Hanlon's Razor

The Publius Forum ^ | August 11, 2009 | Dan Scott

[dscott8186]

There is a lot of invective being flung around by liberals and conservatives these days regarding the each other’s motivations. We hear accusations of “un-American”, unpatriotic, astro-turfing, the police accused of acting stupidly, etc. All of these invectives are nothing more than an attempt to sidestep the legitimate concerns of people asking questions instead of properly showing leadership by addressing the concerns. It seems some people confuse leadership with salesmanship. A leader who expects people to follow them must engender trust for that to happen; clearly hurling invectives at the followers doesn’t engender trust. A salesman is expected to narrowly focus on the sales points of the product they want to sell; a leader has no such latitude. A leader’s responsibility is to explore both the positives and negatives. It’s a pretty incompetent leader who thinks they should horn swoggle people in order to persuade them. Incompetence combined with arrogance many times is mistaken for malice.

Whether it is the Federal Budget, Cap & Trade or Healthcare Reform, these issues are far more complex than the sales points and wrongly assumes everyone affected by these issues understands all the details. One of the biggest mistakes a leader can make is to assume everyone understands what the issues are, what the details are and then assign a negative motivation to those who don’t see things the same way. Given the inappropriate comments from Nancy Pelosi and President Obama towards those who disagree with their solutions and characterization of it they display their incompetence in engendering trust...

[Bearshouse]

Good article.