Centerfield

The Law of the Instrument

A re-run thread from last election season, as it certainly seems appropriate:

We've all heard them--those cynical maxims of insight that help distill experience into simple "laws" for dealing with reality. The classic example is Murphy's Law. "If anything can go wrong, it will." And of course, there's O'Toole's Corollary to Murphy's Law. "Murphy was an optimist."

Then there's Abraham Kaplan's Law of the Instrument, often mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain. "Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." This is also often stated as "If you give a child a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Accountants see all problems as solvable by accounting methods, lawyers use legal means to address them, doctors view everything as organic systems that can be sliced or medicated, etc. And that leads me to Tully's Corollary to the Law of the Instrument.

"When you really want to drive a nail, everything starts to look like a hammer." It doesn't matter if it's a rock or a wrench, a blender or a board or a baguette, if you really want to drive that nail, you'll try anything that comes to hand.

At no time is this more evident than during election season.