Glenn Beck said:
Our nation is split, and not just in half — we are shattered. Build a wall vs. don’t build a wall. Gay marriage vs. traditional marriage. The cops are all good vs. the cops are all bad. Black vs. white. Guns vs. no guns. Black lives matter vs. Blue lives matter. And of course, both sides feel they are 100% in the right. There is no grey. There are no shades. “You must be wrong. Why? Because I am right.”
The issue here is not just the division. Yes, we appear to be divided, because we’ve been convinced that these us vs. them situations are true dichotomies. Some of them are, some of them simply aren’t.
These things don’t have to be all one way or all the other way. We can recognize that some cops are bad, because there’s always some bad people. Just because they wear a badge doesn’t immunize them against corruption — the power afforded by the badge sometimes causes the corruption. But it doesn’t have to, and usually doesn’t. Gay marriage and traditional marriage are not a dichotomy. They’re treated as one, and many would try to convince you that it is, but it’s not.
It’s been a mainstay talking point of the anti-rights activists that “gun nuts want everyone to have guns.” This is the central thesis of the guns vs. no guns false dichotomy, along with the equally-false premise that “more guns equals more violence”. Those premises form the backbone of the “get rid of the guns” argument, and establish the guns or no guns dichotomy. Except it’s not true. “Gun nuts” don’t want everybody to have guns. They want everyone who wants a gun to be able to have one, which is not the same thing. We have an inherent right to protect our own life because we are alive. This implies that we have a concomitant right to the tools necessary to secure our lives. But we get to choose the tools we feel appropriate for us as individuals. Not everybody wants a gun, but the Constitution guarantees that if we do want one, we can have one. Wanting to maintain the guarantee that we can own guns is not the same thing as demanding that everyone must have guns. It’s not an all-or-nothing binary condition, and it is a lie to frame it as a dichotomy in the first place.
Gay marriage does not invalidate or destroy traditional marriage. It doesn’t actually threaten straight marriage at all. Straight people can continue to get married and there’s no barrier to it. The problem was when there was no barrier to straight marriage, but was a barrier to gay marriage. I get that some people don’t like gay marriage, but that’s not a reason to ban it. That couple’s gay marriage doesn’t affect your marriage. Or, if it does, you’ve probably got bigger problems. Why could it hurt your marriage? Is it making you doubt your own sexuality? Did you feel that you settled for a straight marriage, back when you got married? Might you have preferred a different one, if given the choice? That’s not the problem of the gays who want to get married. That is your problem with how you see yourself and your own situation. They didn’t do anything to you. It’s not a true dichotomy. If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t have one. Marry someone of the opposite sex instead, if that’s what you like. Their gay marriage is not an attack on your straight marriage.
Black lives matter vs. Blue lives matter is not a true dichotomy, because both of them are supposed to matter. A cynical point of view might say that, since life is inherently unfair, and that we’re all going to die someday, that neither actually matter, in the long run. They matter because we say they matter. Our lives matter to us. The only dichotomy is the false one claiming that for black lives to matter, blue lives can’t matter — or the converse, the false claim being made that cops feel that because blue lives matter, black lives don’t. It’s a false narrative, propaganda being fed to us that these things are dichotomies, that you can only have one or the other, not both…and not neither. Both blue and black lives matter. No one actually said that one or the other didn’t. The claim that saying all lives matter is “erasing” black lives’ importance is pure propaganda and a lie. When someone says “all lives matter” they aren’t saying that black people are not part of the “all”. They’re saying that black lives are part of the all, and do matter. The claims of “erasure” are being promulgated by those who want to maintain the dichotomy to perpetuate the division to forward their own agenda.
I can hear the screams now, about “systematic racism” and “white privilege”. Those are Kafkatraps. These claims present a logical trap from which you can’t exonerate yourself if you acknowledge the validity of the trap in the first place. They’re a Catch-22. If you acknowledge the authority of the trapper, there’s no way to prove your innocence. (For more about Kafkatrapping, visit http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122 where the term is defined.)
Build a wall, or don’t build a wall. Well, from a physical point of view, you can’t have a wall and not have one at the same time, that’s simple Aristotelian logic, either-or. A wall either is, or it isn’t. But we can have a social wall, even if we don’t have a physical wall. The law defines a line across which a person is acting against the interests of the society that made the law. It’s the point beyond which you are considered a criminal to be negatively sanctioned, vs. the law-abiding, who are positively sanctioned. Laws do not make bad acts impossible; they do not actively protect anyone from anything. It is only in the enforcement of the law that any redress is made for the bad acts of individuals. We could build a metaphorical wall, by enforcing the laws we have. We can make metaphorical gates in our metaphorical wall, by examining and reforming the portions of the law that allow certain individuals to come in lawfully.
The secondary false dichotomy — we can’t enforce the immigration laws because we “can’t deport x million people” — is a clear fallacy. We can deport them. Just not all en masse. It’s like the old saw, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” We could deport the illegal aliens we catch. We’re simply not doing it. We could revise our metaphorical wall to keep them out once we do. We could even build a better physical wall, at least in some places that need it most, such as where the worst depredations upon our citizenry are occurring. And we can extend our metaphorical wall by blocking the reasons why people are violating the border; we can repeal or reform the drug laws so one of the largest reasons for the intrusion is removed, by removing the economic advantage of the drug trade.
I do have to agree with Beck here. We do need to unite. We need to break down the false dichotomies, because all of these can exist together. The claim that it’s one or the other is simply a lie. We don’t have to see all of these things as either-or situations if we don’t want to. We’ve been lied to and told that we must see this as an either-or thing where none actually exists. If we break down the false dichotomies, we can unite. The lies are the only thing actually holding us apart in the first place.
