Occam’s Razor | The Direction of Intention

The Baseline [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on April 26, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

It is the challenge of our times: discerning what is real and what is not. We lack a baseline for truth.

Photographs used to be proof. Video and audio clips were once incontestable. No more.

We live in bubbles of outrage fueled by easy misinformation. Journalism has morphed into entertainment that amps-up the outrage. Fuels the division. Manufactured division is probably our baseline. Our shared truth.

As MM recently wrote, attributing some of our lack of discernment to, “a toxic level of the willing suspension of disbelief required for the mass consumption of “reality television”. After all, reality tv has nothing to do with reality. The act of pointing a camera at something changes the basic nature of the event into a performance. We behave differently on camera than we do off-camera. Reality television is not real just as “truth social” has nothing to do with truth. We are drowning in misnomers. We are lost in our branding.

MAGA world likes to point at 47 and call him a businessman. That, of course, is a role he played on television. In reality, off-camera, he’s driven his companies into bankruptcy six times. There’s an entire industry of media apologists and spin doctors dedicated to painting lipstick on this pig, committed to torturing cowboy-sense out of his dangerous nonsense, his incessant lies, his grift.

In the absence of discernment, conspiracy theories grow like so much mold. Many in this nation without question (or the capacity to question) swallow swill and call it sugar. Heavily addicted to outrage, fed a steady diet of an anger-drug by our media, we are rendered incapable of shared truth and impervious to common (shared) sense. And, sadly, fact-checking seems to take too much effort.

We eschew discernment.

We are in desperate need of Occam’s razor: “a guiding principle in logic and philosophy that suggests when faced with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is usually the best. It emphasizes the importance of minimizing unnecessary assumptions or complexities when seeking an explanation.”

The simplest explanation: “from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.” The minimum wage hasn’t risen since 2009. Manufactured division, divided as we are in our media-fueled bubbles of outrage, keeps us easily distracted from our actual antagonists.

Perpetually seeing red prohibits us from seeing the rest of the color-sense-spectrum, prohibits us from discernment rooted in a baseline of shared truth. It’s a fact: 90% of us grow poorer and poorer as the 1% openly trashes our democracy to give themselves a tax cut and a guaranteed cheap labor force. Is it no wonder that we are outraged?

Outrage should be our baseline. Just not focused at each other.

read Kerri’s blogpost about REALITY

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Filed under: smack-dab | Tagged: artistry, baseline, branding, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discernment, division, fact, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, misnomer, Occam's Razor, reality, reality tv, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | Leave a comment »

Cartoon Possibilities [David’s blog on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on February 26, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Call it self-preservation. With the inspiration of MM, I am compiling a mountain of cartoon ideas borne of the laugh-or-cry idiocracy currently sweeping away the nation. There seems to be no bottom to the inanity of the red-hat cult and those that they’ve elevated to power.

The abundance of comic fodder spewing forth from overly sincere conservative faces has me meditating on what makes them both so horrific and so funny. It is this: they ignore – and expect us to ignore –Occam’s Razor. The Principle of Parsimony: It’s a good rule of thumb, if sanity is the goal, to seek the simplest explanation. It is usually the best. If insanity is the aim, seek conspiracy theories and complex machinations.

Take, for instance, the fires in California. Jewish Space Lasers meet unraked forests? Or, perhaps rising global temperatures and drought are to blame? The first requires a reliance on science-fiction and a multi-layer-cake of ill-intent, stupidity and bigotry. The second relies on science. And common sense.

Or, consider this snicker-worthy intrigue: Did the COVID-19 vaccine included microchips capable of tracking people? Or, was it protecting citizens from a raging pandemic? Again, the first requires a madcap sci-fi dystopian fantasy. Occum’s Razor would have us tip toward the reality of science responding to the pandemic. (note: if you use a cell phone or shop on line, there’s no need to vaccinate a chip into your body since you are infinitely locate-able. Google maps already knows where you are since getting you from point A to point B requires, well, knowing where you are…).

The red hats are awash in conspiracy theories. The fox revels in fueling the fantastic and muddling the minds of the easily led. In my comic-thought the actual red hats are lined with tin-foil to protect their brains from alien mind control. That, and better ham radio reception.

I suppose if human beings are capable of believing that the earth is flat, that climate change is a hoax, that the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary was a scam, that Democrats are drinking baby’s blood beneath the streets of Washington D.C…they are also capable of believing in the big boogeyman, the Deep State. It’s the reason we’re been force-fed for the dismantling of our Democracy. Woke waste and fraud! George Soros secretly controlling the world’s economy! Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!

It is worthy of cartooning and lampooning. Or a good cry.

This just in from historian Heather Cox Richardson: “…the relative stability of American democracy in the late twentieth century allowed politicians to win office with the narrative that the government was stifling individualism, taking money from hardworking taxpayers to provide benefits to the undeserving…But the Trump administration’s massive and random cuts to the federal workforce are revealing that the narrative of government waste does not line up with reality.“

Does not line up with reality. Occum’s Razor. It’s the simplest explanation for how we find ourselves in an era dominated by lies and lunacy. It’s a rich (and increasingly sad) field of cartooning possibilities.

read Kerri’s blogpost on THE CLOUD

an oldie from the archives at Flawed Cartoon International

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Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Pattern, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, cartoons, common sense, conspiracy theory, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Heather Cox Richardson, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lemmings, lies, lunacy, Occam's Razor, reality, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 3 Comments »

Ask, “What’s Really Happening?” [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on September 14, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

Lately I’ve been mourning the loss of Occam’s Razor, you know, that simple but useful little principle that, in the presence of two explanations that account for facts, the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct. In our current national spin, the corrosive and stupidly-complex justifications are overrunning the simple explanation every time. For instance, is it more likely that the “Democrat” leaders are conspiring to inflate the pandemic numbers in a worldwide conspiracy (yes, 195 countries that rarely agree on anything are united in collusion with the American Democratic party!) to bring down the president – or – did the man botch the job and that’s why our numbers are so high? I’m going with botched job since I still have sight of Occam with plenty of data sharpening that simple razor.

Sometimes when I am sifting my too-many-thoughts-for-a-post I’ll jump into the Google pool in the hope that I’ll hit my head on a Google rock and clarity or at least some sense will come. Today I typed in a question: what conspiracy theories helped bring down the Roman Empire? There’s plenty to read if the fall of Rome is on your mind. I went down the rabbit hole and bumbled upon this fun phrase embedded in the List Of Conspiracy Theories page on Wikipedia [sidebar: there are more inane conspiracy theories than you might imagine and most find their place on the “What were we thinking” shelf-of-shame after a year or two passes. We can only hope that the good folks at Q or the pandemic deniers take their place high on the shelf before too long and too many people are hurt or killed from their delusion. Occam would cut them to ribbons if he weren’t laughing/crying so hard].

I digress. Here’s the phrase: Psychologists attribute finding a conspiracy theory where there is none to a mental illness called illusory pattern perception. Illusory Pattern Perception. It’s a “phenomenon in which observers see patterns that do not exist.” The epicenter of the illness that drives folks to see what is not there: lack of control. It’s existential, this American decline.

We are rapidly becoming the poster child for “a nation divided cannot stand.” As a lover of pattern, perception, and metaphor I find it profoundly sad that our latest chapter of lack of control has led us to division and mental illness. Seeing patterns where none exist. Making up horror stories about each other rather than letting Occam’s razor slice away the absurd and elucidate some simple truth.

Lack of control, as we know from the stories we just shared about 9/11, can also unite us. Lack of control can clarify us. It can inspire us to run into burning buildings, link arms with fellow passengers to rush a cockpit – knowing full well your action will bring a plane down and your life to an end – and do it anyway because your action will save the lives of people you’ll never meet or know. The lack of control can inspire us to stand in the hot fires of injustice (injustice is a control mechanism) and declare it wrong.

Unity, goodness, self-sacrifice – all of these virtues are exposed – or can be – in moments when control abandons us. Our path need not be ugly, vicious, divisive, or inhumane. The mental illness that blinds us is not natural to this nation – or to humanity. It’s what happens when frightened people, feeling out of control, meet a salesman of snake-oil solutions, a weaver of dark places in the public mind, rather than link arms and ask, “What’s really happening?”

read Kerri’s blog post about AMERICAN DECLINE

Filed under: Merely A Thought Monday, Metaphor, Pattern, Perspective | Tagged: american decline, conspiracy theory, control, control fantasy, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, delusion, division, Google, illusory pattern perception, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lack of control, mental illness, Occam's Razor, pandemic, pattern, perception, spin | 2 Comments »

Find The First Principle [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on March 9, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

anger copy

I don’t know about you but the moments in my life that I am the least proud are the moments that I was steeped in anger. In anger, I have said things that I didn’t mean and done things that I now regret. There is no real strength to be found in anger. There is only blindness and weakness.

We live in the great age of the misnomer. In anger we slap a label of virtue on the mad face of vice.

Step outside and you’re likely to be trampled by a stampeding herd of verbal misdirection. If your brain is not pulped by rage and you are curious enough to question, you just might survive the stampede. But do not think you are safe! That roaring that you hear is nothing less than an avalanche of obfuscation.

Occam would have a field day using his razor on phrases like “alternative truth.” What are the odds that a lie is a lie and not an alternative at all? He would roll his eyes at us. “What entices you, ” he would ask, after slicing the alternative from the truth, “to willingly swallow so much word-gumbo?”

The answer is easy and readily apparent: anger. We are an angry nation getting angrier. Angry people rarely ask questions. Anger and Reason are never seen sitting at the same table. Angry people are especially gullible, easily whipped into an frenzy, and led by the nose into concocted fights. People are made angry in order to focus their blood shot eyes on made-up-divides. There is nothing that bonds an Us like the perception of an invading Them.

If you survive the avalanche of obfuscation, duck, cover, and roll as the squadron of conspiracy theories are certainly swooping in to drop their fantastic story-bombs. Misdirection. Obfuscation. Cries of “Hoax!” and “Witch hunt!”

Anger, so we’re told, is a secondary emotion. It is a cover-up emotion, a protection against feeling the primary thing, like fear or loss. Anger is what happens when the metaphoric dog is backed into the corner. It’s better to bark and snap than to feel shame or sadness or otherwise vulnerable, especially in public. It’s easier to punch, to blame, to rage than it is to deal with the first principle.

What we-the-people have in common, our first principle, is suffocating under all of this anger.

Sharpening his razor, Occam might ask, “What would happen if you dealt with what you were really feeling instead of covering it up with so much fury? What’s beneath the anger? Deal with that.”

History teaches that when a leader fans anger into a red hot flame, the purpose is to forge the gullible into a thoughtless mob. These are the necessary bellows: obfuscation, misdirection, conspiracy theories a-go-go. Blame. Blame. Blame.

Mobs are not really strong. They are flashes in a vapid leader’s pan. They return to their strength when the fire burns itself out, when their eyes clear, and they once again become capable of asking, “What’s going on?”

Anger and strength – despite what the stampeding herd would like you to believe – are not the same thing. One requires the presence of mind and clear sight – and the other is defined by blindness and the absence of thought.

read Kerri’s blog post about ANGER AS PROXY