Fait Accompli: Dilemmas Visualised in Minimal Design

Do I wash the dishes or do I eat the rice with a knife?

When you are given the choice of tea or coffee, all’s well in the world. However, if you are told to choose between a stick and a brick, without a chance to listen about the corresponding carrots and bouquets, what do you choose? How would you even go about it? That’s a plain fucking dilemma! Kaale fu kaandre fu. Nature has been kind enough to give us a power to reason and use logic but sometimes life is not fair.

It is also considered as getting hit by hailstones while your head is shaven in my native idiom; referring to our ritual of shaving heads when someone in the family passes away.

Fortunately, you can ignore the tea and coffee and ‘take’ the juice out of everything. Simple: just collect all the popular dilemmas and create a dozen of posters—so that instead of being on the horns of a dilemma, literally, enjoy a design ride with the wings on Photoshop.

For many wise folks, these dilemmas are a rhetorical device. With an IQ of Tarzan in the town, I would prefer using the image editing software to delving into the matter that has now been extended to trilemmas and tetralemmas and polylemmas. When did ‘two’ become not enough?!

Here’s the list:

 

The list includes:

 

• Chicken or egg
• Double bind
• Ethical dilemma
• Extortion
• Fairness dilemma
• Hobson’s choice
• Morton’s fork
• Prisoner’s dilemma
• Samaritan’s dilemma
• Sophie’s choice
• Traveller’s dilemma
• Zugzwang

PS:  

Maibam Iboton, a noted Mathematician, has taken the matter one step forward. He says, according to logic, there are two types of dilemmas: (i) constructive and (ii) destructive. However, these are entirely different from facing the worldly predicament of two possibilities and neither of which is unambiguously acceptable or preferable.

1.    Constructive dilemmas
(If X, then Y) and (If W, then Z) ► X or W ► therefore Y or Z
2.    Destructive dilemmas
(If X, then Y) and (If W, then Z) ► Not Y or not Z ► therefore, not X or not W