Trade-offs: a powerful tool of division

Imagine a company wanted to make a charitable donation in your name and were asked to decide between donating to cause X or Y. This could easily (avoiding cynicism, for now) be viewed as a generous act, we appreciate they are just trying to make profits for their investors/shareholders and yet also want to help others.

Replacing government for company, and charitable donation for grant. Does anything change?
Perhaps the target for profit.

Governments were not (idealistically) designed to make profits. They were marketed to the public as facilitators of democracy, and a quasi-democracy has been offered, in the form of trade-offs. Choose between X and Y, choose only one.

Providing us with a limited set of choices is a good way of containing public demands. We do have choices we can make, albeit restricted ones. Our preferences of one option over the other can have an influence on decisions made by higher powers. When we have expectations that the government has a limited amount to give, we are more grateful for any show of this. We limit our dreams through our rationality, and reduce our demands in line with this.

We signal a lack of gratitude for their generosity through our indifference between two options, and we recognise that we importance to politicians diminishes as we become less active with our vote. We learn to choose one if and when we can.

With time, it becomes easier to choose. The history of choices made will guide your current choices. Trust can be built and trust can be broken. The past helps to form our expectations of the future.

There are cycles of empathy and disgust for groups, egged on by media and social influences. In simplifying the good guys and the bad, choices are made with ease.

The sets of choices we are given determine who is not on our side. Old turn against young, female against male, educated against non-educated. When one side gains, the other side loses. The trade-off turns two groups to face eachother, and the more powerful prevails.

We are easily divided by restrictions on our choices, but there are divisions that are occur less often. For example, the elderly against middle class home-owners; students and pro-Europeans. Similar voting patterns and mutual support make it more difficult to divide within.

Some groups are set against eachother, the combinations are determined by how easy it is and how strategically beneficial it is.

It's them vs us. Them being subject to how different their choices are to ours, and us subject to the difficulty of division.