Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.

Public-Discourse

St. Catherine of Alexandria

The False Dilemma Factory

You are presented, in the course of any given week, with dozens of false dilemmas. Security or privacy. Growth or sustainability. Tradition or progress. Open borders or closed borders. Regulation or innovation.

Each of these is constructed to suggest that you must choose one and abandon the other. Each is a lie.

I do not use that word carelessly. A false dilemma is not a simplification. It is a logical error, and when it is deployed deliberately – as it almost always is in political discourse – it is a form of manipulation. The person presenting the dilemma is not trying to help you think. They are trying to prevent you from thinking, by eliminating from your consideration every option except the two they have preselected.

Philosophy
St. Catherine of Alexandria

Why Your Hot Take Is Not an Argument

A thing happened in the world yesterday. Within minutes, thousands of people had opinions about it. Within hours, those opinions had hardened into positions. Within a day, the positions had calcified into identities, and anyone who questioned them was treated not as a fellow thinker but as an enemy.

No one, in this entire process, made an argument.

I want to be specific about what I mean by “argument,” because the word has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that many people believe they are making one when they are doing nothing of the kind.

Philosophy