Stupidity is the one power that human beings possess in unlimited quantities. Stupidity is limitless. We can always count on ourselves and others to do something stupid and we will always look back on our past actions as stupid simply because we possess information and insight now that we didn’t possess when we made the decision.
Never assign to malice what can be explained through stupidity. If you think someone is being malicious or even conspiring to be malicious, it’s far more likely that they’re simply ignorant or just have a completely different perspective from you.
The majority of the world’s problems could be solved if we just considered this fact for a few moments every time we decide to go to war with someone, either on the individual, daily level or on the global level.
The vast majority of what passes for conspiracy theories can be explained this way. What most people see as a vast organized effort to control the population are actually behaviors based on ignorance.
Take the conspiracy that the “establishment” is trying to keep the population dumb, distracted, and drugged to control everyone and eliminate resistance.
It’s true that most entertainment and advertising media caters to a below-average level of intelligence which brings down the intellectual caliber of the entire industry.
The publishing industry does this. The standard target for all forms of written publication is to target the language to a sixth grade reading level. Writers deliberately eliminate large, complex vocabulary words. The writer breaks down Ideas into smaller, more accessible pieces that readers with lower education levels can still understand.
It’s true that this brings down the intellectual caliber of the whole industry, but we can explain this phenomenon much more effectively than by assuming that some vast conspiratorial plan is directing us to do this.
It’s much more likely that writers and publishers alike are doing this because the reading level of the majority of the audience really is lower.
It makes more sense to interpret the phenomenon as the industry giving the audience what people want. The same goes for movies, TV, and advertising. These forms of media target the audience’s actual intellectual and education level, not what we hope it would be.
The algorithms of various internet media platforms curate and modify what we see and consume based on what we see and consume. These algorithms do limit our contact with anything intellectually challenging, but they do it because that’s what we consume. That’s what we continue to look to consume.
We aren’t interested in anything other than that. Most of us consume this media in order to stop thinking—not to have our intellects challenged.
We can apply the same logic to other people’s behavior. It makes much more sense to believe that another driver who cut us off in traffic was distracted, made a momentary error in judgment, or simply didn’t see us. It makes no sense at all to assume that he is generally a bad person or that he deliberately went out of his way to cut us off.
Other people don’t think about us enough to concoct any grand conspiracy to control or oppress us. The oppressive regimes of history were built on the actions of thousands of extremely ignorant people who were easily manipulated into doing things without regard to the consequences.
No one is out there planning to take over your life. That’s just arrogant and self-centered. Everyone in the world has much more important things to think about than what you do, what you think, what you read, and who you vote for. You aren’t that important to anyone other than yourself.
There’s another conspiracy theory going around that the world’s mega-corporations and media giants purchase our internet traffic data and use the information to track our movements, interests, affiliations, and political leanings.
It is true that these companies purchase our data, but do you honestly believe that Google or Amazon or Microsoft has assigned a team of technicians and investigators to sift through your personal life to find out everything about you? No one has the time or money for that.
They use this data on a macro scale to find trends in the entire society. These corporations make marketing, sales, and product development decisions based on these trends—not on what any particular individual is doing.
We’re talking about a massive trove of information from literally billions of people. Every single individual person whose data makes up that trove disappears in the deluge of all the other information. These corporations don’t look at individuals. The corporations ignore everyone who doesn’t follow the trend.
You make yourself much more visible by trying to remove yourself from the flow of information. If you really want to disappear, the most effective way to do it is stay invisible within the system and simply act counter to the trends sweeping the rest of society.
Take the vaccination debate. Those in favor of vaccination see those who are against it as maliciously subversive in their attempts to undermine society. Those who are against vaccination view those in favor of vaccination of pushing a controlling agenda to poison the population to line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and their friends.
Both sides suffer under their own unique set of logical fallacies. Each side is incapable of seeing these fallacies because they’re too close to their own argument. What each side sees as self-evident is actually the foundation of the other side’s argument against them.
The same goes for the debate about whether God exists or not. The atheists insist that they’re basing their arguments on pure reason and logic. They’re unable to see their own logical fallacies or where their own arguments break down.
The number of people in the world who are actually acting out of malice is a tiny fraction compared to the ignorant, the misinformed, or those who have come to a different conclusion based on the same set of information.
One of the worst logical fallacies out there is the notion that you can look at the result of a person’s actions and infer their intentions from the outcome. This is quite possibly the most dangerous logical fallacy there is. We all know perfectly well that our actions often have unintended consequences we didn’t see ahead of time.
It’s far more likely that the person idealized the outcome, ignored or didn’t see the warning signs ahead of time, and got a very different outcome from the one they intended. There is no logical reason to think that we intended every outcome that we got. We all know this isn’t true. We each only have to look at the course of our own lives to see the evidence of this.
None of us would want anyone to apply that standard to us, so we shouldn’t apply it to others. If I didn’t see that car in my blind spot and accidentally cut someone off, I could be yelling, “Sorry!” through the window until the cows come home.
I wouldn’t want the other person to assume I did it on purpose to put him in danger or to make him mad. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We would all be a lot happier and less stressed if we remembered this. I highly doubt anyone is out there plotting your demise, sifting through your personal information, or planning to control you. If they are, those people are in the microscopic minority compared to the people who aren’t thinking about you at all.
These people just want to live their lives. If their paths accidentally cross yours in an unexpected or unpleasant way, then this is what we call life. It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean the person is bad or mean or wrong or controlling or malicious. It means they’re human just like you are.
I’m quite sure your path is crossing others in unexpected and unpleasant ways. You wouldn’t want them to see you as bad or mean or wrong or controlling or malicious. They deserve the same consideration.
_______________
All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.