…you still have made a choice ~Rush
Does anyone remember Choose Your Own Adventure novels? These books were:
- A series of wildly popular 1980’s pre-teen books of extremely poor literary merit and quality (I should know as I read plenty of them)
- The foundation of the gamebook genre, allowing the reader to choose their path through a book with a series of decisions for the main character with different page destinations
- A gateway drug for D&D (at least in my case)
- The very first inkling of what would become text adventure video games – AKA interactive fiction (you have been eaten by a Grue!) — which would eventually turn into the world of adventure / role play video gaming we have today
Let’s imagine that you are sitting in your study / parlor / sitting room reading one of these books (and no doubt thinking ‘why were these ever popular?’). Suddenly you hear a knock at the door…
If you decide to answer the door, continue reading.
If you decide to ignore the door, well you can’t because the knocking just continues and what are you antisocial? Don’t you care about the world?
This is known as a Hobson’s choice by the way. The illusion that you have an option when you don’t really have one or when the other option is entirely unhelpful or pointless.
You answer the door and it’s an hunched old lady with grey hair and a grey shawl and two wicker baskets. Each basket is filled with a different selection of food.
“You must choose one of these baskets,” she says, “and whichever you choose, you need to eat every bite.”
This is what’s called a forced choice in both data collection and stage magic. There’s not an option here to ask additional questions or slam the door in her face (you’ve read fairy tales, you’ve watched Disney, you aren’t falling for this!) or to just say “yeah, thanks but no thanks crazy old lady.”
You look more closely at the baskets and notice that in each basket are healthy fresh foods and nasty rotten foods. But you need to eat the whole basket, which would surely be gross and possibly make you very ill…
Welcome to the psychological concept of illusion of choice, because the decision itself is based on a logical fallacy (why should I need to accept the whole basket?). In fact, the baskets each have many different good and bad things in them and you might be standing there trying to do this very complex math like “will the moldy orange be worse than the moldy cheese, digestively speaking?” This is related to the paradox of choice, where too many options or options that are two complex make us less happy and satisfied with what we do choose (even when none of the options will give you diarrhea, paradox of choice is mostly about good choices).
Next, the crazy old lady produces a couple of thin waifish children from under her skirts. “Whichever basket you do not choose will be fed to one of these children. Which child will eat (the good food and the rotten) and which will go hungry?”
Great, now we’ve reached Sophie’s choice, a choice where every option is ethically or morally problematic, including not deciding at all. If you slam the door now, both children will eat but both will be ill from the bad food (or maybe they both go hungry, the old lady doesn’t seem like a very good guardian). So you get to feel bad no matter what you do.
“Shit Ivy,” I can hear you thinking, “why’d you have to do that? That sucked!”
I know right? Shitty forced choices that are stressful and confusing while not really being much of a choice at all and that will somehow hurt other people no matter what position you take.
So let’s pull a Choose Your Own Adventure style reset and start again…
Knock knock
“You must choose one of these baskets, and whichever you choose, you need to eat every bite. Whichever basket you do not choose will be fed to one of these children. Which child will eat (the good food and the rotten) and which will go hungry?”
You give the old bat a shove and knock her crazy ass right off your porch. Then you and the children collect the healthy food for dinner and pelt the old bitch with her own rotten produce.
There, that’s better.
Whenever you are pressed to choose, you first have to ask whether it’s really a choice at all. It’s no choice for children who are hungry or ill or who are being murdered by guns and bombs.
Whenever someone insists that your choice comes with everything in the basket, stop and think whether that even makes sense? Maybe I want a different basket, one filled with love and hope and freedom (and like some nice muffins and jelly) where we throw out the rotten stuff entirely so no one has to eat it.
When someone insists that you have to pick a side (because if you don’t then you’re somehow complacent or “the terrorists win” or you’re actually just a baby killing Nazi yourself)… maybe instead you say “fuck you and your fake ‘sides’ and your shitty baskets — I’m on the side of every person of every faith and race and creed who doesn’t want war and has never set out to hurt or oppress anyone and just wants to live their lives and be with their families and have their little gardens and pet their kitty in front of the fire after a long day. And I’m against the side with the guns and the bombs and the locks and the barbed wire and the civilian casualties (also known as murdered people) no matter what writing is on the bullets and which god the soldiers pray to before they kill people.”
The fact that this coalition of everyone who doesn’t want to hurt anyone is somehow illegitimate or not an option is crap. It’s crap when we in the US have to pick a political party (which doddering old mental patient and their cruel, greedy handlers should I choose?) and it’s even more crap when we’re supposed to pick a side in a war (“well, he started it!” is such a lame excuse for killing people).
I’m not playing that game. I choose peace and I choose love. I’m tossing those shitty books with their terrible options in the fire (Choose Your Own Adventure: American Hegemony was particularly bad). I’m packing my own basket and making my own decisions.
Note: My basket currently includes a donation to Save the Children, which I share here not to brag but to both put my money where my mouth is, and to encourage you to do the same if you can.
