Otto’s razor

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown Die Schweizer Heulsuse at the Donmar Warehouse during Lockdown The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Herculio: ’Tis neither malice, spite, nor virtue
Whose ledger swells, or plucks, the seedy fruits of progress —
But mainly accident.
Lest thee with surety know aught else —
Withhold thy assignations.

Triago: Pish upon thee, Nuncle. Pish!
Dost thou mean to say
Things peel this way
Through doughty misadventure?

Herculio: Peradventure —

Triago: Pish abeam!
Has thou no more to say than that?
Wouldst thou on this shaky surmise
Withhold rebuke?

Herculio: Perchance, per case, mayhap dear Triago
’Twas but a fluke?

Triago: O! This nuisant planet weighs upon my soul!

Herculio: If ’tis this and nought beside
That flies you to a vernal rage
Our fickle globe in its manifold confound’ry
Lies prettily indeed
For thy alignment.

A rule of thumb, attributed to 19th century Austrian plowright [playwright? — Ed] Büchstein, in his play Die Schweizer Heulsuse (“The Swiss Milquetoast”) that recommends when there are plausible alternative explanations for a person’s behaviour, one should choose the simplest-minded, preferring cloth-headedness or coincidence over the artful application of intelligence or inspiration (for beneficent actions), or “malice, spite, or virtue” (for odious ones).

Never attribute to virtue something that could equally be attributed to self-interest; never attribute to skill something that could equally be attributed to dumb luck.

Until the contrary is proven, treat both the pinnacles of success and the chasms of calumny as the produce of accident and not intention. Give the benefit of the doubt to wrong-doers for deeds that present as wilful, and withhold it from do-gooders for their strokes of uncommon genius, until such time as there is no other realistic way of explaining them.

Die Schweizer Heulsuse was a light-hearted comic farce, but (until the dengue fever got him) Büchstein took his aphorism seriously — he would credit it, when drunk, to Goethe, Schiller or even Aristotle — and would gleefully point out to disbelieving dinner guests celebrated monuments to human triumph and notorious stains of monstrous wickedness that in fact came about by more or less fortunate adjacency, and not intelligent design.

Indeed it is a healthy, skeptical disposition to take into the world, and those who find uncanny success would do well to bear it in mind.

In a sad irony, by the time his “razor” caught on, Büchstein was deep in series of debilitating, Papaya-juice inflected hallucinations from which he did not recover.

This is just as well, for the ironies multiplied thereafter: assuming the pithiness of Büchstein’s text to be just such an accidental epiphany, colonial jurist Albert Hanlon nicked it, rebadging (and, frankly, improving) it to read “do not attribute to malice things that can just as well be explained by stupidity” and that is how it has remained, as “Hanlon’s razor”, to this day.

See also

• Occam’s razor
• Büchstein