The ‘All-or-Nothing Fallacy’ of Polarised Politics

Political discussions are too often misdirected, intentionally or otherwise, to fall down the hole of the All-or-Nothing Fallacy.

Here are just a few examples:
• You either punish every accused (innocent or not) so not a single guilty one will get away, or you may as well let every guilty person go free.
• You either pay everyone the same, or you leave pay differences alone.
• You either distrust everything connected with law enforcement agencies, or deem those agencies as totally beyond reproach.
• You either condone all verbal attacks on practices carried out in the name of religion, or you forbid them all without exception.
• You either impose rules on people without them having any say, or you have to allow them to do as they please.
• You either back every proposed armed intervention against foreign targets, or you are unreservedly against the military establishment.

There are countless more such examples to be found in heated arguments or coldly calculated propaganda. Isolated in their bare form, they are easy to spot, but fired off in the midst of claims and counter-claims, they can imperceptibly trap the unsuspecting into one corner or another.

The underlying problem is that nuanced analysis has been marginalised as ‘fence sitting’, ‘lack of assertiveness’, or even ‘muddled thinking’. Having ADS (attention deficit syndrome) at a societal level means that in public debates and private conversations there is now considerable peer pressure to respond to simplistic depictions of political issues, not by challenging them and setting out the variety of possible solutions, but by seizing one of the extreme options with dogmatic gusto.

Those of us involved in political education can play a part in tackling this problem in at least four ways. First, we can make explicit the false dichotomies every time some form of All-or-Nothing Fallacy is slipped into a political discussion. Secondly, we can promote the approach of cooperative problem-solving that has evolved from the deliberations of many leading thinkers and practitioners as a highly reliable way to explore contested issues and resolve disagreement (see: ‘Cooperative Problem-Solving: the key to a reciprocal society’). Thirdly, we can raise wider awareness that while debating may help to develop certain skills and serve to formulate a few relevant arguments, it is a mistake to focus on it as ‘the’ format for exchanging and examining political ideas. In many cases, it merely reinforces the misleading impression that a complex issue can be reduced to a crude ‘either/or’, and that one must back one or the other without assessing other options.

Last but not least, we should sustain a critique of the routine polarisation of policy options deployed by many in the media. Instead of assuming every problem is to be dealt with by some All-or-Nothing proposal with proponents divided into opposite camps, news editors and presenters should learn to facilitate cooperative enquiries where the solution comes from more sophisticated exploration of what on balance may achieve the desired outcomes more effectively than other variants. Commentators may achieve more by being tasked with working out shared positions rather than just goaded into attacking each other [1].

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[1] This is not to say that some issues should not be tackled by cross-examination by opposing sides, or by a narrowly focused investigation. But only another invocation of an All-or-Nothing Fallacy would suggest that such techniques are never to be used if they are not always used.