31 January 2022
According to Hanlon’s Razor, we should
or, according to an equally well-cited version,
Hanlon’s Razor is a heuristic – that is, a mental shortcut that helps us to make decisions, pass judgements or solve problems quickly and efficiently.
We all use heuristics every day, and they save us enormous amounts of mental effort by simplifying what would otherwise be complex decisions or judgements.
For example, I could spend hours scrolling through the endless list of movies on a streaming service, carefully reading every plot summary in order to decide what to watch, or I could use a heuristic such as “If Daniel Day Lewis is in it, it will almost certainly be a great movie, and if Tom Cruise is in it, it will probably be rubbish” to help me narrow down my options.
Hanlon’s razor is a philosophical razor – a type of heuristic which can help us to arrive at better explanations by discounting unnecessarily complex or unlikely explanations.
It is essentially a special case of Occam’s Razor, which advises that explanations involving the least necessary assumptions are more likely to be correct; or in layman’s terms, the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is probably the right one.
Hanlon’s Razor is a method for applying Occam’s Razor to the way we think about other people’s motives. It cautions us against assuming that people who do things that harm us in any way, are deliberately doing so out of bad intent.
Like all heuristics, it has its limits.
My Daniel Day Lewis-good/Tom Cruise-bad heuristic has occasionally led me astray – I know There Will Be Blood is critically acclaimed as a modern cinema masterpiece, but I personally found it as enjoyable as root canal therapy; on the other hand Rain Man and A Few Good Men are eminently watchable (probably despite rather than because Tom Cruise was in them, in my humble opinion; Cruise fans may send me hate mail in the comments section below, if you wish).
Likewise, only a naive fool would assume that everyone whose behaviour harms them is well-intentioned but just doesn’t understand the consequences of their actions.
An article on Hanlon’s Razor provides some good advice on when we should go beyond the heuristic and exercise our critical thinking capacities more fully:
Now, I am more than willing to entertain the possibility that governments and bureaucracies all over the world are populated by profoundly stupid and incompetent people. The Peter Principle – in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence – is real, and it afflicts both the public and private sectors.
However, if incompetence on a truly global scale were the sole explanation for the dumpster fire that is COVID-19 public policy, one would expect that there would have occasionally been a decision that, out of sheer dumb luck, actually happened to have a beneficial effect on the population on which these policies were inflicted.
And if we were all suffering solely from Idiocracy–level bureaucratic and political stupidity, we would expect that
- When the utter uselessness and collateral harms of lockdowns were revealed; and
- When face masks (including cloth, surgical and N95) were shown 167 ways to Sunday to be completely ineffective and harmful at preventing spread of SARS-CoV-2 (as if we needed to be shown this, when every pre-COVID evidence review had already demonstrated their abject failure to prevent the transmission of other respiratory viruses); and
- When school closures were shown to have no benefit in reducing community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and students were found to be less likely to be carrying the virus than their teachers, but keeping kids out of school was demonstrated to inflict on them a multitude of educational, physical and psychological harms; and
- When early outpatient treatment protocols developed by independent doctors, using cheap, easily-obtained nutraceuticals and off-patent pharmaceuticals with a long history of use and a known safety profile, were found to be remarkably effective at keeping vulnerable people out of hospitals and morgues while authorities approved remdesivir (an incredibly expensive drug which can only be administered in hospital settings) despite it being a failed experimental Ebola drug that killed more Ebola victims than the standard-of-care control treatment and despite the World Health Organisation (WHO) specifically recommending against its use because of its ineffectiveness in COVID-19; and
- When experimental COVID-19 injections were not only shown to be ineffective at reducing case rates of COVID-19 and to have led to higher numbers of COVID-related deaths, but also to be clearly harming considerably more people than they benefit; and
- When the WHO stressed that vaccine passports were scientifically unjustifiable because “there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission” – a position that is infinitely stronger since the advent of the Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 which blows straight past vaccine-induced antibodies and is more likely to infect, and be transmitted by, those who have had one or more doses of a COVID-19 injection than those who have had none;
… in short, when the gross, comprehensive ineffectiveness and catastrophic harmfulness of COVID-19 policies was revealed to those who authored and implemented those policies, one would expect that if they were honest (although stupid) brokers, at least a few of them would admit that they screwed up mightily, their “3 point plan to fix everything” just ain’t working, and it’s time to change course:
Instead, we see politicians and “public health experts” doubling down on their failed and harmful policies, and gaslighting the hapless victims of those failed policies.
And if stupidity and incompetence were the sole explanation for the patently absurd biosecurity theatre we’ve all been subjected to for the past two years, how is it that lockdowns, mask wearing, perspex shields, social distancing, vaccine mandates and passports were instituted in most developed (and many developing) nations, at much the same time?
Did the leaders of all these countries just catch the stupid virus from each other? And if so, why didn’t they catch the common sense virus once they realised that while ill with the stupid virus, they had inflicted ruinous harms on their people and national economies whilst achieving precisely zero “control” over the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the illness and death it was causing?
In short, when confronted by unarguable evidence of the utter failure of COVID-19 containment policies in every jurisdiction that has employed them, like this:
… and this:
… and this:
… and this:
and this:
… and this:
… they plough on in the same well-worn furrow, only backtracking when their own political necks are on the chopping block.
No, I simply don’t find it credible that near-identical, and self-evidently nonsensical and ineffective (if not counterproductive) COVID containment policies would be rolled out in culturally, linguistically, ethnically and politically diverse countries all over the world, simply because the policy-makers were all well-intentioned but profoundly stupid and/or spectacularly incompetent.
And if we rule out stupidity and incompetence, according to Hanlon’s Razor, malice is back on the table for consideration.
Furthermore, if what has been done to all of us for the last two years was indeed the product of malice aforethought, we are morally obliged to oppose those malicious policies by engaging in peaceful mass civil disobedience (trucker convoy, anyone?) until they are rolled back, and then hold those who have intentionally harmed us, our loved ones, and all those who cannot speak for themselves, responsible for their crimes against us.
The words that President John F. Kennedy spoke in 1961 are just as true today:
It follows that if these policies were malicious, there is a coherent intent behind them. I have my own theories about what the COVID-19 crisitunity is all about. What are yours? Let me know in the Comments section below.
7 Comments
Nigel B
30/01/2022I would definitely say profit for the medical pharma industry complex, not sure about depopulation maybe, definitely control based on vaccine passports.
If you know the history of Rockefeller Medicine and the Flexenor report etc, I would say it is to perpetuate an industry, inject people with products that will make them sick for years to come so we can sell them additional drugs and products forever into the future.
Robyn Chuter
03/02/2022The Flexner Report indeed laid out the blueprint for the pharmaceutical-medical-industrial complex that we are besieged by today. I first learned about the Flexner Report when I was a first-year naturopathy student.
James Corbett provides his usual well-informed take in several of his productions, https://www.corbettreport.com/?s=flexner+report and https://www.corbettreport.com/rockefeller-medicine-video/
Nigel B
30/01/2022I might add perpetuate the illusion that you people are just waiting around to be infected and get sick and the only thing that will save them is something from the pharma industry.
Robyn Chuter
03/02/2022Yes, it’s a full-spectrum assault on people’s inherent fear of contagion – which seems to be built into our DNA based on studies of the disgust reflex elicited by bodily fluids that are ejected by a sick individual, such as vomit, snot and blood; and the aversive reflex elicited by pathognomic changes that are characteristic of infection, such as swollen eyes and nose – but now weaponised such that people have been trained to fear perfectly healthy-looking individuals as if they are festering swamps of pathogens!
Robyn Chuter
04/02/2022Hey Nigel, I’ve shared my take on what’s going on, at least to some extent, in https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/reader-responses-to-is-hanlons-razor-sharp-enough-for-covid-19/ but I will be laying out my thoughts more fully in a future post.
Nigel B
30/01/2022Selling Sickness
Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the world’s largest drug companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s. It had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people so that Merck could “sell to everyone.” Gadsden’s dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth.
Drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD. When it comes to conditions like high cholesterol or low bone density, being “at risk” is sold as a disease.
Selling Sickness reveals how widening the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt health-care systems all over the world. As more and more of ordinary life becomes medicalized, the industry moves ever closer to Gadsden’s dream: “selling to everyone.”
The inside story of how Big Pharma’s relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits corrupts medical knowledge–misleading doctors, misdirecting American health care, and harming our health.
The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries–yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals.
In this no-holds-barred expose, Dr. John Abramson–one of the foremost experts on the drug industry’s deceptive tactics–combines patient stories with what he learned during many years of serving as an expert in national drug litigation to reveal the tangled web of financial interests at the heart of the dysfunction in our health-care system. For example, one of pharma’s best-kept secrets is that the peer reviewers charged with ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the clinical trial reports published in medical journals do not even have access to complete data and must rely on manufacturer-influenced summaries. Likewise for the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines that define our standards of care.
The result of years of research and privileged access to the inner workings of the U.S. medical-industrial complex, Sickening shines a light on the dark underbelly of American health care–and presents a path toward genuine reform.
Nigel B
31/01/2022I would be interested to hear your theories Robyn, will this be a topic for another article?
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