Would you swallow the blue pill or the red pill?
The blue pill returns you to the invisible prison that is your artificially simulated reality, whereas the red pill allows you to discover the truth of your enslavement by the machines. Have you ever wondered why you only have two pills to choose between? If you buy a pack of chocolate M&Ms you also get brown, green, yellow, and orange options.
In a famous poem, Robert Frost described his moment of choice between two paths in a wood, knowing that he might never pass that way again he surmised that the choice he was about to make would later seem to him to have made all the difference. Did he never consider the possibility that he could reject both paths, and make his own, new track through the woods? In the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote a famous book, Either/Or, in which he compared two approaches to the conduct of life, one primarily aesthetic the other ethical. Is there not a third way? And not just a third but, perhaps, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh way to live. What is the attraction of binary choices? In part, for the decision maker, choices become quicker and easier for there are only two option to consider. Our bodies and our language normalise this way of thinking: on the one hand, on the other hand. In part, however, the binary structure allows the person who is presenting our choices to us, to seek to persuade us to do something we might otherwise be reluctant to do, by making the alternative highly unattractive. There is significant rhetorical force in the design of a false dichotomy.
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