By Sergio Arellano

I have an uncle who fiercely defends Morena, Mexico’s ruling political party.

It does not matter how much evidence accumulates against people associated with the movement. Allegations of corruption involving the sons of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Accusations from the United States against politicians linked to Morena for cartel-related activity. Expanding cartel control across large parts of Mexico.

None of this seems sufficient to change his model.

His default response is always the same:

“It’s all because of PRI and PAN.”

At first glance, this may look like a political disagreement.

I think it is something deeper.

This is not primarily about ideology. It is about perception.

More specifically, it is about resolution.

What is low resolution thinking?

Low resolution thinking means using an overly compressed mental model to interpret a highly complex reality.

Think of image quality.

A low-resolution image has very few pixels. Shapes are blurry. Fine details disappear. Everything becomes blocky and oversimplified.

A high-resolution image contains more information. You can distinguish subtle features, textures, and patterns.

Human cognition works in a similar way.

Low-resolution thinkers compress reality into simple narratives:

• good vs evil
• left vs right
• oppressed vs oppressor
• people vs elites

This makes reality easier to process emotionally.

But easier is not the same as more accurate.

In politics, low resolution often sounds like this:

• Morena = good
• PRI/PAN = bad

Or the reverse:

• Morena = evil
• PRI/PAN = better

Both are low-resolution models.

Both collapse complexity into tribal narratives.

Reality is almost never that simple.

Mexico is not a single-variable system

Mexico’s political reality is a multi-variable system.

Its current state is shaped by decades of interacting forces:

• institutional corruption
• cartel expansion
• weak rule of law
• impunity
• state capture
• poverty
• economic informality
• political incentives
• public dependency structures

PRI contributed to this.

PAN contributed to this.

Morena inherited this.

Morena also now shapes this.

This means two things can be true simultaneously:

PRI and PAN caused enormous long-term damage.

And Morena may also be worsening certain structural problems.

These statements do not contradict each other.

A high-resolution thinker can hold both.

A low-resolution thinker struggles to do so.

My uncle’s model

My uncle uses a single explanatory variable:

“Everything is PRI/PAN’s fault.”

This is an example of monocausal thinking.

Monocausal thinking is psychologically comforting because it reduces complexity.

Instead of evaluating a difficult system with many interacting forces, the mind selects one cause and uses it to explain everything.

Once this happens, analysis stops.

Narrative takes over.

Every new piece of evidence is absorbed into the same story.

Corruption allegations?
PRI/PAN sabotage.

Cartel expansion?
Inherited problem.

Institutional decline?
Media manipulation.

No evidence is processed independently.

Everything is filtered through the preexisting narrative.

This is the hallmark of low resolution cognition.

The deeper issue with my uncle is not that he supports Morena.

People can support any political movement for rational or irrational reasons.

The real issue is the structure of his perception.

What stands out is not merely the conclusions he reaches, but the striking predictability of how he arrives at them. No matter what political subject is introduced, whether it concerns Mexico or the United States, his mind seems to compress complexity into highly simplified moral categories that feel emotionally satisfying but explain very little.

This is where low-resolution thinking becomes visible.

Once you begin observing carefully, you realize this pattern appears everywhere.

When discussing Mexico, his worldview collapses into a simple binary: PRI and PAN are responsible for everything wrong in the country, while Morena represents the corrective force. Every new event, scandal, contradiction, or institutional failure gets interpreted through this lens. Evidence is no longer examined independently; it is filtered through a preexisting narrative that determines in advance what conclusions are acceptable.

The same cognitive compression appears when discussing American politics.

For him, Donald Trump is simply “a racist white man.”

That description may contain elements that some people believe are true, but the more important issue is what gets lost through this reduction. Trump is not merely a racial or moral symbol. He is a complex political phenomenon shaped by multiple forces: economic frustration, anti-establishment sentiment, institutional distrust, media polarization, globalization backlash, immigration politics, cultural conflict, and elite credibility collapse.

Reducing Trump to “racist white man” eliminates all of that complexity.

But interestingly, the opposite simplification is equally low resolution.

People who describe Trump as a flawless savior fighting evil elites are making the same cognitive mistake from the opposite ideological direction.

Both narratives sacrifice complexity for emotional clarity.

That is what low-resolution cognition does.

It converts systems into stories.

The deeper psychological mechanism behind this usually begins with identity fusion.

At some point, political beliefs stop functioning as hypotheses and start functioning as identity.

This changes everything.

Once a political worldview becomes part of someone’s identity, challenges to that worldview no longer feel like intellectual disagreements. They feel personal. They feel threatening.

Criticism of Morena no longer sounds like:
“Here is evidence suggesting institutional corruption.”

Instead, it feels like:
“Your worldview is wrong.”
“Your tribe is wrong.”
“You were fooled.”

That creates internal resistance before evidence is even evaluated.

At that point, reasoning becomes defensive rather than exploratory.

The goal is no longer to understand reality more accurately.

The goal becomes preserving internal coherence.

This leads directly into motivated reasoning.

Human beings like to imagine that they process facts objectively, but in practice the mind often behaves less like a neutral scientist and more like an extremely skilled lawyer defending a preferred conclusion.

If someone is emotionally invested in believing Morena represents moral progress, then the mind becomes remarkably efficient at protecting that conclusion.

Evidence against Morena gets minimized, dismissed, or reframed.

Evidence against PRI or PAN gets amplified.

Contradictions are explained away.

Exceptions become proof of conspiracy.

This process often happens automatically and unconsciously.

The person feels rational while defending conclusions that were emotionally chosen beforehand.

Then comes cognitive dissonance.

This may be the strongest force of all.

If my uncle has spent years believing that López Obrador represented a historic break from corruption, that Morena represented the people, and that this political movement was fundamentally different from what came before, then accepting serious corruption inside that same movement creates enormous psychological tension.

Because accepting those facts would not merely require updating one opinion.

It might require admitting something much more painful:

“I may have been deeply wrong.”

For many people, that is psychologically expensive.

Far more expensive than simply denying, rationalizing, or reframing uncomfortable evidence.

This is why evidence alone often fails to change minds.

Facts do not enter an empty space.

They enter a psychological system designed to preserve coherence, status, identity, and emotional stability.

Eventually this entire process hardens into tribal thinking.

Politics stops functioning as a domain of competing ideas and becomes a moral battlefield divided into heroes and villains.

Our side becomes good.

Their side becomes bad.

Our flaws become understandable mistakes.

Their flaws become proof of evil.

Once someone reaches this level of tribal cognition, reality becomes secondary to narrative.

And that is ultimately what I see in my uncle.

Not stupidity.

Not ignorance.

But a low-resolution cognitive architecture that compresses complex systems into emotionally comfortable narratives.

That is why nuance struggles to survive.

And that is why evidence alone rarely changes his mind.

What makes this especially striking is that my uncle is not an unintelligent man, nor someone lacking formal training in evidence-based reasoning. Quite the opposite. He is a highly respected attorney in the United States with decades of professional practice, someone whose career has been built around analyzing facts, constructing arguments, identifying inconsistencies, and persuading others through logic and evidence.

Which makes this dynamic even more revealing.

Because it shows that the problem is not a lack of intelligence, education, or professional sophistication.

The problem lies deeper, in the architecture through which evidence is processed.

In fact, his legal training may even strengthen his ability to defend preexisting conclusions. A skilled lawyer is trained not only to evaluate evidence, but also to construct compelling arguments for a position, reinterpret inconvenient facts, challenge opposing narratives, and build coherent defenses under pressure.

Those are powerful cognitive tools.

But those same tools can serve truth—or rationalization.

When identity, emotion, and tribal allegiance become deeply entangled with political beliefs, intelligence does not necessarily produce clearer perception. Sometimes it simply produces more sophisticated justifications for why one’s existing worldview must remain intact.

This is what makes low-resolution thinking so deceptive.

From the outside, it may look like rigorous reasoning because the arguments can sound articulate, structured, and persuasive.

But beneath that sophistication, the underlying model may still be highly compressed.

The conclusions remain constrained by narrative boundaries established long before the evidence is examined.

In that sense, intelligence alone is not enough.

A sharp mind can still operate on a low-resolution model of reality.

And in some cases, that may be even harder to detect.

What makes this especially important is that low-resolution thinking is not a problem exclusive to uninformed people.

In fact, intelligence alone offers surprisingly little protection against it.

Highly educated people fall into the same trap all the time.

They simply build more sophisticated rationalizations.

A low-resolution thinker with less intelligence may defend simplistic narratives with crude arguments.

A low-resolution thinker with high intelligence often does something more dangerous: they construct elaborate intellectual defenses for conclusions they were emotionally committed to from the beginning.

In other words, intelligence can improve reasoning, but it can also improve rationalization.

This is why the real dividing line between strong and weak thinkers is not raw intelligence.

It is resolution.

High-resolution thinkers perceive reality with greater granularity.

They can tolerate complexity without immediately collapsing into simplistic narratives. They instinctively distinguish between layers that low-resolution thinkers merge together.

They separate:

• individuals from institutions,
• institutions from systems,
• short-term events from long-term structural forces,
• facts from narratives,
• explanation from justification.

This allows them to hold multiple truths simultaneously without feeling psychologically threatened.

A high-resolution thinker can say:

PRI and PAN caused enormous long-term structural damage to Mexico.

And Morena may also be worsening some institutional problems.

These statements are not contradictory.

They are both potentially true.

Likewise, a high-resolution thinker can analyze Trump without collapsing into ideological caricatures.

They can recognize that Trump may display traits they consider dangerous, narcissistic, divisive, or inflammatory.

At the same time, they can also recognize that millions of people support him for reasons that cannot simply be reduced to racism.

Those reasons may include economic frustration, distrust in institutions, hostility toward political elites, concerns over immigration, cultural backlash, or the belief that establishment systems no longer represent ordinary citizens.

Understanding these motivations does not require agreeing with them.

Understanding is not endorsement.

This distinction matters.

Low-resolution thinkers often fail to make it.

To them, understanding the other side feels like betrayal.

But serious thinking requires the opposite.

It requires the willingness to understand reality even when reality resists moral simplicity.

That is the real challenge.

Not intelligence.

Not education.

Not ideology.

But epistemic discipline.

The ability to continuously update one’s model of reality as new evidence emerges.

This may be the clearest test of intellectual maturity.

Can you revise your model when reality contradicts your narrative?

Can you say:
“I was wrong.”

Can you hold conflicting truths long enough to understand a complex system?

Can you resist the emotional comfort of simplistic explanations?

That is rare.

Much rarer than people think.

Most people do not want reality.

They want coherence.

They want certainty.

They want emotionally satisfying stories that make the world feel stable and morally legible.

That is why low-resolution thinking is so common.

It reduces uncertainty.

It lowers cognitive load.

It turns chaos into narrative.

And narrative feels safe.

But reality does not care about our preferred narratives.

Reality remains complex whether we acknowledge that complexity or not.

That is why my uncle matters to me as more than just a political example.

He represents something much broader and deeply human.

The temptation to replace reality with narrative.

The temptation to compress complexity into morality.

The temptation to stop observing and start defending.

And if I am being intellectually honest, that realization leads to an uncomfortable conclusion.

The real danger is not merely that my uncle thinks this way.

The real danger is assuming I am somehow immune.

Because low-resolution thinking is not someone else’s problem.

It is a permanent human vulnerability.

The question is not whether we have biases.

Everyone does.

The real question is whether we can notice when our own models are becoming too compressed, too tribal, too emotionally convenient.

The real question is whether we still care more about what is true than about what feels comfortable.

That may be the ultimate difference between low-resolution and high-resolution thinking.

Low-resolution thinkers defend narratives.

High-resolution thinkers continuously refine models.

One seeks emotional certainty.

The other seeks deeper contact with reality.