Or are they basically the same? Thank you for any help.
In: Other
In a Hobson’s choice, you don’t actually have a choice at all. At best, there’s a “right” choice and a “wrong” choice. Like, if I offer you $1000, or I punch you in the face, that’s not *really* a choice at all, because nobody wants to get punched in the face. The Wikipedia article describes the “choice” that women faced about getting married. If they *didn’t* get married, then they had zero job opportunities, zero chance of higher education, and zero chance of being able to support themselves and remain independent. So, although they could, theoretically, choose not to get married, it was such an awful option that it wasn’t *really* an option at all.
In a Catch-22, you do have a choice, and both options are more or less equal…they just both lead to the same outcome. The actual “Catch-22” from the novel is that pilots could be taken off active duty if they were deemed “unfit” by way of insanity. However, if you expressed any desire to be taken off active duty, it meant that you feared for your life, which showed that you were not insane. So the choice is: be sane, and therefore be fit for active duty and be sent out (and possibly die); or, be insane and have no fear of death, and therefore you would not ask to be taken off of active duty, so you would be sent out (and possibly die). The choice is still there – sanity or insanity – but the outcome is the same.
They are similar enough, though, that the difference is mostly pedantry. They’re *basically* the same thing.
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