Protocols of Ruin

mail@osaigbovo.xyz (Osaigbovo Omere) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We build philosophical heuristics exactly how we build software abstractions. We construct them to protect our minds from the overwhelming, brutal complexity of the underlying machine. When the raw data of human behaviour becomes too heavy to process, we reach for a mental model to parse it for us. For decades, one of the most widely deployed of these models has been Hanlon’s Razor. It commands us to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It wears the aesthetic of profound rationality.

A recent observation by Matthew Lyon caused the entire architecture of that aphorism to collapse. Lyon stated cleanly that Hanlon’s Razor itself functions as an incompetent or malicious thought-terminating cliché for dealing with rhetoric. That single sentence dredged up a visceral, unhealed memory of 2023, providing a new framework for a betrayal I had long struggled to articulate.

I used Hanlon’s Razor extensively during that election year. I wielded it as a social sealant, a desperate rationalisation to justify my continued friendship with people who actively supported the ascension of an extraordinarily vile figure to the presidency. As I watched the political landscape curdle, I convinced myself that these friends were simply victims of profound cognitive failure. I forgave them by reducing their agency, deciding they were merely foolish.

The elected regime then proceeded to systematically dismantle every piece of half-functioning infrastructure we had left. It took a geography that had long been pretending to be a country and formally transformed it into a dead country.

In the ruins of that collapse, the truth of their support finally emerged. My friends had not been tricked by rhetoric, nor were they blinded by a lack of education. They supported the destruction because they had received private assurances. They expected to be fixed into positions where the profound failings of the government would simply bypass them. They willingly traded the architectural integrity of the nation for a promised spot in a personal bunker. I had thought them fools. They remain fools, because the political promises of immunity were ultimately empty. However, the core revelation stands. They were monsters operating in their own rational, devastating self-interest.

This exposes the fatal flaw of Hanlon’s Razor. Originally designed as an informal tool to prevent paranoia, it has been entirely weaponised into an alibi for complicity. Mandating that observers must assume incompetence before malice creates a system where malicious actors are highly incentivised to adopt the camouflage of stupidity. If a politician or an institution can destroy a nation’s future and be defended by philosophers insisting they simply did not know any better, incompetence ceases to be a failure state. It functions as a highly effective legal and moral shield. Hanlon’s Razor pardons this precise brand of monstrosity by framing it as a deficit of intelligence. It demands we treat calculated, systemic selfishness as innocent incompetence.

Surviving the modern era requires us to abandon the prosecution of intent. We spend an absurd amount of energy trying to peer into the hearts of corrupt administrators and failing institutions to determine their internal motivations. That distinction is a luxury we can no longer afford.

We must adopt the cybernetic principle articulated by Stafford Beer. POSIWID dictates that the purpose of a system is what it does. Intentions, stated goals, and original blueprints hold absolutely no weight when evaluating a functioning architecture. In systems engineering, if a script explicitly written to secure a database instead wipes the servers clean every Sunday at midnight, the intention of the developer is structurally irrelevant. The system is a deletion engine. Leaving the system running constitutes authorisation of the deletion.

Applied to human architecture–governments, economies, friendships–POSIWID acts as a brutal, clarifying lens. A political regime that consistently produces immiseration, extraction, and dead infrastructure must be judged exclusively by those outputs. We must stop asking if they are making mistakes. The purpose of their system is to extract and destroy. Intentions are invisible, unprovable, and easily fabricated. Consequences are physical, measurable, and inescapable. Action and result define the tool. A hammer that consistently shatters the wood rather than driving the nail must be categorised strictly as a wood-shattering device. Its identity is forged entirely in its physical friction with reality, completely divorced from the aspirations of the blacksmith who cast it.

We require a new heuristic to replace the outdated comfort of Hanlon. We can establish this as Lyon’s Razor. It dictates that whenever incompetence is consistently invoked to protect a harmful system, the invocation itself constitutes an act of malice. This razor removes the luxury of pleading ignorance. It recognises that incompetence, deployed at scale, serves as a calculated operational strategy. If the direct result of a supposedly foolish action repeatedly serves the actor’s self-interest at the expense of the wider ecosystem, that foolishness functions seamlessly as a calculated weapon.

Believing the world is broken simply because its administrators are stupid offers a terrifying comfort, implying the system can be fixed with education or better data. Malice, conversely, demands confrontation. I am done granting the benefit of the doubt to the architects of ruin. I am done using thought-terminating clichés to protect myself from the reality of the people around me. The razor is dull. We must now judge the machine strictly by its output.

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Protocols of Ruin