, very slowly, stopped sharing opinions on small things to avoid conflict, started as picking your battles, became not having any.

Same three centrisms. Disengaged is mostly fine and sometimes wise (you don’t need a hot take on your in-laws’ kitchen renovation). Empty-suit is the one that quietly hollows out a relationship over years. Both/And is the one where you say, I love you and that hurt my feelings and I want to keep talking.

That’s not centrism, that’s, well maybe that is impossible.

Lol. Kidding (you get it).

So when does the quiet stop being wisdom?

Three lenses, depending on where you’re sitting.

If you’re conflict-averse, the question isn’t whether to fight more. It’s whether the things you’ve gone quiet about are still choices or whether they’ve become defaults you didn’t quite make.

If you’re over-engaged, the question isn’t whether to care less. It’s whether you’re confusing “I have an opinion” with “every opinion needs to leave my mouth.” Some forests aren’t yours.

If you’ve been Louis-Philippe in your own life — and most of us have, at least once — the question is whether the moderation you’re performing has a head under the hat anymore, or whether the hat is doing all the work.

MAYA: The Ewok rule

I named this myself. (Sorry. I know. I observe “May the 4th”.)

As a side note-to-the-non-Star-Wars-Informed-Reader, please feel free skip down to “Three Small things to start today”, you’ll just miss out.

Where as I, as yes, Star Wars.

For Luke and Vader, the war between the light side and the dark side was the only battle in the universe. From their point of view, every being in the galaxy should have been picking a side. But the galaxy was mostly full of people running cantinas, fixing moisture vaporators, smuggling spice, and (on one particular forest moon) stealing honey from trees and worshipping gold protocol droids.

Most beings never picked up a blaster. Were they cowards? No. They had their own forest.

And then the Empire built a base on it. And the Ewoks fought.

That’s the rule. You don’t have to be on the front lines of every cause to be a serious person. You do have to know which forest is yours. Both/And isn’t a demand to engage everywhere, that’s just exhausting and probably annoying. It’s a demand to be honest about where you’ve quietly already made a choice not to.

Three small things to start today:

• Pick one thing this week where you went quiet and ask yourself honestly: is this not my fight, or have I just stopped fighting?
• The next time you’re tempted to “find the middle” in a conversation, try the harder version: name both sides at full volume, then say where you actually land. (Then survive the awkward five seconds.)
• Notice once when someone else does it well. The friend who tells you the hard thing kindly and in real time. Tell them you noticed. And then try that.

Final result: it’s pretty gray.

Most of life is the Plain. The quiet middle bloc, doing the work, not making speeches, voting in the dark with our wallets and our attention. That isn’t a moral failure. That’s a Tuesday.

Centrism has its place, whether it’s in politics, or the workplace, or at home and that can take on a few different personas or behaviors. Centrism provides you the time to view or name the binary without diving into 1 or 0. Just don’t fall into the trap that centrism itself provides.

But, both/and has showed me that understanding “1 and 0”, without deciding one side or another, before it’s too late helps…..a lot.

The trick is knowing what “late” is, like when the Empire shows up on your forest moon.

• Louis-Philippe and the juste milieu (the “happy medium” centrism that ended in revolution): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juste_milieu
• The July Monarchy, 1830–1848 (Louis-Philippe’s full reign and its collapse): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Monarchy
• The Plain (La Plaine / Le Marais) — the moderate majority of the French Revolutionary Convention, mocked as “the swamp” and “the toads,” many of whom survived the Terror and rebuilt the government afterward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plain
• Aristotle’s Golden Mean — and the part most people skip, where he says the mean is not arithmetic but contextual (Britannica overview): https://www.britannica.com/topic/golden-mean
• Aristotle’s phronesis (practical wisdom) and the doctrine of the mean (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)