False Dilemmas

There's a statement I've heard over the years that goes: "You can be happy or you can be right." I've thought about it since the first time it came to my ears. At first I thought it was a helpful piece of wisdom when trying to resolve differences in relationship or in an attempt to stop a damaging argument. But something always bothered me about this because of the polarizing attribute it had. Attributes like this in our thinking make it difficult to creatively come up with other possibilities and keep us in a black & white world.

The saying itself "You can be happy or you can be right" can be viewed as a construct. And we can take that construct and impose it upon a life situation thereby forcing two absolutes on it. I went in search of the fallacy in this phrase in order to gain language to communicate this point effectively. I found what I was looking for and I offer it as a viewpoint to open up what may lay between Happy and Right.

The fallacy involved is called a False Dichotomy: Defined as polarized thinking (dichotomy, primal thinking, false dilemma, black and white thinking): This is the fallacy of thinking that things are either black or white, good or bad, all or nothing. This fallacy can lead to rigid and harmful rules based on primal thinking when it is efficient to compress complex information into simplified categories for rapid decision-making during times of stress, conflict, or threat.

Dialogue is a powerful tool for identifying a false dichotomy and moving past it to other alternatives. Here's a story I read that expresses it wonderfully... "A clever Zen master teaches his students to reject a false dichotomy and go beyond polarized thinking with the following challenge. He places a cup of tea before the student, then says “If you drink that cup of tea, I will beat you with a stick, and if you don't drink that cup of tea I will beat you with a stick.” The student has to reject the false dichotomy, recognize options other than the two presented, and create other alternatives, such as offering the tea to the instructor, or asking his advice to avoid punishment..."

As I look around at the messages coming at me I see this fallacy everywhere in our media and politics. Here are some examples by asking: If Barack Obama is good or bad, if you are liberal or conservative, if you are republican or democrat. Or asking are you with us or against us, scientific or religious, etc... This dichotomy obscures a grander unity. It separates us and our understanding of nature and each other. Used right it becomes an effective tool to polarize (or divide) people, and people divided are easier to manipulate.

In essence, false dichotomies are harmful because they distract us from the many alternatives that could provide creative solutions or help us constructively resolve conflict. Whereas debate tends to be used as a tool to support a false dichotomy by focusing on the limited alternatives "Capitalism or Socialism?", "Private Healthcare or Public Healthcare?", the list goes on and on.

Consider the distinction between the false dichotomy of “black or white” and the accurate dichotomy of “black or non-black”. Non-black includes a vast range of colors spanning shades of gray, the colors of the rainbow, and the infinite shades of colors in between.

So as we go about our daily business it may not serve us to reduce things down thus, or accept headlines, messages, or ideals so reduced without some critical thought. Since it's in the reduction of things that we get into so much trouble. We reduce thought processes with these constructs and then we continue on as if they were fact! And then so much is lost in the reduction and it's gone forever and we never stop to recognize that we reduced an idea in the first place. It's no longer real life, and then one is off in concept-land working inside a construct. And when one lives inside a construct we no longer have the resolution (as in megapixles) on the life situation to creatively create alternate possibilities.