Modeling nature by attempting to simplify its complexities into a pair of polarities is a primal human inclination. Light and dark, positive and negative, port and starboard, true and false, life and death...the list is considerable. So persuasive and appealing can such dualities be, especially to individuals with no aspiration to think for themselves, that entire religions have been fabricated around the idea.

From a simple numerical perspective, two is in many ways the essence of countability. It is the cumulative total arrived at after the same counting criteria has been applied one more time after a first successful application.

Suppose, as is commonly done, a counting process is set up to get some numerical data on fairy beans. Once the count recorder is set to zero and the start button has been pushed, few gardeners would claim that any counting has been done at all until a suitable fairy-bean entity is actually found. In spite of this, certain researchers and mathematicians are quite willing to promote the initial zero as a valid count. The former might do so to justify the financial support of the funding providers, and the latter to ensure their theorems could be presented in a cosmically general format. If in fact a fairy-bean-like entity is identified, the counter can be poked, the fairyish-beanish thing tagged as counted, the search widened. The researchers will be able to present their results to the sponsors with relief and confidence. The counter is now recording a one. But even this is hardly counting. An entity has been identified maybe, but the essence of countability is accumulation. Claiming to have accumulated only one, is rather akin to claiming to have exposed a dilemma when only one of its horns has been uncovered.

So much success in life seems to hinge on getting past one. By looking further afield and creatively tweaking the criteria for fairybeanness ...by perhaps including asymmetrical beans or transparent fairies... it is usually possible to get things underway in a convincingly reassuring manner. The counter will be authorized to register the magic digit two one way or another. Now at last there is real counting. Now at last there is credibility. The funding is assured and an expanded program clearly justified.

If there was to be any modern secular glorification of a duality, it would have to be for the on-off binary polarities of electromagnetic switches. Few individuals, who use any one of the myriad of technological devices being created, have the slightest concept of the innumerable continuous switch reversals that make the functioning of their device possible.