Machiavelli vs. Occam

A guy named Occam had a rule about the world: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I hope you all knew that already, just as you already knew that said rule is generally know as Occam's Razor. A guy named Machiavelli did not have a philosophy about the world wherein he posited that there should be obscure conspiracies running everything. It's a common use of the adjective which bears his name, Machiavellian, but he never actually posited that philosophy, at least not to my knowledge.

I use Machiavelli as a personification of conspiracies even though he wasn't a proponent of them. I'm sure he would have felt that a true leader didn't need them. But people tend to speak of Machiavellian conspiracies. I chose Occam as his opposite because he would have laughed at some of the conspiracies we've come up with, not because he wasn't a member of a secret order of Freemasons and Luddites plotting to return the world to pre-Roman technology in order to serve a dark power. As far as I know, he wasn't, but that's not why I chose him.

It's fun to ascribe a massive conspiracy to everything. If something doesn't go your way, it's nice to believe that someone has it in for you rather than that life is brutally fair. But it gets old after a while, unless you're paranoid. Most of the time, simple explanations are true, and there's no reason to ascribe convoluted motives to something which is really a simple case. This is, of course, different from the debate about human morality; base instincts are very simple motivations, even if they usually result in negative consequences, and if you happen to believe that the simple truth is that humans are basically evil, then you don't need to make it any more complicated to justify your belief that evil is behind bad things that happen.

The opposite side of the coin is to believe that everything has the simplest explanation, as Mr. Occam would have us think. The problem is that we misinterpret Occam and believe that what appears simplest at first glance really is the simplest explanation. We use Occam as a crutch to keep from having to work toward the truth, when in fact the he never said the easiest explanation, just the simplest. Then, of course, there are times when the simplest is just plain wrong, even with all the facts. Humans are complicated. Our world is complicated. There aren't necessarily always simple answers.

The truth of the matter is that simple things sometimes give rise to complications far beyond the thought of any individual participant. A lot of the time, there is no grand ringleader, but there's still a conspiracy. Scientists would call this complexity or distribution; I call it complicated. Sometimes convoluted. The problem is that people who are looking to point fingers at someone don't want to face the reality that there is no one in particular at the head, that the only people the blame are everyone involved. It's hard to blame massive numbers of people like that.

Sometimes we try. Nazi Germany has some easy people to blame, but really, the entirety of Germany was party to a conspiracy which, more and more, seems to have been led at points but un-led in many others. Things just happened. That's not intended to seem blameless; far from it, blame should be assigned to everyone who let things happen, or who participated in things happening. And blame we do, but it's harder than being able to point and say, "Hitler was the problem and he was a bad man." Real life isn't that simple.

In other cases, we have conspiracies which probably will never be completely sorted out. We have no head to blame so it's hard to get the ball rolling to blame anyone. I don't genuinely believe that too many people are conspiring to manipulate the country in certain ways; it's not that simple. Societies work in trends, except in rare revolutionary cases, and even these are quickly swallowed up. Rare indeed is the dictator who can single-handedly conspire to run the entire country. It's a balancing act between complete self-determination and complete subjugation.

I guess what I'm trying to point at is that people ascribe motives to trends which may or may not be present, but usually are a mix of both. And often enough, the people ascribing these motives are written off as paranoid because they seem to be saying that a conspiracy is actively intending some end or at least some direction. People are unwilling to believe that there is a secret cabal which controls aspects of their lives arbitrarily, and they are right to be suspicious. Much of the time, Machiavelli and Occam dance the tango.