ABSTRACT
Perhaps the greatest danger of dichotomous thinking occurs when we come to consider success/failure. If you are not a success, in two-valued thinking, you must be a failure. In such highly emotional highorder maps or abstractions it is valuable to stop and analyze, to define terms, and to add “to me.” I am a success to me. Because I am . . . happy . . . living in New York . . . have a yacht . . . whatever. He is a failure to me, because he lives in the woods in a cabin and writes indecipherable philosophical papers and sends people mail bombs. Success is getting what you want (which you must define precisely). What the world calls success is getting what everybody (presumably) wants. But like other emotional maps, there is a spectrum or continuum hiding behind the dichotomy.
