Hollywood movies about the mafia often portrait threats, intimidation and extortion. In those movies, criminals attempt to extort money from the victims by putting them in front of a false dichotomy. The victims are given the choice of paying for fake insurance or having their shop burned down.
At the end of those movies, the victims, or at least some of them, refuse to accept the false dichotomy and choose instead to get rid of the threat. The story will seldom end well for the criminals who had tried to impose a false dichotomy on other people.
In philosophy, we are also faced with false dichotomies, but their negative impact goes beyond extortion or racketeering. In some cases, the reverberations of a false dichotomy can cause damage for centuries.
Why is the damage so extensive? Because the victims lack the intellectual capacity to see the swindle underlying the false dichotomy. They are not sophisticated enough to realise that they are being cheated, anaesthetized and dispossessed.
Socrates stands at the root of some extremely harmful false dichotomies. The silence of philosophy and history professors has given those false dichotomies a patina of respectability.
An intellectual trap
In order to immunize ourselves from those intellectual traps, we need to understand the gaps in their logic, and the vested interests that keep presenting them as legitimate and virtuous.
According to Plato’s “Crito,” Socrates argued that “it’s better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.” We find a derived statement in Plato’s “Apology,” where Socrates affirms that “it is always wrong to do wrong,” but “Crito” is the original source from the false dichotomy.
What is the context for Socrates’ argument? His friend Crito was trying to convince him to flee Athens. Crito knew of some people that he could pay off to let Socrates escape and get out of Athens.
If Socrates had said yes, he would have escaped the lethal consequences of the trial. Instead, he rejected Crito’s proposal, and opted for staying put and preparing for the worst.
Why did Socrates reject the possibility of escape? Because, in his eyes, escaping would undermine the laws of Athens and Athens’ long-term survival as a whole.
Thus, he preferred to endure the negative consequences of a wrongful judicial decision rather than weaken Athens’ judicial system. What would happen, he argued, if everybody starts to question its legitimacy and enforceability?
Crito listened to Socrates compare the alternatives, stay put or escape, but failed to voice an obvious objection. Why was Socrates conflating those alternatives with “to suffer wrong or do wrong”?
The arguments recorded in Plato’s “Crito” are exaggeratedly one-sided. They give the impression that Socrates had lost the will to live and was just looking for excuses to commit suicide.
Or that Socrates was enjoying so intensely to stand in the limelight that he was willing to kill himself just to increase his fame in posterity.
Crito should have contested the categorization of escaping as “doing wrong.” Surely, the life of a prestigious philosopher was worth more than paying allegiance to Athenian laws and judicial procedures. Socrates’ trial had already revealed those as inadequate, arbitrary and despotic.
It was also far-fetched for Socrates to argue that, if he chose to escape, he would be endangering Athens’ survival. Why did Crito not jump at that fuzzy statement? His silence only served to give credence to Socrates’ false dichotomy.
I view the idea that people should endure injustice in silence as a major philosophical error. It’s an open door to perpetuating and expanding all sorts of mistreatment. Unfortunately, neither Crito nor Plato took upon themselves to refute Socrates’ error.
In real life, it is as bad to do wrong as to suffer wrong, and we should steer away from both. Socrates did not consider the third alternative: to live peacefully and harmoniously, without suffering wrong or doing wrong.
Nothing is something
To make things worse, Plato also created the grounds for attributing to Socrates a harmful paradox, namely, the idea that knowing nothing constitutes a form of wisdom.
Countless philosophy books quote Socrates as saying that “I only know that I know nothing” although this formulation does not correspond to the wording in Plato’s “Apology.”
What Plato’s “Apology” says is that, by acknowledging his ignorance in a certain area, Socrates was displaying more wisdom than people who claim to possess knowledge that they don’t.
Unfortunately, repeated actions and omissions have turned this statement into the belief that ignorance means wisdom, and that wisdom can be demonstrated through ignorance.
I would primarily blame Plato for the transition from Socrates’ original words reported in the “Apology” to a false paradox. Why blame Plato? Because the false paradox rests on similar quotes from his other works.
For instance, in “Cratylus,” Socrates affirms that he knows nothing about the gods, but then engages into a debate about the gods’ names. In “Parmenides,” Socrates also acknowledges his ignorance about the divine matters during an interlude in his discussion of the theory of the forms.
In “Lesser Hippias,” Socrates claims once more that he knows nothing, but in this case, he is employing ignorance as a rhetorical device to incite Hippias to prove his knowledge.
In view of all those quotations from Plato, it is no wonder that numerous people today believe that Socrates had regarded ignorance as a form of wisdom.
If we put together the false dichotomy (“it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong”) with the false paradox (“ignorance is a form of wisdom”), a key question emerges: How much of what we know about Socrates is polluted by contradictions and doctrinal accommodations?