All politicians know what the Nirvana fallacy is, they know its mendacious condition – it often appears in catalogs of logical fallacies – and yet they make use of it with total lightness. His statement is attributed to Voltaire, who translated an Italian adage that in plain language says: “Often the best is the enemy of the good.” In Spain it is contained in a saying that is the bastion of the most prosaic realism: “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” The fallacy lies in perversely arguing that to achieve the best (one hundred in the air) it is necessary to give up the good (bird in the hand). And that happened yesterday in Congress, which was actually the Senate. But it was not without precedent. Not at all.
In the previous legislature, the most flagrant case was the votes against the labor reform, when groups such as Bildu and ERC cited the absences of the text as justification for their vote against. That is, they agreed with the content of the 52 pages of the norm put to a vote and argued the absence of some platonic pages 53 and 54 (on severance pay) to vote against all that content that, they said, seemed good to them. It is called a fallacy because it contains a lie, which in that case were the reasons given. The truth was that Bildu could not support a text from whose negotiation the Basque unions were excluded and that ERC did not want to give such a political victory to Yolanda Díaz who, as was seen on June 23, enjoys as much or more sympathy than herself. Esquerra in Catalonia.
Another identical case was the failure of the reform of the so-called Gag Law, where the votes against the investiture allies were again based, not on the more than thirty agreed points that the reform contained, but on what it did not contain. The allies voted against 36 points on which they agreed and the reform of the Citizen Security law by PP Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz remains in force.
The drawback of resorting to this mechanism, which we saw again yesterday in the vote on the decree relating to the expansion of unemployment protection, is that it tends to make the true purpose behind the technical discussion transparent. The five former deputies of Sumar – under whose brand they obtained the parliamentary record –, all of them with Podemos cards and integrated today into the mixed group, alleged a “cut” in the protection of unemployed people over 52 years of age to overthrow the decree. The debate about the alleged cut is simple: the decree gradually lowers the subsidy contribution from 125% to 100% of the minimum wage in five years, but the growth path planned and agreed for the minimum wage means that this cut is not such in effective income and in fact represents an increase.
None of that was relevant to the case, since we are talking about a rule whose effects will be seen in 2028 and with it measures in force have been overturned that today improve the unemployment benefits of three quarters of a million unemployed by almost 100 euros per month.
The truth behind the fallacy is transparent: the five Podemos deputies voted in favor of the PSOE decrees and against the only one promoted by the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, against whom they maintain their political pugnacity, which is not programmatic but staff. Life takes no prisoners. In that narrative sphere of politics – now that everything is multiverse and reunions with other versions of oneself in space-time –, yesterday it was necessary to imagine what the radical deputy of the mixed group Ione Belarra would tell him, regarding the modest ambition of the laws he promoted, to the reformist minister Ione Belarra. Or better yet: vice versa.
NOTE: The Scottish engineer and physicist Robert Watson-Watt, who is credited with the invention of radar and whose work was decisive in the Luftwaffe attacks on the United Kingdom during the Second World War, always praised imperfection and provisional solutions, in a very lucid application of the Nirvana fallacy: “Give them the third best option to move forward; the second best option arrives too late. “The best never comes.”
