Counsell's Heuristics

Rules-of-thumb to refer to alongside Counsell's Laws

As an experiment, I’ve also read this one out myself. You can listen here:

[For those readers unaware of the years-old Counsell’s Laws, I’ve appended them to the bottom of this post.]

1. The Cynic’s Razor

If you worry that you’re being slightly too cynical about the motivations or behaviour of an individual or organisation, you’re being insufficiently cynical.

One of my favourite examples of a failure of cynicism is the widespread belief that the Iraq War was a “War For Oil”, fought by the US/the west to seize Iraq’s natural resources. In fact, the pre-war Iraq “Peace” was, like so many others before and since, a “Peace For Oil”: The west turned a blind eye to the Hussein family’s atrocities—indeed, it propped up Saddam even while he gassed Iraqi civilians—in the hope of a relatively stable supply of oil.

Today, even as he betrays the people of Ukraine, we can at least thank Donald Trump for making this classic kind of great-power deal-with-the-Devil out in the open. His self-described peace deal to end the war started by Russia’s invasion of the country explicitly demands that Ukraine sign over rights to its natural resources to the US.

The accusation of “War For Oil” was doubly stupid, because it was possible to find evidence for multiple motivations for the Allies to remove Saddam Hussein that actually made some kind of sense¹ and that reflected badly on the people Stoppers² wanted so much to hate. Though this particular stupid theory did have the dual campaigning advantages of sounding plausible to non-political bystanders who hadn’t been paying attention to the past couple of centuries’ geopolitics and of “War For Oil” being an easy-to-spell three-syllable slogan that fits conveniently onto any size of placard—preceded by the protester’s favourite word: “No”.

If you were opposed to involvement in the Iraq War, and were looking to attack the motivations of Allied forces, you could, quite legitimately, have cited George W. Bush himself saying words to the effect of: “They [the Iraqi regime] tried to kill my daddy” in public. I don’t happen to believe that family revenge was his motivation either, but it’s better supported by evidence than any supposed economic justification, based on some fantasy that the US would spend astronomical sums of money on a war to “seize” Iraqi oil, something which, twenty years later, the US still hasn’t done—in much the same way the United States continues not to “buy our NHS”. It’s certainly more cynical.

What marked neo-conservatism out as different from other forms of American conservatism was its rejection of traditional US conservatism’s, especially anti-communist conservatism’s, longstanding foreign-policy attitude of “He might be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, in favour of what New Labour called a “moral” foreign policy, a foreign policy that not only aspired beyond narrow self-interest, but boasted classically liberal, democratic, “nation-building” goals.

Consumer nations tolerated and supported murderous autocratic regimes in producer countries in return for continuing access to the natural resources of the producer countries those regimes ruled over. Consumer nations did this for far longer and on a much larger scale than they had ever tried to depose or destabilise such regimes. But “anti-imperialists”, normally so enraged by consumerism, found it difficult to fit neo-conservatism’s rejection of this (perfectly rational and perfectly wrong) behaviour into their model of the world. Theirs was and is a model in which everything “white” western countries did and do—including, for embarrassing example, freeing slaves—was Bad in some way. So they had to project motives onto the Allies that made no sense, even on anti-imperialists’ own terms.

It’s always annoyed me that most conspiracy theories have no internal logic, especially when they ignore human nature—about which, I emphasise again, it is difficult to be too cynical. There is no person more likely to pompously ask “Cui bono?” than someone convinced of a conspiracy theory that requires the supposed conspirators to have acted against their own interests.

This happens so often that one of my favourite responses to a tin-foil-hat-wearer advancing a conspiracy theory is to suggest to him a better (less-bad) conspiracy theory of my own invention that is at least a) consistent with reality and b) rational from the alleged perpetrators’ point-of-view. My starting point for devising such a theory is usually, of course, to assume that the theorist I’m arguing with has failed to think badly enough of his enemies: that he has been insufficiently cynical.

2. The Intersection Of Repulsion

If you are not in the habit of disliking people, but someone’s behaviour makes you take a strong dislike to them, there is a good chance that you are not half of a “clash of personalities”, and that other rational people share your feelings about that unlikeable someone.

If a person you’ve dealt with for a non-trivial length of time has made you ask yourself more than once “What is their problem?!” or “Why are they like this?!”, it’s likely that other people have found that person bafflingly unpleasant too.

If you are worried that you might have been over-sensitive or that the problem might be you*, I recommend that you discreetly solicit the opinions of mutual acquaintances/colleagues. The more eager/relieved/engaged they are in expressing their own exasperation with the person in question, the more likely it is that you have simply been dealing with a shit and responded reasonably and rationally to their bad behaviour. A bonus: You now might be able to recruit said mutual to your crusade against said shit.

A much more interesting question is: “How do repellent people thrive?”

I’ve written previously about my puzzlement at the persistence of genuinely good people. Genuinely unpleasant people are a lesser mystery, but a mystery nonetheless. It’s possible to be morally bad and personally pleasant. Indeed, if you are planning on screwing people over to your own advantage, it might seem to be an optimal strategy. But it can’t be sustained forever, because people are gossips—and people love gossip. As word gets around that you might be civil but you aren’t moral, eventually you run out of suckers, or at least you are reduced to exploiting the suckiest of suckers.

Not-terrible people co-operate with terrible people because terrible people make it costly not to co-operate with them. In the short term, this is a win for terrible people; but, in the long-term, it’s a loss: because rational non-terrible people will a) remember being treated badly and avoid terrible people, and b) tell all their non-terrible friends that the terrible people are terrible. If you don’t have any other things going for you, like being hot or being rich, your being a bad person will tend to make your life worse.

If no one else thinks the person you think is obviously bad is bad, you might be early to the party or you yourself might be the problem. Always do a sanity check that you aren’t the problem.

3. The Disliked-To-Dismissal Pipeline

I developed this rule-of-thumb after years of my volunteering as a union rep alongside my doing “proper” jobs³ and it follows naturally from The Intersection Of Repulsion above.

In the UK, even as a matter of admin alone, sacking an employee is always tedious and unpleasant⁴. Managers do everything they can to avoid it—often including constructive dismissal (trying to drive the person to give himself/herself the sack so they don’t have to do it).

Because of this, most sackings require the additional incentive—beyond, say, criminality from the soon-to-be-ex-employee, and certainly beyond that employee’s mere incompetence—that the employee in question is unpleasant for his/her coworkers to be around.

The corollary of this is that, if you ever read or hear of someone (in this country especially) being fired, then there is a high probability that, in addition to the official reason for that person’s dismissal, no one liked having them around.

This is sad in itself and, sadder still, implies that, if you want to keep your job (especially at an employer already looking to make redundancies), it’s more important to be widely liked by your fellow employees, especially your superiors, than it is to be competent. Similarly, most of your colleagues won’t fret about your professional integrity, unless your lack of it puts their own employment at risk; and most of your colleagues won’t care about your contribution to an organisation’s aims or bottom line, as long as your shared employer is big enough that the output of your work doesn’t affect their income as well.

Does this make me sound too cynical? See Counsell’s First Heuristic, “The Cynic’s Razor”, above.

Addendum: Counsell’s Laws

Counsell’s First Law

The Cool Kids are always wrong, even when they are right.

Counsell’s Second Law

The two most powerful forces known to contemporary humankind are peer pressure and the desire for a quiet life.

Counsell’s Third Law

The most dangerous political weakness is sentimentality. It’s not a coincidence that every form of fascism has had a deep and wide sentimental streak.

Counsell’s Fourth Law

Where there’s a subsidy, there’s a scam.

1. On the subject of base reasons to remove people, see also Counsell’s Third heuristic further down this page.

2. “Anti”-war protesters. I put “anti” in quotes because there are only some wars that Stoppers are actually interested in stopping: ones that their ideological enemies might win.

3. …As opposed to being self-employed.

4. See Counsell’s Second Law further down this page.