He Probably Just Forgot

Mental Models for Masons — Hanlon’s Razor

Every Wednesday, a new framework for seeing what's already happening in your lodge, your workplace, and your life.

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Hanlon’s Razor is usually stated as: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I would soften the second word. Brother Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, initiated into Lodge Amalia in Weimar in 1780, put it better two centuries before Hanlon submitted his version to a joke book: misunderstandings and neglect create more mischief in the world than malice and wickedness, and the latter two are far less common. In a lodge, distraction, exhaustion, and forgetfulness cover most of it.

The Secretary did not return your email because he has 200 members on his rolls, a full-time job, and his wife just had surgery. The Worshipful Master did not acknowledge your idea at the last meeting because he was managing three agenda items and a plumbing emergency in the basement. The brother who promised to call you back and did not was not sending a message. He was overwhelmed and your call fell off his list.

Lodge politics runs largely on misattribution. A brother feels slighted by something that happened at a meeting. He interprets it as intentional. He tells another brother, who agrees it seemed deliberate. A narrative forms. Within two months, a genuine grievance has calcified around something that was, in its original form, someone being stretched too thin to pay attention.

This does not mean malice never exists. It does. But it is rarer than we think, and the habit of assuming it first does more damage to lodge culture than the occasional actual slight ever could. A room full of men who assume good faith operates differently from a room full of men cataloging offenses.

The practical version of Hanlon’s Razor in a lodge is a phone call. Before the story sets, before the narrative hardens, call the brother and ask. “I noticed you didn’t respond to my message about the event. Everything okay?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is some version of “I’m sorry, I completely forgot.” The tenth time, you have surfaced something real that needed addressing anyway.

The razor does not make you naive. It makes you accurate more often than the alternative does. Most of the time, the simplest explanation is the right one, and the simplest explanation is almost never “he did it on purpose.”

-Brother Rob

Rob Linn builds teams, lodges, and nonprofits, and writes about what happens when organizations stop earning the loyalty of the people who show up for them. Find his books at bosley.press.