Kang: Abortions for all!
Crowd: Booo!
Kang: All right, then. No abortions for anyone!
Crowd: Booo!
Kang: Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!
Crowd: Yaaay!
He considers all enthusiasm as a degree of madness, particularly to be guarded against by young minds; and believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.
—William Hazlitt, "On Common-Place Critics"
Most people know that there are two sides to every issue: their side, and the wrong side. Authors (and people in general) who subscribe to the
Golden Mean Fallacy have another outlook. They believe that there are in fact three sides: the side of the complete morons to the left of them, the side of the complete morons to the right of them, and their own side, which combines the good points of each in sublime harmony while avoiding all the bad. If one position is argued to be superior
solely because it is in the middle then this is the
logical fallacy of
Argument to Moderation
.
The
Golden Mean Fallacy is turning both sides of an argument into
Strawman Politicals and declaring that the only sensible approach is to take the middle road. There is a number of benefits to this - you avoid offending either side too much since they can each take comfort in the fact that their enemies get just as ridiculed as them, you get to come off as a sensible person who thinks for yourself and doesn't blindly follow any one party line, and you get twice as many people to insult and make fun of.
Another handy (and sneaky) thing with this method is that you don't actually have to be very moderate to use it. A
Strawman Political is by definition hideously more extreme and unreasonable than any position in real life, so there is nothing stopping you from presenting a horrific parody of one side of the issue, then presenting a horrific parody of the other side of the issue, and finally presenting your own actual opinions as a moderate option. It will look very sane and reasonable in comparison, even if in
Real Life it would be considered quite extremist. In fact, you can take this one step further: present a horrific parody of your own opinions and the
unmodified opinions of those who oppose you; now not only is your actual opinion the sane and reasonable compromise, but your political enemies are irrational extremists! Is it any wonder this fallacy is so popular in politics?
The technique is known among American political strategists as
the Overton Window.
Note that this is different from the author just
pointing out the flaws in both sides of an argument and
never revealing where they themself stand - this trope is when the author claims that there really is a path that is completely good, right and perfect, simply because it's right smack in between the other two. And of course, sometimes an option somewhere in between two polar oppositions really
is the better option; however, this doesn't mean that the middle option is
always the best option, or that this better option will fall squarely in the exact middle without favouring one or the other of the opposites even slightly.
People trying to enforce the
Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement on this very wiki often invoke this trope, most often intentionally.
Compare
Stupid Neutral. Contrast with
Take A Third Option.
Examples:
Literature
Web Comics
Western Animation
- The Simpsons does this a lot. Admittedly, it might be mostly because they live in such a Crapsack World that any idea, plan or policy is almost by definition horrendously flawed, but the writers still want to offer some kind of uplifting moral at the end of the episode.
- See the above quote from a Treehouse of Horror episode in which Kang and Kodos run for president disguised as Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.
- Also demonstrated in the episode, 'Bart Gets An Elephant'. During Stampy's rampage, he stomps through two political conventions, one Democrat and one Republican. The Democratic convention has banners reading 'We Hate Life, And Ourselves' and 'We Can't Govern'. In comparison, the banners in the Republican convention read 'We Want What's Worst For Everyone' and 'We're Just Plain Evil'.
- The episode where Lisa goes vegetarian tries to pull this at the last minute.
- South Park is like a much worse version of The Simpsons in this. Many episodes consist of exaggerated mockery of one or both sides on an issue until at the end someone makes a speech presenting some wishy-washy solution everyone accepts as perfect. We should have sex education... but at home, because teachers (as opposed to parents) may be unqualified to give it, and because it just feels like such a personal thing. We shouldn't scare our kids about drugs - we just need to tell them drugs can make them "dull" so they won't use them. (The latter probably has an unintended point in that some in the know claim young people do drugs because they're made to sound so dangerous and interesting. But that doesn't mean the whole issue is swept away by a simple line like that.)
Live Action TV
- Law And Order sometimes falls into this, with the creators admitting that their show has likely pissed off people on both sides of the aisle at some point. One notable example would be "Talking Points," which opened with someone firing on an Ann Coulter stand-in who was painted as a bigoted harridan... but then the shooter turned out to be a stem cell research advocate who was afraid that his endeavors were being poisoned by her rhetoric. <shakes head sadly>
- The West Wing, unusually for a political show, subverts this. Since it's about the President, there's plenty of compromise, but not because it's better; it's just what can get passed by an opposing Congress. And it's not unheard-of for one side to win. The merits of moderation were a matter of some heated debate in one episode:
Josh: If we had a bench full of moderates in '54, Separate But Equal would still be on the books, and this place would still have two sets of drinking fountains.
Toby: Moderate means temperate, it means responsible. It means thoughtful.
Josh: It means cautious. It means unimaginative.
Toby: It means being more concerned about making decisions than about making history.
Josh: Is that really the greatest tragedy in the world, that we nominated somebody who made an impression instead of some second-rate crowd pleaser?
Toby: The ability... The ability to see both sides of an argument is not the hallmark of an inferior intellect.
Josh: What about the vast arenas of debate a moderate won't even address? A mind like Lang? Let them pick a conservative with a mind like Justice Brady had. You can hate his position, but he was a visionary. He blew the whole thing open. He changed the whole argument...
- They manage, with some finagling, to get one liberal judge and one conservative judge to balance each other out, as opposed to the one moderate judge that they were arguing over. This allows for both positions to be represented while not having to settle for "moderation."
Newspaper Comics
- In one strip of The Boondocks, George W. Bush says (paraphrased from memory), "On one hand, Colin Powell supports affirmative action. On the other hand, Condoleezza Rice favors the death penalty for anyone who teaches a black person to read. So I figure that keeping black people out of college is good enough." (You have to expect this sort of thing from the comic.)
Table Top Games
- Most attempts at justifying True Neutral characters in more realistic settings.
- It would appear that WOTC wised up on this one: True Neutral is now defined as either people dedicated to maintaining a balance (druids who switch sides in the middle of a battle, for instance), or people who aren't devoted to a particular ideal of law/chaos or good/evil. In other words, normal people, even when it borders on apathy.
- It has also been boiled down to "just let me do my friggin' job".
Real Life
- Some people consider this a problem with modern journalism: to appear "objective", many reporters and commentators will interview both sides of an issue and avoid as much as possible indicating that one side is demonstrably in error.
- A lot of people found Martin Luther King Jr. threatening... Until they started listening to Malcolm X. Malcolm X pointed this out himself.
- I was once laughed at when I asked a member of my University's student run union group if they actually expected their demands to be met. "Of course not, it's so the actual unions aren't the fanatics."
