No, I’m not talking about Murphy’s laws.
I’m talking about apparently obvious truths, that, under close scrutiny, don’t hold up. You’d think that massmurderers have an evil glint in their eyes, and that you’ll get more organized if you get more closets, right?
**The more a man regards himself als victim, the more likely he is to be a
perpetrator. **
People talking about how much life owes them, and how they won’t stand anyone’s shit for one more lousy second, usually are either working themselves up to a agression, or they’re excusing past acts of unpleasantness to themselves.
The harder you work, the harder you have to work.
You’d think that by working harder, you get more done? Think again. In many situations, the opposite is true. The harder you work, the more people come to rely on you and give you more work. And the harder you work, the more work
you generate, not only for others, but for yourself, too. It’s like a tennismatch where both people smash the ball across the net at increasingly higher speed…
**The more closets you have, the more clutter you aquire and the harder it
is to find anything. **
**How much a problem is ranted about, in media and in conversation, is
independent of how much it is a factual problem. **
In The Netherlands, acts of random violence shock the public far more in then those same acts would have done in the seventies, precisely because such acts were much more common back then. Yet most people think, because of the public outcry at violent incidents, that the nineties were a more violent decade then the seventies.
**The harder you fight the war on drugs, the more you lose that war. ** The familiar arguments: if it is illegal, organized crime steps in and
creates a steady market; the more illegal it is, the more young people
are interested to try it.
**Villains in a position of great power are not only intelligent, but more
likely charming and/or attractive then non-villains. **
We often look at pictures of Saddam, Stalin, Bin-Laden or Ted Bundy and are surprised that the “evil doesn’t show”.
But if they had not had charisma, chanches are they would not have risen
to level of power, that enabled them to do those appaling things.
Of course, many of these paradoxes are often true. Sometimes a villain looks evil and sometimes an extra closet does reduce clutter. Let’s not debate the exact circumstances when or how much closets are optimum, or how the war on drugs should be fought. Instead, I’d like to hear the paradoxes you can come up with!