🧨 The False Choices That Are Killing Progress

By Christian Pace

In the fight against animal cruelty and exploitation, climate collapse, climate injustice, racial injustice, and systemic inequality, one of the most insidious obstacles isn’t denial or apathy—it’s the seductive simplicity of false binaries.

We’re told we must choose between champagne for a few or water for all. Between free speech or safety. Between climate action or economic growth. These zero-sum framings are not just intellectually lazy—they’re actively harmful. They flatten complex systems into moral ultimatums, bulldoze through nuance and insult human intelligence and in doing so, they fracture coalitions, alienate allies, and obscure the very mechanisms needed for change.

Consider, for example, the debate around consumption of animal products. Too often, it is framed as a stark choice: either you consume animal products, or you don’t. But that is an impossible binary for many people based on access, culture, or circumstance, and it needlessly excludes them from participation in solutions that actually deliver greater improvements in animal welfare than simply adopting a vegan diet. By recognising a spectrum of approaches—such as supporting ethical farming, advancing humane treatment, or reducing consumption where possible—we open the door to progress that is measurable, practical and inclusive, rather than shutting out potential allies with rigid purity tests.

🧠 False Binaries Are Not Strategy—They’re Sabotage

Zero-sum rhetoric thrives on outrage and fuels division. It offers the illusion of moral clarity: if you’re not with us, you’re against us. But real-world systems are not binary. Climate justice, for example, isn’t about punishing the rich to save the planet—it’s about redesigning infrastructure, energy, and economics so that everyone can thrive. Framing it as a war between “the elite” and “the people” literally repeats the sentiment of the rich who stand to loose gains and ignores the fact that many frontline communities need both systemic reform and investment, not just redistribution.

Similarly, in racial and gender justice movements, the idea that progress for one group must come at the expense of another fuels backlash and division. It plays directly into the hands of those who benefit from the status quo by making solidarity feel like surrender. If scales represented the balance we aim to get to, we should focus on lifting the falling side rather than burdening the rising side.

🧩 Complexity Is Not the Enemy

The world is complex. That’s not a flaw—it’s a feature we need to get used to accepting and embracing. Effective activism embraces nuance. It recognizes that climate change, racism, and sexism are not isolated issues but interlocking systems. Addressing them requires intersectional thinking, not ideological purity tests packaged in sound bites.

When we reduce these issues to simplistic binaries, we lose the ability to build broad, resilient coalitions. We alienate those who might otherwise be allies. We turn potential collaborators into targets of moral suspicion. Worst of all, the undoing of any progress becomes inevitable. Take the local example for stray cats. The binaries have taken three shapes;

1) whether you feed strays, 2) whether you rescue strays, and 3) whether you are participating in a cat TNR scheme,

with no real room for nuance. This clashes with evidence-based advocacy. Feeding increases reproductive rates and thus exacerbates the welfare issue of stray cats but the moment you bring the subject up, it's met with aggressive resistance and you are labelled as a cat hater. Withdrawing yourself from cat TNR scheme makes you somewhat of a pariah, even though the schemes are designed to fail at the expense of cat welfare as well as the taxes or donor contributions. Bad schemes are defunding projects that would be effective without burdening cats with unnecessary exposure to disease, unnecessary whelping and unnecessary captivity. Rescuing feral cats into an adoption service totally ignores their ethological needs that are equivalent to wild animals. We seem to agree that tigers and leapards do not belong in cages, but cannot afford the same widespread empathy towards feral cats. Why? I believe it is because we have allowed to oversimplification of complex matters in the public sphere with these binary moral tests that have no real relevance.

Walking away from harmful systems is still a meaningful choice available to everyone though.

🔥 The Cost of Rhetorical Purity

The most dangerous thing about false binaries is that they feel righteous. They offer clarity in a chaotic world. But clarity without accuracy is propaganda. And propaganda, even in service of a good cause, corrodes trust.

We’ve seen this play out in climate discourse that pits “degrowth” against “green capitalism” as if no hybrid or transitional models exist. We’ve seen it in social justice spaces where disagreement is treated as betrayal. These dynamics don’t just stall progress—they make it easier for bad actors to discredit the entire movement.

🛠️ What We Need Instead

We need framework solutions that benefit one group that do not come at the cost of another. We need systemic shift away from scapegoating and focus on structure, to include rather than exclude, able to withstand disagreement without dehumanising retaliations. We need solutions that respect nuance and evidence.

The work ahead is not about choosing between water for all and champagne for the few because the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s about building a world where everyone has clean water—and where joy, abundance, and celebration are not privileges, but possibilities.

False binaries are easy. Justice is hard. Let’s choose the hard thing. Let’s choose the right thing.