In this same cartography of self-deception, the Fallacy of Confusing Wishes with Reality emerges, studied by contemporary biophysics under the concept of Wishful thinking. In this state of intellectual confusion, the subject exclusively considers the prognoses favorable to his appetite and deliberately suppresses any adverse probability from the calculation. Neuroscience reveals here the presence of an uncontrolled peak of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens that clouds the anticipatory judgment of the prefrontal cortex; the mind becomes intoxicated with a dream of success that replaces empirical evidence with sentimental complacency. Classical history offers an eternal parable in the figure of the sovereign Croesus of Lydia, who, dazzled by his ambition for conquest, consulted the oracle of Delphi about the convenience of going to war against the Persians; Upon receiving as his answer the prophecy that his campaign would destroy a great empire, his desire hijacked his synderesis and he interpreted the phrase as the infallible promise of his triumph, omitting to ask which empire would perish, only to discover in the ruin of his own throne that he had been a victim of his own vanity. This same fragility inspires pedagogical fables about milky daydreams that end with the jug shattered on the road.

The catalog of deception takes on edges of intellectual coercion when we examine the Fallacies of False Dilemma and False Disjunction. Formal logic recognizes the legitimacy of the disjunctive argument only when the horns of the dilemma are rigorously exhaustive - without there being a conceivable alternative outside of them - and exclusive - without their concurrence being possible. However, the malicious arguer imprisons the listener's judgment by building an illusory grip that forces them to choose between two caricatured extremes, deliberately hiding the middle ways, the prudential synthesis or the complementarity of partial truths. From the economy of cerebral attention, binary and polarized reasoning offers the temptation of minimal metabolic effort; Pondering nuances, degrees and conciliatory solutions demands an expenditure of cognitive energy that the mind excited by urgency refuses to pay.

Social analysis exhibits clear examples of this dialectical strangulation. Proposing in a humanitarian crisis that an oppressed population only has before it the dilemma of perishing in its homeland or being massacred in the border country constitutes a false dilemma when the existence of neighboring territories capable of providing asylum is omitted. In Hispanic political philosophy, Juan Donoso Cortés dramatically illustrated this tension when he questioned the modern tendency to reduce all conflict in the social order to the ultimate dilemma between religion and revolutions, showing how times of profound crisis tend to erase in the collective consciousness the vast territory of republican restraint that mediates between anarchy and tyranny. In the everyday political forum, this stratagem is summarized in totalitarian dichotomies of the tenor of those who proclaim that the only alternative to their government is the chaos of national dissolution, forcing the citizen to choose between unconditional submission and the abyss. The duty of the upright journalist and the philosopher is to open the third way, fracture the false dualism and demonstrate that the preservation of freedom and order, or of industry and nature, do not constitute exclusive poles but rather harmonious obligations.