**TL;DR: Accounting for nuance allows for consideration of different perspectives which, in turn, allows for empathy. Empathy leads to understanding and consensus, which underpin democracy. Modern phenomena like cancel culture are indicative of the prevailing wave of group-think which disregards nuanced viewpoints in a way that is dangerous to democratic consensus.** Life is unimaginably complex. Human experience is multifaceted and radically individual, and there is no single lens that is best suited to navigating the human condition. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Recognizing the true complexity of the world and our place in it cultivates empathy by forcing the consideration of different perspectives. Acknowledging nuance requires willingness to see the whole truth in a way that requires disassociating identity and emotions from deeply-held convictions. And pursuing and accepting naked truth requires intellectual discipline and impulse control. Yet acceptance of the world’s nuance – willingness to see truth – is acceptance of reality. Still, accounting for nuance is hard. It takes scrutinizing over facts to determine the fullest truth, it takes willingness to overcome entrenched biases, it takes open-minded communication, and it takes empathy. It takes resistance against the comfort of falling in with our familiar tribes. It takes potent personal conviction. It takes work. As our society has already discovered, it’s easy to be intellectually lazy, to relax the brain in the technicolor flicker of political pundits who feed the insidiously addictive confirmation bias cycle. Indeed, today’s increased political polarization is the disease that collective intellectual laziness has led our society to catch. Populism and cancel-culture are symptoms of this disease. Under the obnoxious brew of misguided activism and intellectual laziness that is cancel culture, it’s in vogue to paint nuanced behaviors and issues as black and white. As one Vocal Media writer puts it, “...extreme labels seem more performative than anything. They're not a solution. They're someone wanting to stake out a position to prove how they're so much more woke than everyone else, how they're such a great activist. That's not constructive” [(1)](https://vocal.media/theSwamp/the-importance-of-nuance-in-political-debate). Of course, there are certain social stances that our society takes as axiomatic because we’ve collectively worked them out to be squarely right or squarely wrong. “Police brutality is wrong. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are bad” [(1)](https://vocal.media/theSwamp/the-importance-of-nuance-in-political-debate). But each of these issues – along with every other issue – are intensely interconnected and complex beneath the skin of their hot-button labels. Cancelling conversation-goers who are trying to work towards a nuanced compromise defeats any potential that our ideologically varied society will ever fix what is broken. The fervor surrounding certain contemporary social problems is so great that it puts blinders on our society. Nuance fades into the background because abortion, racism, constitutionality, spirituality, poverty, identity, and healthcare are simple. You’re either on the right side or you aren’t. As Huffington Post writer Qasim Rashid pointed out, “Simply open your mouth on Israel-Palestine, and faster than you can blink you’ll be labeled either a heartless Zionist or a Hamas terrorist. Both extreme labels are equally fruitless” [(2)](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/9-israel-palestine-facts_b_5643077). Those labels are worse than fruitless – they’re dangerous. They construe the other party in the conversation as a threatening existential other. Rather than working through or “winning” a conversation, labels like this deal with disagreement by destroying the conversation altogether (in the same way the US simply “will not negotiate with terrorists”). Such open disregard for nuance constructs walls that empathy cannot penetrate. Without empathy, there is no understanding. Without understanding, there is no conversation. Without conversations, there is no democracy.