There’s only two types of people in the world, the ones that entertain and the ones that observe. —Britney Spears, “Circus”

There are two kinds of people: those that keep files and those that keep piles. There are two kinds of people: chaos muppets and order muppets. There are two kinds of people: the ones that divide the world into two kinds of people and the ones who don’t.

“Two kinds of people” is a joke, a Socratic question, and a provocation. The joke promises a grand theory about something that turns out to be inconsequential. The Socratic question isolates the variables of a given problem to reduce the noise of a complex world and provide a bird’s-eye view—the abstraction is necessary to formulate a question. The provocation invites an argument. Am I one of these two kinds of people? Are you one of these kinds of people? Are there two kinds of people?

Are there two kinds of people? Dilettante Army invites reflections on this very question for our upcoming issue, Two Kinds of People. Categorical thinking is a useful social tool. We divide the world into categories to make sense of it and also to position ourselves and others within it. Although the world is detailed and nuanced, sometimes strong categories are necessary in order to form collective identities or make political demands. Without social identities that account for class, gender, race, and disability, no political momentum can be generated or traction maintained. The binary has its uses and also its abuses. One of the reasons that binaries can be problematic, besides their rigidity, is that they can become naturalized, seemingly organic, and therefore inflexible. The binary is a tool, and as with any tool you have to figure out where, when, and how to use it.

Contributions should focus on the jokes, Socratic questions, or provocations in “two kinds of people,” as well as binaries that have come to seem “natural”: Coke or Pepsi, Taylor Swift or Kanye West, winners and losers, the Cold War, binaries of race and gender, opera or death metal, West Coast or East Coast, Star Trek or Star Wars, sandwich rectangles or sandwich triangles, STEM or humanities, comedy or tragedy, Comic Sans or Times New Roman, apples or oranges, punner or pun-hater, A sides or B sides, introverts or extroverts, with us or against us.

Submission pitches should be emailed to editor Sara Clugage (sara@dilettantearmy.com) by Monday, April 4, 2022. Before submitting,please read our submission guidelines for more information on what we publish.

Image: Isabelle Coe as Niobe, William Morrison albumen print cabinet card, circa 1892