National Post (National Edition)
There’s no conspiracy, just a mental and psychological disposition to believe certain ideas that are stupid and dangerous.
If you’ve been spending even more time online than usual you’ll have encountered so many conspiracy theories you might be thinking they’re out to get you. And if two months of quarantine also has you needing some grooming, consider a shave with Hanlon’s Razor. Or mine.
The former says “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” And it arose in context of, yes, a COVID conspiracy theory.
Like many aphorisms, it has a murky provenance. Remember Lincoln’s wise maxim “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” (No really; you can Google it.) In 1941 a character in Robert Heinlein’s Logic of Empire said “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” Yet somehow Hanlon got there first later, submitting it to a joke book published in 1980. Sci-fi is like that.
At any rate, it’s not surprising that it’s been floating around for a while because it’s an important concept. Indeed, though I first stumbled over it on May 10, I have long had my own version that has singularly failed to become a meme: “Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.”
I frequently find myself telling people who think Justin Trudeau or some such person is engaged in a deep plot against our freedom, decency and so on not to suppose someone might be seamlessly planning, executing and concealing a massive conspiracy who is plainly incapable of organizing a brawl in a saloon. And quoting Susan Sontag’s “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”
There’s a weird arrogance to conspiracy theories. Including thinking your adversaries must be plotting because nobody could actually disagree with you. But here’s where my razor crosses Hanlon’s.
It seems to me that there is a certain form of stupidity that is driven by unpleasant habits of thought. But it’s not conspiratorial. On the contrary, it proves the power of ideas for good or ill.
When I say stupidity I don’t mean the garden-variety low IQ sort. People like Lenin embraced moral rather than mental stupidity with demented cleverness. And I’m reluctant to call it wilful blindness lest we get a kindergarten “I know you are but what am I” over who’s an “ideologue” who “won’t see facts.”
On the contrary, another of my maxims is that there’s nothing wrong with being ideological as long as you choose carefully. Just as when someone says they’re being “philosophical” about things I need to know which philosophy before tendering congratulations or letting them get behind me.
Certain kinds of ideas, generally involving dragging our fellows to paradise in chains, or to the cemetery, do close their eyes to the humanity of individual people. Generally with a smugness often grounded in real apprehension of their talents that poisons their judgment.
Such ideas, ideologies, philosophies or paradigms routinely accomplish the disastrous opposite of what they claim to seek. And at some point when people keep adopting them something sinister is going on. Maybe in 1870 or 1920 Marxism could be an honest mistake. But not in 1955 and certainly not in 1980.
True, Bolshevism had a conspiratorial aspect. High-ranking Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko cited a “familiar joke … that Lenin’s Bolsheviks went underground at the end of the last century and have never come out — even after they seized power.” They even gave us the world’s first “secret police,” the “Cheka,” whose very existence was secret (unlike the Gestapo modelled on it). And the Chinese Politburo is plotting against us, right down to bot networks spreading coronavirus misinformation.
There are plots in this world. But contra Dan Brown, they are rarely successful or secret. The Chinese government’s desire to stuff Xi Jinping “thought” down all our throats is as public as the Bolshevik desire for world revolution. When they proclaim it openly and we ignore it, they’re not hiding the truth. We are.
As for the quarantine, with its looming economic and fiscal disaster, there are many people excited by government bossing us around while conjuring endless quantities of free money into existence without that tedious private sector or constitutional checks and balances. But there’s no conspiracy, just a mental and psychological disposition to believe certain ideas that are stupid and dangerous.
Let me be blunt. Trudeau is having fun. And it’s not clean fun. As Rex Murphy wrote Tuesday, “Canada is now governed from a cottage doorway. The safeguards of oversight, procedures and protocols of parliamentary democracy have been simply switched off.” But Hanlon’s Razor can’t cut through this mess, because there’s both malice and stupidity.
Robson’s Razor can. It’s not a plot. It’s a very bad mindset. And it needs a trim far more urgently than you or I do.
THERE’S A WEIRD ARROGANCE TO CONSPIRACY THEORIES.