http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoldenMeanFallacy

Kang: [disguised as Bob Dole] Abortions for all!

Crowd: Booo!

Kang: Very well. No abortions for anyone!

Crowd: Booo!

Kang: Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!

Crowd: Yaaay! The Simpsons [disguised as Bob Dole] Abortions for all!Booo!Very well. No abortions for anyone!Booo!Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!Yaaay!

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Most people feel certain 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 Golden Mean Fallacy, aka "Argument to Moderation." It's also sometimes called the Gray Fallacy, between black and white options.

The fallacy is not merely saying that compromise between opposing viewpoints is good. It is saying that extreme solutions are never reasonable or correct, and the correct solution can always be found in the middle. For example: some say cyanide is a lethal and dangerous poison and should never be consumed. The opposite position would be that cyanide is nutritious and beneficial to your health and should be consumed frequently. The golden mean fallacy would state that cyanide should therefore be consumed in moderation.

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The Golden Mean Fallacy is turning both sides of an argument into Strawman Politicals and declaring that the only sensible "realist" 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 much ridicule; you get to come off as a sensible person who thinks for oneself and doesn't blindly follow any one party line; and you get twice as many people to insult and make fun of. The downside is when one side is so objectively unreasonable (see the above cyanide example) that ceding any ground to it makes you look crazy.

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 more extreme and unreasonable than any position in Real Life,note Poe's Law notwithstanding 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. Another way of looking at it is by invoking The Horseshoe Effect: if the people on each extreme have more in common with each other than they do with the people in the centre, than the centre starts to look a lot more favourable.

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The technique is known among American political strategists as the Overton Window.

A few notes about this trope: it does not mean giving equal weight to two opposing viewpoints, when in reality one is far more credible than the other. That is called "False Equivalency". It is also not saying that moderate compromises are always wrong. Sometimes an option somewhere in between two polar opposites really is the best choice; this trope is when the author claims the best choice must be found in the middle. In other words, it is the opposite of the False Dichotomy, or Take a Third Option turned up to 11. In conclusion, use neither the False Dichotomy nor the Golden Mean Fallacy, but reason somewhere in the middle.

Compare Stupid Neutral. Contrast with Take a Third Option and Both Sides Have a Point. Named for Aristotle's concept of virtue, which presented the golden mean as the excellent ideal of behavior. Obviously, he didn't consider it a fallacy. Aristotle's golden mean also often did lean slightly towards excess or deficiency, rather than being precisely in the middle, and varied from situation to situation; he himself made it clear that he was not espousing a purely mathematical mean between two extremes, but rather a moral best course of action that the "extremes" were defined in contradistinction to. However, he also said that some actions were so bad that they could never be justified, let alone be made to appear moderate.

Please also note that the conflict need not have a right or wrong side in order to be this. For example, a conflict between two foods for dinner could result in a truly disgusting "compromise" dish. So long as the viewpoints are incapable of compromise, in that any compromise is at least as bad as either side, anybody who tries to claim compromise is always right will be guilty of this fallacy.

Compare and contrast with Intolerable Tolerance and Culture Justifies Anything, which commit the same fallacy from the opposite direction: saying that everyone is right instead of that everyone is wrong.

See also Contempt Crossfire, when the person in the middle is viewed as a Category Traitor / The Fundamentalist by his/the opposite side respectively.

Examples:

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Comic Books

Ex Machina: This comic is actually pretty fair, even charitable, in its representations of both sides of a political argument. It's the positioning of protagonist Mitchell Hundred as between both political parties that occasionally invokes this trope.

Knightfall: Jean-Paul Valley tried to apply this logic - and failed miserably - when he temporarily became Batman after Bane broke Bruce Wayne's back. Having been brainwashed as a child by his father into believing that the radical Roman Catholic sect they belonged to demanded that evildoers be slaughtered by "avenging angels", Valley experiences a Heroic BSoD when, as Batman, he finds a serial killer at his mercy (hanging by one hand over a vat full of molten steel in a foundry) and is tormented by visions of both his late father and the medieval French saint, Dumas, who founded their breakaway movement. The elder Valley demands that his son shoot his blades at the killer so that he will fall into the vat, while St. Dumas insists that he must save anyone in danger, no matter how reprehensible they are. Unable to reach a decision, Jean-Paul finally screams: "I choose neither one!" The inevitable result is that the murderer eventually loses his grip and falls to his death - which is even worse than it would first appear, since the murderer had to be kept alive so that Batman could find his most recent victim, who'd been placed in a sadistic torture device, with the result that the victim died too.

Comic Strips

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.)

In one strip of Get Fuzzy, Bucky built a robot designed to be the most moderate Presidential candidate ever, with a hodgepodge of backgrounds, friendly demeanor, and spouting quotes like "my father shared your job and/or ethnicity!" However, Rob breaks the robot when he asks it the first controversial issue he can think of: "Don't you need to raise taxes to pay for TheWarOnTerror?", causing it to explode from a Logic Bomb.

Ruthlessly mocked in a Dilbert strip. Dilbert asks his boss whether a project's budget should be $100,000 or $25,000. The Boss cited the wisdom of "Wise King Salmon" by "splitting the difference" and giving him $50,000. Dilbert concludes: "Fish are stupid."

Fanfiction

The Harry Potter fic Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation has an argument between Harry, Ron and Hermione about what should happen to the Malfoys in the wake of Voldemort's defeat. Harry wants them pardoned since they switched sides at the last minute, while Ron thinks they should essentially be tortured to death because he doesn't like them. Hermione, who is the POV character of the story and is just generally shown in a far more flattering light than the other two, is the one who wants the Malfoys to pay for their crimes, but only to a suitable degree and after a fair trial.

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Puppet Shows

Team America: World Police epitomizes this as far as Americans are concerned. Conservatives are "dicks" who are so aggressive that they cause as much harm as good, while liberals are "pussies" who are too wimpy to get anything done in the first place, but sometimes have to stop the "dicks" from going too far (of course, neither of these characterizations are necessarily correct, but never mind). Unlike South Park, which often has a character find the golden mean, the film contrasts both opposing viewpoints with "assholes" (like terrorists or the movie's Big Bad, Kim Jong-Il) who make the "dicks" necessary.

Religion and Folklore

The Bible: Subverted in the Judgment of Solomon from the Old Testament. Two women each claim to be a boy's mother. Solomon cannot tell who is lying, so he declares that he will cut the baby in half and give each woman her "share". The boy's true mother gives up her claim so that the child lives, which reveals who truly loved him. Subverted in that Solomon never intended this as a legitimate solution but only a trap to catch out the liar, leading to the phrase "splitting the baby" when someone destroys the subject of a dispute rather than assign it to one party.

A Japanese folktale invokes this: Two hungry cats are arguing over two rice cakes — one large, one small — and take their dispute to a sage. The sage decides that the only way to solve the argument is to eat part of the large rice cake so they are the same size, but he intentionally takes a too-large bite so that he subsequently has to take a bite of the other rice cake to equalize them again. He does this until both are gone, ultimately saying "there, now you're both equally dissatisfied." By giving a solution that is equally distasteful to both parties, the sage was giving An Aesop about greed and envy.

C.S. Lewis' famous trilemma was a response to this, namely the position that one could believe in the Bible but deny the divinity of Jesus, to avoid the "extremes" of orthodox Christianity and atheism. Lewis points out that this doesn't make sense, because in the Bible, Jesus claims and acts consistent with divinity, meaning that if you want to accept the Bible and deny Jesus' divinity, you have to either claim that Jesus was delusional or that he was lying. Some have criticized this trilemma on the basis that Jesus could simply have been genuinely mistaken about his divinity or that the Gospels were simply fictional, but Lewis' response was that taking this position still requires one to both deny the veracity of the Bible and deny the divinity of Christ, meaning that it's still an all-or-nothing proposition.

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons: The True Neutral alignment, which started out as people who are dedicated to maintaining balance, to the point that they'll switch sides in the middle of battle. Druids had this alignment the most. True Neutral changed to what Absolute Neutral (or just "Neutral") used to be: people with no strong convictions toward any side of good or evil and law or chaos. Creatures without intelligence and people with profound apathy would have this alignment. Fourth Edition calls this "Unaligned."

Video Games

Web Comics

Web Original

Parodied: No matter what the issue, JP Nickel gives you... Both Sides!!! note For those not wanting to YouTube — the issue discussed is: Eyeglasses vs Stabbing Yourself With a Steak Knife.

Discussed in this Angry Aussie video, as an argument when discussing creationists' arguments against evolution.

Angry Aussie video, as an argument when discussing creationists' arguments against evolution. Parodied in a Scientific American April Fool's joke : Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts.

: Parodied with the The Onion article "Government Admits It Was Only Behind Destruction of North Tower " in which the American government DID bomb the north tower, only for a random suicide plane to crash into the south tower.

" in which the American government DID bomb the north tower, only for a random suicide plane to crash into the south tower. Reddit Parodied in r/dirtbagcenter , which is generally centrists making fun of themselves by embracing the Golden Mean Fallacy or insisting that two sides of a debate are exactly the same. Played straight in r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM , which is a more left-leaning subreddit than r/dirtbagcenter which uses the fallacy to make fun of centrists.

CGP Grey discussed in his video on Brexit how the UK government could do a semi-Brexit by entering the EEA, would would leave both sides - unhappy. The only people who'd win would be the politicians who'd manage to avoid a political shitstorm. Grey: Nothing Brexit voters actually cared about would change: Immigration, EU membership fees and binding EU laws, all this would remain the same. The only thing different would be the UK giving up all her representatives in the EU Parliament, so she would have zero influence on EU law she would still have to follow, which is not something pro-EU voters probably wanted either.

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. Lampshaded in the episode in which Homer gets his jaw wired shut. In the middle of a long story about the old days, Grandpa says: "Then after World War Two, it got kinda quiet, 'til Superman challenged FDR to a race around the world. FDR beat him by a furlong, or so the comic books would have you believe. The truth lies somewhere in between..." And then there's the debacle with the children of Springfield trying to figure out why all the adults had disappeared from the streets after Grampa started selling his aphrodisiac, with them all proposing different sinister actors behind this and arguing over them, prompting Milhouse to wind up including them all with another reason for it: Milhouse: Ahem. OK, here's what we've got: the Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires, are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner.

South Park uses this trope a lot to deliver its message. Strawman Politicals from both sides clash and make the problem worse, until someone delivers a final speech concluding that neither side is correct. For example, we shouldn't support the Boy Scouts' decision to exclude membership to gays, but we also shouldn't ban the organization because they should be free to exclude people who bring up their orientation (since it's not in line with the organization's moral code, in that it should only be discussed outside of their groups) in their own institution. Other times however, the solutions have been highly unconvincing compromises presented as perfect for everyone, giving rise to complaints that the makers try to force the trope. Through the show's many seasons, however, they have lampshaded and subverted the common formula a number of times: The episode on gay marriage, for example, parodied this trope by having a politician offer a "compromise" solution in which gay people could get all the legal benefits of marriage, but instead of using traditionally straights-only terms like "marriage," "married," and "husband and wife," they would be called "butt buddies". Much like in Real Life, no one was particularly pleased. An attempt at having a golden means solution, which shows just how fallacious this trope really is, appears in the episode "I'm a Little Bit Country." Half of the town opposes the war in Iraq, while the other half supports it. After going back in time and meeting the founding fathers, Cartman believes he has the right answer. He says that America needs the pro-war people to support America's wars so America looks like a strong country, but we also need the anti-war people to oppose these wars so America looks like a compassionate country. Both sides are happy with this answer, because it basically means the war will continue, and the anti-war crowd gets to continue protesting.

Futurama made fun of this at the end of one episode, where Bender states the moral he learned: "I'll never be too good or too evil ever again, I'll just be me."

"Do you think you could be a little less evil?"

"I don't know, Leela. Do you think you could survive a 600-foot fall?"

American Dad! has one episode where Stan and Francine argue over how to raise Steve, with Stan preferring strict discipline and Francine preferring a hands-off approach. To determine who's right, Stan has Steve cloned and each of them will raise one how they see fit. This results in Stevearino (the clone) becoming a crazy cat killer due to Stan's overbearing rules while Francine's coddling devolves the original Steve into a spoiled brat who does nothing but sit on the couch and eat junk food. At the end of the episode, they realize that Steve needs both of them to parent him so he balances out.

Real Life

Other

Rational Wiki covers this under Balance fallacy .

. Fark "independents" (read: Republicans) use the fallacy so much, it has its own initialism: BSABSVR. (Both Sides Are Bad, So Vote Republican.)

There's a joke (or riddle, or witticism; take your pick) asking whether half a Cute Kitten is a compromise between all of a kitten and no kitten at all. The answer is no, it's not at all cute and indeed more horrible than either of the other two, because it's a kitten bloodily sawed in half.

Another joke goes: Should we drive on the right side of the road or the left? Let's compromise, and all drive in the middle!