Our choice is more government or some terrible catastrophe will befall us all. We’re never presented with any third choices. From Joel Bowman at internationalman.com:
Of the myriad rhetorical tools employed in public discourse today, dangerous few are more insidious than the false dilemma. Simply put, the false dilemma is a sly trick of exclusion whereby a speaker (always generously) offers his or her audience the apparently favorable choice between two unfortunately poor options.
Little surprise then that, as the election season circus rolls across the country, this Weapon of Dialectic Destruction (WDD) finds itself a favorite of slick politicians working to curry favor with an increasingly ovine voter mass.
“On which horn do you wish to be gored?” they inquire, sharpening their bestial tines.
Known variously as the either-or fallacy, the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses or, more colloquially, plain ol’ black and white thinking, the false dilemma is both deceptive and destructive. First, because it lures unsuspecting listeners into a misguided belief that their choices are limited to those offered by the speaker and, second, because it attacks the creative process by which new ideas come to “market,” slamming the door closed on alternative possibilities.
