Governance and False Dilemmas
Seeking agreement in an age of popular falsehood and metastatic absurdity.
A few years ago, a friend asked if I could distill my political philosophy down to one sentence. “Absolutely,” I said, “If it takes more than one sentence to describe what you believe, you probably aren’t that sure what you believe. In most cases, I find that is true – if you can’t apply Occam’s Razor to your belief system, it is too complicated to understand.”
My one sentence definition is this:
“I do not want to govern you, I want you to govern yourself.”
One wonders how a country founded on the ideal that each of its citizens have a right to their own lives, a right to think, speak and do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rights of other citizens to do the same, can survive the millenniums old urge for the few “who know best” to tell the many how they should order their lives and what is the “proper” thing to think, speak and do.
Progressivism, envy and pure old nosy old yenta biddiness has taken a simple constitution and heaped upon it an ever expanding, multi-layered inverted pyramid of “emanations and penumbras” of laws in the vain attempt to be that “know-it-all” president of a national homeowner’s association on steroids.
There is no possibility every American will agree on everything, that is the miracle of our Constitution – it sets forth perhaps the minimum of the most important aspects of what a central government of a nation vast in geography, diverse in demography and divergent in ideology, should do for its collective citizens. Every step we have taken away from the brilliance of the underlying philosophy of this document has created less unity and more discord. In actuality, the broadest of actions taken by our government have led to a sharp narrowing of control – it is sort of an Inverse Theory of Governance, the more control enacted leads to fewer and fewer people exerting control and the less their accountability to the citizens becomes.
Do we have to believe the same things, be of the same religion, the same socioeconomic class?
No.
But there is a minimum of things we must absolutely agree upon.
And the things upon which we agree must be based in fact, truth and reality.
A primary cause of our discord today is that we agree on virtually nothing. Far too many people believe in things that simply are not true because it is easier to retreat into the protection of group delusion than it is to face the often harsh truth. Representative of how absurd this process is, is the current fad and fiction that half of America are white supremacist domestic terrorists.
It is sad that people find it easier to believe their neighbors are demonic and evil than it is to admit that their ideology is flawed and false.
But they would rather believe a lie than live the truth, because the truth negates their premise.
But false premises are the order of the day. They are the very basis for the foundational arguments of the contemporary American left and its chosen disease vector, the Democrat Party.
And as we all know, beginning any argument from a false premise means literally everything that flows from that premise is also false. False premises always lead to a cascade of logical fallacies. These fallacies are often variations of false dilemmas that are characterized by mutual exclusivity or collective exhaustivity - or both.
Mutual exclusivity means that only one of the available options presented can be selected (or can be true) at any given time. When the premise of mutual exclusivity is false, this means that it involves presenting the available options in a way that suggests that we can only choose one of them (or that only one of them can be true), while in reality it’s possible to pick two or more of them (or for two or more of them to be true).
Collective exhaustivity means that the options that are presented are the only ones that are available. When the premise of collective exhaustivity is false, this means that it involves presenting a limited number of options as the only available ones, while in reality there are additional relevant options.
The rhetoric about covid vaccinations is a false dilemma (as is the masking of kids). The premise that vaccinations are the only way to go denies the research proving that the natural immunity of people who have already had the disease and recovered is stronger and more durable.
Joe Biden's speeches in specific, and Democrat speeches in general, are textbook examples of false dilemmas. The idea that there was no other choice other than to leave Afghanistan immediately, the way we left was the only way possible to leave and the consequences were inevitable is a perfect encapsulation of a false dilemma on a grand scale.
And the fact they are sticking to that story in the face of its obvious falseness is why the rational half of America rightly judges them as unserious and dangerous.
Fighting false dilemmas is often reduced to the level of arguing with a two year-old in the middle of a tantrum, but that is the way to defeat this logical fallacy. We must point out the falseness of the argument, explain why it is false, and if necessary, also explain how being false invalidates the argument they are making.
It is often beneficial to ask the person who relied on the false premise to support it. In cases where it helps the other person notice and internalize the errors in their reasoning, or in cases where you’re not sure if a certain premise is false in the first place. When doing this, you can also remind them that they bear the burden of proof - since they’re the ones who are making the argument.
Won’t always work, but it is the only way.