The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

partner to open up more to her. With the hope of establishing more
intimacy, she asks him what he is thinking, what happened during the
course of the day, and so on. He interprets this as intrusiveness and
closes up further, which makes the wife more suspicious and more
prying, which closes him up even further.
The source of this age-old syndrome is relatively simple: alarmed by
something in the present, we grab for a solution without thinking
deeply about the context, the roots of the problem, the possible
unintended consequences that might ensue. Because we mostly react
instead of think, our actions are based on insufficient information—
Caesar was not planning to start a monarchy; the poor people of Delhi
despised their colonial rulers and would not take kindly to suddenly
losing money; Americans would be willing to go to war if attacked.
When we operate with such a skewed perspective, it results in all kinds

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of perverse effects. In all of these cases a simple move partway up the
mountain would have made clear the possible negative consequences
so obvious to us in hindsight: for example, offering a reward for dead
cobras would naturally cause impoverished residents to breed them.
Invariably in these cases people’s thinking is remarkably simple and
lazy: kill Caesar and the Republic returns, action A leads to result B. A
variation on this, one that is quite common in the modern world, is to
believe that if people have good intentions, good things should be the
result. If a politician is honest and means well, he or she will bring
about the desired results. In fact, good intentions often lead to what
are known as cobra effects, because people with the noblest intentions
are often blinded by feelings of self-righteousness and do not consider
the complex and often malevolent motivations of others.
Nonconsequential thinking is a veritable plague in the world today
that is only growing worse with the speed and ease of access to
information, which gives people the illusion that they are informed and
have thought deeply about things. Look at self-destructive wars such as
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the attempts to shut down the American
government for short-term political gain, the increasing number of
financial bubbles from tech stocks to real estate. Related to this is a
gradual disconnect from history itself, as people tend to view present
events as if they were isolated in time.