I feel like there is a certain comfort in believing in malevolence. To think that some cabal of conniving overlords is plotting the slow erosion of our freedoms makes a kind of grim sense. It gives the chaos a villain. It offers a familiar storyline. And most importantly, it gives us someone to hate.
There is something deliciously satisfying about hatred when it feels earned, when it’s directed toward the unmistakably powerful. But lately, I’ve begun to suspect that even that is giving them too much credit.
Helen’s Razor (never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity) is not a new idea, but it has been chewing at the inside of my mind with renewed ferocity. Like a hamster on a squeaky wheel, it just keeps spinning. And every news headline, every policy blunder, every tone-deaf soundbite only feeds the notion that we’re not necessarily being sabotaged by Bond villains with laser pens. We’re being herded toward the cliff by buffoons who think they’re on the freeway.
This is not to excuse the harm. Let’s be clear: real people suffer. Entire communities are bled dry. Forests burn. Rivers shrink. Entire generations inherit the consequences. But the architects of these disasters are not always wicked masterminds in expensive suits. Most of the time, they’re just sheltered, average people who confuse being born lucky with being smart. They think getting ahead early means they’re geniuses, and they treat making money like it’s the same thing as doing something worthwhile.
Even when their actions appear obviously cruel, even when they strip rights or gut institutions or make laughably short-sighted economic decisions, they do so not necessarily because they are evil, but because they are (as my grandmother would say) “not quite right in the head.”
Not stupid in the way of someone struggling with math or forgetting where they parked. No, this is a cultivated, willful stupidity. The kind that comes from decades of surrounding oneself with yes-men and scented air and unchallenged assumptions. It is the stupidity of those who no longer need to learn anything because they believe they’ve already won.
Still, there is a part of me that resists this conclusion. I want the world to be broken on purpose. I want the surveillance and the manipulation and the greed to be part of some grand, coordinated plan. Because if someone planned all of this, then maybe, maybe, we could appeal to their reason or at least break their grip. But if it’s all just happening because nobody in power is thinking more than six months ahead, then what we’re dealing with is a slowly collapsing house whose owners are too stupid to notice the rot in the foundation. And that is somehow worse.
There’s also the question of complicity. Because if we keep saying “they’re just stupid,” we risk absolving them. And let’s be honest, stupidity in the halls of power is not innocent. It’s the kind of stupidity that kills people, bankrupts countries, and destroys futures. It’s not the village idiot stumbling into a bakery and knocking over a tray of muffins. It’s a man in a tailored suit misreading a climate report, shrugging, and signing away the planet’s lungs.
Helen’s Razor, in its clean little slice of logic, removes the conspiracy and leaves only the farce. But farce, in enough concentration, becomes tragedy. And maybe that’s the hardest truth to sit with. That our world may not be dying at the hands of the wicked, but simply at the hands of the profoundly unwise.
So what are we to do with that? I don’t know. Maybe wisdom begins when we stop mistaking power for competence. Maybe change doesn’t begin with outrage but with insight. And maybe survival, at this point, depends not on defeating evil masterminds but on metaphorically outflanking a very stupid system before it collapses under its own idiocy.
At the end of the day, perhaps the most important act is to stay aware, to think clearly, and to refuse to let stupidity, whether ours or theirs, have the final word.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.