The Law of the Instrument

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 sometimes 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 really want to drive that nail, everything suddenly looks like a hammer.

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

"When a man believes that any stick will do, he at once picks up a boomerang." --GK Chesterton

[NOTE: This is a re-run post from previous election seasons. I re-run it every election season, because it always applies.]

UPDATE: John Harris of the Washington Post notices the phenomena.

Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit.

What's laughable is that he thinks it's new. It's not. It's as old as American politics itself, and may well have been shopworn when Akhenaten shook up Egypt. All that has changed is the speed with which it propagates.