The False Dilemma: Do you fall for this COMMON psychological TRAP?

The social engineers and the heads of the media companies have been dividing us with this tactic since forever… by presenting only two options, they can force people, often unnecessarily, onto one side or the other of whichever line they draw for us with the framing of their narratives.

They know we are prone to having a preference for dichotomies because they understand that, although we prefer having a choice and a say in our thoughts and affairs… they also know that most are so lazy that they would rather only have to decide between two choices anyway without having to compare multiple data points and run through the mental gymnastics of more complicated decision-making.

The fake-moral dilemma they put us in when framing questions like, “Do you support X, or are you a bad person?” are meant to disable your reasoning faculties and trigger your tribal instincts to get you on one side or the other of THEIR line:

“Us or them.”

Both dominant ideologies (conservative/liberal) engage in this… and the media loves it because it creates conflict and drama for the news cycle.

In reality, arguments on either side of that line often have some amount of validity and many other options that are equally or more or less valid may exist but end up being ignored due to the tribalism they are triggering.

It makes us easier to control if they can cordon off entire topics of discussion and put us into the camps that THEY decided we can exist within.

Please be careful out there, don’t let them manipulate you and make you dumber and less capable by limiting your thoughts.

Hoaxtards vs. Virustards… is just more divide and conquer using black-and-white thinking, forcing people right where they want us, which is at each other’s throats.

Civil War.

Here is a good explanation, surely better than my own from this one website:

False Dilemma
(also known as: all-or-nothing fallacy, false dichotomy*, the either-or fallacy, either-or reasoning, fallacy of false choice, fallacy of false alternatives, black-and-white thinking, the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, bifurcation, excluded middle, no middle ground, polarization)

Description: When only two choices are presented yet more exist, or a spectrum of possible choices exists between two extremes. False dilemmas are usually characterized by “either this or that” language, but can also be characterized by omissions of choices. Another variety is the false trilemma, which is when three choices are presented when more exist.

Logical Forms:

Either X or Y is true.

Either X, Y, or Z is true.

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Example (two choices):

You are either with God or against him.

Explanation: As Obi-Wan Kenobi so eloquently puts it in Star Wars episode III, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” There are also those who simply don’t believe there is a God to be either with or against.

Example (omission):

I thought you were a good person, but you weren’t at church today.

www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/False-Dilemma

From Wikipedia:

False dilemma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy, more specifically one of the correlative-based fallacies, in which a statement falsely claims an “either/or” situation, when in fact there is at least one additional logically valid option.[1]

The false dilemma fallacy can also arise simply by accidental omission of additional options rather than by deliberate deception. For example, “Stacey spoke out against socialism, therefore she must be a fascist” (she may be neither socialist nor fascist or a socialist who disagrees with portions of socialism). “Roger opposed an atheistic argument against Christianity, so he must be a Christian” (When it’s assumed the opposition by itself means he’s a Christian). Roger might be an atheist who disagrees with the logic of some particular argument against Christianity. Additionally, it can be the result of habitual tendency, whatever the cause, to view the world with limited sets of options.

Some philosophers and scholars believe that “unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn’t really a distinction”.[2] An exception is analytic philosopher John Searle, who called it an incorrect assumption that produces false dichotomies. Searle insists that “it is a condition of the adequacy of a precise theory of an indeterminate phenomenon that it should precisely characterize that phenomenon as indeterminate; and a distinction is no less a distinction for allowing for a family of related, marginal, diverging cases.”[3] Similarly, when two options are presented, they often are, although not always, two extreme points on some spectrum of possibilities; this may lend credence to the larger argument by giving the impression that the options are mutually exclusive, even though they need not be.[4] Furthermore, the options in false dichotomies typically are presented as being collectively exhaustive, in which case the fallacy may be overcome, or at least weakened, by considering other possibilities, or perhaps by considering a whole spectrum of possibilities, as in fuzzy logic.[5] This issue arises from real dichotomies in nature, the most prevalent example is the occurrence of an event. It either happened or it did not happen. This ontology sets a logical construct that cannot be reasonably applied to epistemology.

False dilemma refers to misuse of the xor or nand operators. For misuse of the and operator, see False conjunction.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Another key example of this thinking:

Everyone that disagrees with me is a bot or a Russian/CIA/Mossad/etc. shill!

 

h/t BFD

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