We all seem to love to be one-dimensional: simplifying down a story from a spectrum to a trite summary.

POSIWID is about finding a single "purpose" and defining that as the apex reason for a system (usually to manipulate).

I'm not sure how we have more balanced discussions.

  reductionism: squashing a many-layered phenomenon into a single tidy cause
  framing: choosing one angle of a story and strawmanning or deflecting.
  false dichotomy: where every shade of gray is lost.
  single-axis narratives: narrative manipulation where you steer the public to think along just one line (whatever works — economic, moral, tribal).