Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

There are times when I ask if my situation was caused by one of two shortcomings. Neither answer is pleasing. Then I move on to ask why I am in such an unsatisfactory situation.

A couple decades ago, I heard a statement about explaining a bad situation. One paraphrase of the statement is:

They aren’t mean, they’re just stupid.

According to this Wikipedia article, this statement is called Hanlon’s Razor, which is:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Wikipedia explains that there are several sources of similar statements that go back to the 1700s. I have little doubt that if someone did further research they could find this statement in ancient times.

Whatever the original source, the thought explains much of human behavior and many of our bad situations. Someone did something, and now we are in a mess. Why? What caused the mess? Here are three questions that I have asked in my experience. If I dwelt on my past enough, I can find more, similar questions.

1. Was the person lying (no one would be so stupid, so they must be lying to cover their actions) or were they actually that stupid?
2. Was the person hiding information or are they incompetent when it comes to displaying information?
3. Did the person not know how to do something or did they simply not care to do it correctly?

I find these questions to be the title of this post – the Lesser Of Two Evil or LOTE. There are two evils here, which one is lesser? Is it not as bad to be working with a stupid person rather than a deceptive person? I can excuse stupidity as there are many things for which I am stupid. Hence, stupid is less evil than deception, yet it is still an “evil.”

I then find myself asking LOTE meta questions. Some of these meta questions are:

1. Why am I in a situation where I have to find the lesser of two evils?
2. Do I want to spend my life with people who are either stupid or lying?
3. Do I have another choice of where I can be?

Let’s narrow the circumstances to illuminate the situation and the meta questions. I work with college students who are writing papers. These are ignorant people. They are not stupid; they can learn, but there are important things they haven’t learned yet. Notice that ignorance is not mentioned in any of the variations of Hanlon’s Razor.

Working with ignorant people is not a LOTE situation. The LOTE situations are ones where the people involved should know what they are doing. Their resume, their circumstances, their position declares that they do know better or should know better or must know better. For some reason, however, they either don’t know better or they do know better and choose to do less.

Hence, I ask myself:

Do I want to spend my short life with people who are either plagued by one shortcoming or plagued by another shortcoming?

Will the world be better if I spend my short life with people who are plagued by neither shortcoming?