Recently I have been more aware of people's approach to making a 'correct choice', and consequentially I've been more conscious of the negative effects it can have. It is human nature to want to make the best decision because the best decision is the one that has the best results, but all too often we encounter situations where no decision will have very good results, or even more optimistically no decision will have much of an impact at all, and yet we fight for the best one any way.
A lot of politics is plagued with this 'good choice fallacy' as I'm calling it from here on out. When facing a scenario in which you must decide which is the least bad option it may have once been possible to achieve a good outcome, but the wrong selections in the past have resulted in this current lose / lose situation.
When faced with the horrible fact that there is no clean way out it is tempting to believe that not making a decision is itself a decision, and all too often this is simply not true. Inaction, whilst occasionally useful, is often not appropriate in real life. One must simply commit to something and move forward. Taking an overused soap opera plot, if you have just witnessed a crime the 'right' decision is to obviously report it. However, this doesn't seem like the 'good choice' because it may put you at risk, and so the temptation is to do nothing. This is the worse decision, just in case you really haven't watched many movies or T.V. shows.
It's easy to write this down in black and white and perhaps you'll read it and the biggest criticism will be that I needn't have stated the obvious. Unfortunately you only need look around to see how often this problem plagues our lives and how rarely people are willing to confront it head on and endure the consequences of resolving it in one of the many only crappy ways that were available.