Hanlon's Razor - Television Tropes & Idioms

A corollary to Finagle's Law which seems to have almost infinite applications in writing comedy:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

For a bit more information, see this entry

in the Hacker's Jargon File.

Ignorance of Hanlon's Razor is one of the more common forms of Genre Blindness.

Disregarding Hanlon's Razor is a prerequisite for plots involving an Ancient Conspiracy, Government Conspiracy or similar antagonist. The existence of a powerful, secretive and malicious cabal makes for juicier storytelling than the idea that bad things just happen when people don't do their jobs properly.

Most aversions involve someone saying that the noise you heard was just the wind.

Granted, it does have a corollary of sorts, Grey's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

This law relies on the assumption that ignorance in and of itself isn't malicious.

Not to be confused with Occams Razor. See also No Delays For The Wicked.

Examples:

Anime

In Code Geass, this trope explains: 1) Why Clovis ends up fearing that the Emperor will consider him to be disloyal if he finds out about C.C., despite Bartley's indication later on that they had no traitorous intentions against the crown. 2) Lelouch and his role in what happens with Euphemia around episode 22. Even if he's a mastermind, he was still dumb in this case. 3) Suzaku and his role in what happens when Lelouch gets captured by Schneizel and Kanon after his allegedly "private" meeting with Suzaku.

Film

Almost certainly the unleashing of the Rage virus in 28 Days Later. The scientist directly told the Animal Wrongs Group that the chimps were both infected and highly contagious. If they had actually listened to him, the Zombie Apocalypse probably wouldn't have happened.
- Well, maybe if he'd actually, you know, explained this, instead of just calling it "rage" and leaving it at that...which makes this an even bigger example of this trope, come to think of it.
  - In which case, the activists really should have paused until they got an explaination. But in short, the entire development of the rage virus and its release can basically be summed up with this trope, where everyone involved was an idiot.
  - I doubt many activists would spare any time for a scientist they considered to be an amoral criminal. And I doubt many scientists would be collected enough to give a coherent explanation to a group of large men armed with blunt objects.
In Cube, the left-wing doctor's assumption that the Cube is part of some maniacal government plot is immediately shot down by the revelation that it's just a white-elephant porkbelly boondoggle that no bureaucrat had the cojones to pull the plug on. Which, once the truth sinks in, she admits is actually worse.
- Unfortunately, the sequels reveal that the government in question is a hypersadistic theocracy and military dictatorship, ruining the whole thing.
  - There is only one sequel and it reveals nothing of the sort. Theories != fact
  - There are two sequels, the second of which centers around the guards of the cube complex as they monitor the prisoners. We just like to think there was only one.
Both versions of The Day The Earth Stood Still have Klaatu admonish humans for being irresponsible, not outright malicious.

Literature

Robert A Heinlein's novella "The Logic of Empire" brings this up as two characters discuss how slavery and its equivalents are allowed to exist even though it's both immoral and economically self-defeating. One character says that it's a product of deliberate malice, and the other replies, "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."
- See the Jargon entry, "Hanlon" may well have come from "Heinlein".
Touched on in The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The fandom of A Series Of Unfortunate Events has frequently suspected that many of the useless adults in the books are working for the villains or otherwise involved in the Ancient Conspiracy of V.F.D. More likely, if they have any involvement in the conspiracies, they are clueless pawns whose selfishness and stupidity is exploited through Xanatos Gambits.
- If it's based on exploiting their various individual character flaws, wouldn't that make it more of a Batman Gambit, rather than a Xanatos Gambit?
- This is possibly a deconstruction, as many of the orphans' guardians (at least early in the series) are confirmed or strongly implied to be members of the V.F.D. on one side of the schism or the other. Even with this background knowledge, though, they still manage to be woefully ignorant of and/or inept at dealing with Olaf's schemes.
Black Beauty discusses this; after the teenage Joe Green's ignorant handling of a delicate situation nearly kills the titular horse, one character tries to defend him on the basis that he didn't mean any harm, but another responds harshly that ignorance has caused more far more evil in the world than actual malice.
There's a fairly large section of the Harry Potter fan community that could stand to learn from this trope and apply it to their interpretation of Professor Dumbledore's actions over the course of the series; Your Mileage May Vary, but most of the crap Harry has to put up with could just as easily be a result of Albus merely being painfully Genre Blind and a poor judge of character, rather than some sort of cross between David Xanatos and Gendo Ikari.
- It also applies to pretty much every other adult in the series. Even in the first book, where the magical world is shown as wondrous, many of the adults' actions are disturbing. (Snape is verbally abusive. McGonagall barely speaks to the children she is given charge of. Hagrid causes serious disfigurement to Dudley and sends students alone into the Forbidden Forest looking for dangerous predators.)

Live Action TV

This trope is in no way related to a scene in Oz where Nikolai Stanislofsky kills Richie Hanlon in the shower with a razor hidden in his mouth.
Invoked on That '70s Show when Charlie sees Kitty naked. Kelso advises him to walk in on Red naked: that way, Red will think he's an idiot rather than a pervert. It backfires when he accidentally walks in on Kitty naked again.
Both subverted and played straight on Better Off Ted. While Veridian Dynamics are indeed involved in projects of dubious moral character (killer pumpkins, the bunny that will "snuggle" everyone within a 5 mile radius, etc.), nearly every bad company policy or consumer product is "usually" done without any intentional malice. The episode Racial Sensitivity is probably the best invocation of the trope.
Veronica (after complaints about the separate water fountains for black employees): Okay, they realize it didn't work. Although there's a lot of fighting upstairs about whether it was the idea or the execution.
On The Daily Show, the reason for a seemingly hypocritical omission by the Fox News Channel was debated: Wyatt Cenac and John Oliver representing "Team Evil" and "Team Stupid", respectively.

Tabletop Games

Paranoia. As deadly as the world of Alpha Complex is, the real threats aren't those out to get you, but the whole incompetency of the system. The computer wants to help you, not kill you, but unfortunately it isn't able to do that properly. Shortsightedness, competing interests, and general incompetence destroy the world. Except, of course, when someone out to get you is the bigger threat. Paranoia inverts this and plays it straight simultaneously.
Double-whammy in Warhammer 40000: on the one hand, your homeworld may be left to the predations of mind-shattering horrors simply because someone in the Imperial bureaucracy misfiled something and forgot your planet existed. On the other hand, if they did remember they might order your world destroyed anyway because you've had contact with the aforementioned gribbly monsters. In this setting there is malice and stupidity in abundance, which helps the body count climb ever higher.
- Inverse Hanlon's Razor still applies too, regarding the Emperor's treatment of his sons, which ended up resulting in the crapsackiness of the setting.

Theater

Romeo And Juliet.
Hamlet.
- There's malice in plenty here, but nobody is fully in control of their schemes.
Damn near every comedy of manners.

Video Games

The Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil series appears to be a generic Evil Corporation, what with its using the T-Virus to experiment and attempt to create biological weapons. More often than not, the constant outbreaks of Zombie plagues are the result of massive stupidity and recklessness, rather than a deliberate desire to kill everybody.
- Technically, they thought they were working on something that could bring people back from the dead — the fact that it wasn't 100% effective (didn't bring the recipients back completely right) didn't mean it didn't look golden on paper. You can't tell me real-life medical companies wouldn't jump at the chance to perfect an immortality/resurrection formula.
  - Sure they would. Of course, any company worth its salt would realize that zombifying their own customer base isn't a viable long-term business strategy.
  - Technically, that would depend on whether the mindless zombies still have disposable income.
  - The actual outbreaks might be more the result of accidents, but you can't tell me that their policy of "Machinegun any scientist that just had a breakthrough and steal their research" isn't card carryingly evil.
- Speaking of Resident Evil, in Yahtzee Croshaw's review of Resident Evil 5:
  One really shouldn't worry about [the perceived racism] unless there's genuine hatred behind it. And I don't get that impression, Capcom aren't bad people, THEY'RE JUST IDIOTS!
- RE 5 actually plays with this: Umbrella's actions are attributed to stupidity, when in fact it all actually was a deliberate effort to generate a virus that would bring about A God Am I.
In Star Control II, the Slylandro Probes seem hellbent on deconstructing everything in the galaxy to create more probes. Why was this plague of Von Neumann probes unleashed upon creation? Answer: a programming bug. The Slylandro purchased the self-replicating probes for peaceful exploration. Wanting to learn as much as they possibly could, they innocently set the probes' program value for self-replicating to maximum. The result, the probes sought out ships and evidence of civilization and then immediately destroyed them for raw materials to make more probes. Hilarity Ensues.
Quoted directly (attributed to Richard Feynman) in Deus Ex on one of Majestic 12's computer terminals.
Aperture Science may use human guinea pigs and have created the most malevolent, twisted AI in the history of their Earth, but it has been made painfully clear that they suffer from such staggering stupidity and way-out cloudcuckooland thinking that there is no room for malice in their plans.
- They created the Anti-Heimlich Maneuver and were rather shocked at the poor public reception when it successfully prevented the saving of a choking individual's life.

Web Comics

Used in this Sluggy Freelance strip:
"Never underestimate the ability of stupidity to catch you off guard and mess up humanity."
- Sluggy Freelance in general could be considered a big example of Hanlon's Razor. Half the story arcs in the series wouldn't exist if it weren't for people making incredibly stupid decisions.
  - Though that particular example was a subversion, they thought the Ghouls were caused by some idiot unleashing a zombie plague, when in actuality the Ghouls were a Horde Of Alien Locusts that had taken human form.
- Heck, 90% or more of the time a villain has done something right, it's because he or she, one of his or her underlings, or even one of the good/neutral guys has screwed up. A good number of the plots end with two characters thusly:
  Sluggy Character: Why did you do ABCDGFQRS Xanatos Roulette?
  Seemingly Malicious Character: Because I wanted Y outcome.
  Sluggy Character: Why didn't you just do X action resulting Y outcome?
  Seemingly Malicious Character: Oh, duh. Nohardfeelingsseeyanever! * Exit*
In The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja, Doc despised Monster Marty for years for seemingly selling out the Vigilante Club, but forgives him when he discovers that Marty did it because his monster form makes him dumb. This leads to the Aesop: "It's better for people to think that you're stupid, than to think you're a jerk."

Western Animation

Dib from Invader Zim put it best:
Dib: Chickenfoot, come back! You're not a freak! You're just stupid!
South Park hung a big lampshade on this trope in an episode debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. The existence of conspiracy theories is actually a government conspiracy; Washington failed to prevent twenty Muslim lunatics with box cutters killing 3,000 people, so they'd rather allow people to believe that they made it happen — it actually makes the government look more formidable than it is.

Real Life

Just about everything surrounding World War I can be explained by the leaders of Europe acting like a bunch of gibbering morons. The fact that four years of horribly bloody conflict were kicked off because of a student ~~with a pistol~~ eating a sandwich boggles the mind.
- Austria had wanted to go to war and so initially made demands of Serbia that they figured no one would accept. Serbia acquiesced to all but one demand, upon which Austria was not willing to compromise. Only after the declaration of war was sent did the Austrians learn that Serbia had sent a post saying they'd submit to the final demand.
  "It was simply too much effort not to have a war."
  - Also, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne whose death started the mess, was the strongest opponent to a war with Serbia among the Austrian leaders, reputedly having said that such a war's only gain would be "some plum trees and poachers". (Plum liquor was the vodka equivalent in Serbia.)
  - Likewise, France and Germany had been itching for a rematch for some time. France was hoping to get back territory taken in the last war, and Germany was ready to take another slice (or vice-versa).
  - To be specific, Germany had taken over the French province of Alsace-Lorraine when they won the previous war. In six weeks.
- Kaiser Wilhelm II revealed his immaturity and foolishness openly in an interview in the Daily Telegraph in 1908. His rash words about Great Britain ("You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares!") caused an international uproar, but he still kept on ruling Germany.
  - To be fair to the unpleasant Hohenzollern, in Germany itself Wilhelm had previously been seen as far too accomodating to the British, who were generally unpopular in the Deutsches Reich. He was attempting to shore up his domestic popularity. It didn't work.
- To add to the mess, the war itself was, in all likelihood, inevitable: nobody had thought very hard when signing mutual defense treaties saying that "If somebody declares war on X, we will declare war on them." Hilarity, of a sort, Ensued when somebody actually finally did follow through with their treaty obligation to do just that, a dead guy's war plans went into effect automatically, and there's some evidence for the theory that the US was dragged in because some people in Europe felt that it wasn't fair to let the US stay out of the party. That probably counts as 'ignorance' of a sort, given that it could have easily enough backfired horribly.
In contrast to the South Park entry above, conspiracy theories about 9/11 refuse to accept the possibility that any element, any tiny, inconsequential detail, is anything but the single thread that, if unraveled, will bring the whole conspiracy down into bite-sized chunks of truth. The simplest solution is that Bush is, in fact, a well-meaning guy who, during the 9/11 crisis and during the whole of his presidency made difficult decisions that he thought were right.
- The facts of 9/11 boil down to two possibilities: dozens, if not hundreds, of American politicians, servicemen, and agents (With full cooperation from the airlines and airport authorities) deliberately and maliciously abandoned their oaths of protection and conspired to murder (by action or inaction) their fellow countrymen, or those in charge made a mistake and thought that the 9/11 plan wasn't a threat. I call Finagle's Law.
  - You can make the same analysis of the whole "FDR knew about Pearl Harbor" idea.
- Hell, conspiracy theories in general depend on the assumption that a lack of evidence is in turn proof of a cover-up. Plain ol' incompetence with a dose of coincidence just doesn't seem like a cool enough explanation, apparently.
  - You'd like us to think that, wouldn't you?!?
  - Officials are just as willing to cover up incompetence (or negligence) as they are to cover up conspirital actions, if not more so. A cover-up does not necessitate a conspiracy, it is more likely to be for covering their asses after a screw up.
- This cracked article says it best, and even invokes this trope.
  "Just as it's wrong to find complicated conspiracy where simple incompetence will explain everything, it's also wrong to presume evil motives where simple mental retardation may be the explanation."
  - The best part of that article is that it has fake advertisements for Halliburton and Freemasonry, implying that the article itself is all part of the conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories always surround the unexpected deaths of major personages. It just doesn't seem right that someone so big and important could just die!
- Nearly forty years after his assassination, people are still coming up with harebrained theories about who "really" killed John F Kennedy.
- Less than 20 minutes after the accidental death of Diana, Princess of Wales, conspiracy theories were already buzzing around the Internet.
- There was a movie made in the 1970s called The Lincoln Conspiracy. It was basically "Oswald didn't act alone", with Lee Harvey Oswald replaced by John Wilkes Booth.
  - It's moderately well known that Booth actually was part of a conspiracy. It just turned out he was the only member of it who went through with the whole "murder another human being" aspect of the plan. His friend Lewis Paine stabbed the US Secretary of State but failed to kill him, and the other conspirator chickened out on shooting Vice President Andrew Johnson. All were eventually caught and hanged or imprisoned, except for Booth as he was shot by a soldier. Conspiracy theories claim he somehow escaped, it was a double killed, people in the US government were involved, etc.
  - In addition to the attempts on Seward and Johnson, there were two attempts on General Grant's life as he and his wife were on their way out of town. One man attempted to catch their carriage on horseback, but was apprehended by the armed escorts, and another attempted to force his way into the Grants' private cabin aboard their train.
  - The circumstances of Booth's death didn't help. Everton Conger (1834 - 1918) was the one leading the search for the assassin. He did manage to track him down and was trying to capture him alive, for obvious interrogation purposes. Sergeant Boston Corbett (1832 - 1894?) suddenly shot at Booth, fatally wounding him. Booth was never interrogated. Conger reported Corbett's actions to be "without order, pretext or excuse". There are suggestions that Corbett was acting to silence the assassin. Far more likely though that it was another of Corbett's insane moments. The guy had a long history of strange behavior, arguably starting with his self-castration in 1858. Supposedly to avoid sexual temptation. He ended up in an insane assylum by 1887. His biographers have noted that Corbett had spend years working as a hatter, his exposure to mercury may have much to do with his strange behavior.
Climategate and Glaciergate appear to be this according to close to fifty percent of people analyzing it- there was no attempt at deceiving the public, the scientists just suck at proper phrasing, and did nothing actually wrong in "climategate". (In the case of Glacier"gate", sloppy editing was also an issue, as the editors missed a gaffe that they should not have.)