Is Hanlon's Razor sharp enough for COVID-19?

According to Hanlon’s Razor, we should

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

Robert J. Hanlon

or, according to an equally well-cited version,

“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

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:

“When in doubt about whether an action is malicious or simply driven by unawareness, it may be helpful to ask yourself questions such as: Has this person been told they shouldn’t do this before? Does their behavior change when they are corrected? Do they otherwise treat me with respect?”

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:

(Chart by Ian Miller)

… and this:

(Chart by Ian Miller)

… and this:

(Chart by Ian Miller)

… and this:

(Chart by Ian Miller)

… and this:

(Chart by Ian Miller)

… and this:

(Chart by Ian Miller)

… 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:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women, I would add] to do nothing.”

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.