The Opposite of What You Believe Is True

The antidote to single-story thinking is learning to hold multiple perspectives at once. There is great wisdom in being aware of your perspective and then being able to transcend it at will. You can gain a deeper understanding of a situation through the dialectic movement of holding two perspectives in an antagonistic tension. If you're convinced of something, try to think how the opposite could be true too.

One example: I believe that God doesn't exist. At the same time, if I think about it, God is, if nothing else, a concept that influences many people's lives. The brain scans of people praying to God show identical brain activities to the people socially interacting with real people. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wrote a fascinating book about this and related phenomena. So in this sense I'd concede that God exists after all - he is at least as real as Capitalism or other ideas that shape life on earth in a major way. A fair objection here could be that I'm just using different definitions of what existence might mean when talking about God. But this is exactly my point: when transcending single-story thinking, all these nuances suddenly become available, and I'd argue that nuanced thinking is a strong indicator for wisdom.