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“Hey are these people evil or just stupid?”
“Do they really believe in what they say?”
I’ve heard this for most of my life in some form of political discussion. We see more of this right now because of the politics of 2025. But the question haunts humanity – are the terrible things people do belief or stupidity? It’s as if we want the comfort of knowing someone chose evil, because if they didn’t, then more of us can do evil for other reasons. There’s an absolution in being able to label someone stupid or foolish figuring that will never be you.
This is also something that has bedeviled me in project management, to a lesser ethical degree. One often confronts poor decisions, and as I work in IT where poor decisions accumulate in the form of code and hilarious security breaches, one confronts history as well. There is nothing like a decade of “who the hell made this call?” rattling around your head (worse, when you find the person in question might be you).
I’d like to propose a third option that sometimes people’s bad decisions can be born of opposition.
Among my many interests is why people believe conspiracy theories. A theory I’ve seen pop up a few times is they’re often a form of Oppositional Defiant Disorder – that many (not all) a conspiracy theorist believes in conspiracy theories as a form of opposition. They’re hard to talk out of it as opposition just hardens their beliefs.
We’ve all dealt with people like that (a few times, we may BE that person), where telling someone they’re wrong makes them “wrong harder.” With conspiracy theorists – especially the ones who make a living at it podcasting and writing or being in politics – many will buckle down on their beliefs. If you think about it, that means they have a believe structure that is increasingly and aggressively wrong and they act on it.
Now imagine someone making very bad decisions and choices. But not out of malice or actual believe, but literally because their entire structure is composed of ideas created in opposition to critique. They act in a form of anti-belief.
Go ahead, think over the bad choices not just in today’s politics but in finance, software, and your job. How many people made absolutely the worst decisions that would be explained by the fact that at some point they did the opposite of common sense just due to opposition to advice.
If you get very “oppositional” to good advice, you WILL construct a worldview and policies and plans based on the worst stuff you can do. It might not necessarily be evil, but as it’s a very active form of stupidity, it gets close.
Now, look at the world and ask if certain people got told no so often they literally do the worst choices only to avoid the better choices they were told?
Steven Savage