Adequately explained by you-know-what

Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the fine story writer and poet who was also the first Russian author to win the Nobel prize, wrote in his diary known as The Accursed Days, referring to the folly of the Bolsheviks and their followers:

Besides, much is because of stupidity. Tolstoy used to say that nine-tenths of bad human deeds are explained exclusively by stupidity. “In my youth,” he said, “we had a good acquaintance, a poor man who had once suddenly bought a clockwork metal canary with his last pennies. We scratched our heads bloody in search of an explanation to that incongruous act, until we recalled that our friend simply was awfully silly.”

Tolstoy’s maxim is sometimes called Hanlon’s razor. The term has been around for decades. But new terms keep popping up, and one of the greatest recent inventions is Cidu’s razor,

…the opposite of Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor is the idea that the simplest explanation for something is usually the answer. Cidu’s Razor is the idea that the most convoluted conspiracy theory possible is the likely explanation for something.

Italian has a useful word for a similar concept, dietrologia, while Russian is still limited to the lame-ish teoriya zagovora.

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