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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
Hanlons 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, Clark's Law:
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
See also
No Delays For The Wicked.
Examples:
- 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 three thousand 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.
- Touched on in The Shadow Over Innsmouth by HP Lovecraft. When the narrator's motel room door is rattled in the middle of the night by someone trying the lock, the narrator first suspects that the locals think he knows too much. He convinces himself to get into bed on the thought that someone just tried the wrong door on accident. It turns out the locals think he knows too much. They come back later well-armed.
- 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?
- 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.
- Romeo And Juliet. That is all.
- 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.
- 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. They set the priorities wrong: they set the target priorities to seek out ships and evidence of civilization over raw (non-living) materials for replication. The problem was that they set the action priorities wrong; they set the action "Break target into component compounds" to maximum. So it did exactly that: seek out ships and evidence of civilization and destroy them. Hilarity Ensues.
- In contrast to the entry about South Park up at the top, conspiracy theories about 9/11 refuse to accept the possibility that any element, any tiny, inconsequential detail, is anything but the single piece of thread that, if unraveled, will bring the whole conspiracy down into bite-sized chunks of truth. The idea 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 the right ones is poison to these people; if you can get them to accept the possibility for even a moment, they'll die, and you can be charged with Murder By Perspective.
- Hell, conspiracy theories in general depend on the assumption that a lack of evidence is in turn proof of a coverup. Plain ol' incompetence with a dose of coincidence just doesn't seem like a cool enough explanation, apparently.
- Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the explanation being cool and everything to do with the conspiracy theorists thinking that they are special snowflakes who are better and smarter than everyone because they know THE TRUTH! (TM)
- Inverted in Warhammer 40000: never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice. A puree of Crapsack World, Everything Trying To Kill You, and Black And Grey Morality at its finest.
- Although there is still a lot of stupidity — see the Imperial Bureaucracy, and the Emperor's treatment of some of his sons (although Inverse Hanlon's Razor still applies to the latter, thanks to Horus).
- 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.
- 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 contant outbreaks of Zombie plagues are the result of massive stupidity and recklessness, rather than a deliberate desire to kill everybody.
- Dib from Invader Zim put it best:
Dib: Chickenfoot, come back! You're not a freak! You're just stupid!
- This Troper once had a housemate that would've done well to incorporate this trope into her life. As far as This Troper and her friends can figure, this particular housemate's philosophy of the world was thus: No mistakes can be made. If someone else makes a mistake, they've done it because they're out to get her in some way. If she makes the mistake, it was due to someone else's malice. Considering how little respect she had for the intelligence of others, it's rather surprising she didn't have this trope as her philosophy.
- 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 boggles the mind.
