Dispatch #35
🌹 Æsop’s Nettle
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
A razor cuts (in this case, between two alternatives). We may find ourselves missing a point in the story we tell ourselves about malice and incompetence, particularly as malice blinds our eyes.
Æsop’s Nettle: Never (mis)interpret the intentions of a mitigation based on a (fictional) antecedent.
It has become extremely common on social media to reason from stories, particularly movies or popular fiction like Harry Potter. This serves as a convenient shorthand for formulating teams and rhetorical lines of attack.
After all, what is narrative but the vehicle of our meaningmaking? This becomes pathological, however, when the fictional frame skews one’s ability to engage with the facts of reality (hyperrealism, Dispatch #22). Unæsthetically, one twists a metaphor; worse, one risks missing the true situation by engaging with a fantasy.
We tell ourselves stories about who we are and how we are. If our behaviors are misaligned in ego-dystonic ways, we experience destructive distress which leads either to an update on beliefs and stories (unlikely); a change in behavior (agential); or far more likely lasting cognitive dissonance.
Stories can be our augmentation, however. If “an institution is a sustained collective fiction” (Dispatch #18), then organizations are mecha suits allow us to behave in ways that without that common story would not be feasible to us.
Use story for motivation and magnification, but not distortion of the reality you face. In particular, the next time you are challenged to take a side by the first-strike framing of the legacy media or social media (this week, on Elon Musk vs. Donald Trump), your assignment is to first consider whether there are any circumstances under which the behaviors of the principals would make sense. Do not appeal to either malice or incompetence: assume goodwill, assume competence, and then grasp the nettle.
This is the first examination of The Extellıgencer. You are equipped to obtain a passing grade and reach the next secret (also a razor).