Why Everyone Else Sucks

Check out this fun article: 5 Ways ‘Common Sense’ Lies To You Everyday. It contains 5 fun little logical fallacies that we fall prey to everyday. I’m sure that there are probably more than these, but the article has 5 great ones named The Historian’s Fallacy, The Nirvana Fallacy, The Appeal to Probability, The Regression Fallacy, and Special Pleading.

Special Pleading is the one I want to talk about today.

Special Pleading is making yourself (or others you care about) exempt from a standard, with no objective reasoning. In other words, as the article says:

When someone else eats thest doughnut, they’re a classless motherfucker who deserves to rot in Hell; when you or a friend does it, it’s because you were really hungry and you’ve had a bad day and you didn’t get any doughnuts the last time.

I laughed out loud at this, because I immediately recognized this tendancy in myself. Whenever I do something that others don’t like, I have a good reason, of course. Whenever others do something I don’t like, there’s something wrong with them.

The girl behind the counter at Starbucks wasn’t rude because she was having a bad day. She’s just a bitch. The kid at Best Buy wasn’t just clueless about the return policy, he was intentionally evil and trying to steal your money.

Ah, yes. This is so very, very familiar. It’s comical when it’s pointed out like this, but it can have a very real effect on our enjoyment of the world and the people in it. The section on this item concludes with:

They might as well call it the “This Is Why The World Seems to be Full of Dicks” fallacy.

Hmm. The world does seem to be full of assholes. Perhaps this little fallacy starts to explain why.

What to do about it then? I have my own term for this kind of mis-thinking, which is Insides and Outsides, which I have posted about before. The idea is that we are only able to know our own insides and only able to see the outsides of other people. When we try to compare the two, we get into all kinds of trouble.

For instance, this can easily result in thinking that it’s us that sucks. We know ourselves to be sometimes flawed and confused and conflicted and faultering on the inside. When we look at other people, we see only their outward projection and might cast them in a “perfect” role, not able to see the mess that might lay on their inside.

And then it can also lead to the opposite problem talked about in the article, which is granting all kinds of execptions for ourselves - since we are able to know our own contexts - and pushing other people into cardboard cut-outs of bad intentions.

The truth is that everyone has bad days and makes mistakes for good reasons. I like to go back to the NVC idea that at all times, everyone is doing the best they can to try and meet their needs. We could cut ourselves some slack by remembering this about ourselves, and also cut others some slack by remembering this about them, as well.

Mind the Insides and Outsides fallacy and everything might begin to suck a little less.