There is a very funny scene in Game of Thrones, where Arya, the youngest of the Starks, is stuck on avenging her family. One of the people on her list is the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Queen Cersei. As Arya is wondering through Westeros in her journey to kill the Queen, she encounters a bunch of the Queen’s soldiers. She is hungry and tired, and decides to stop and make conversation.
Everything is going well until they ask her where it is she is going. What is she doing? Well, she’s going to kill the Queen, right? Most of us would lie. If the Queen’s soldiers found out, they’d kill us, at the very least arrest us. But what does she do? She tells them the truth… “I’m going to kill the Queen“. And what do they do? They look at each other in disbelief. They try to reason her response. What person in their right mind would tell them such a thing, right? And what do they do? They laugh it off.
All humans have a natural tendency to try to make sense of the world. When things do not make sense, it makes us uneasy, stressed, uncomfortable. It’s not a nice feeling. This is exactly what those soldiers did; they reasoned her response as nonsense, it made them uncomfortable, they looked at each other for comfort, they were not able to find something that made sense to them, they laughed it off as a joke.
I’ll give another example. There is a new TV drama based on the Chernobyl accident of 1986 in Ukraine. In the early hours of April 26, as part of a test which required one of the reactors to be shutdown, reactor #4 became unstable and exploded. The consequences of the reactor exploding were unimaginable by everyone involved. And as you would expect, everyone tried to reason this insanity.
After workers at the plant feel the explosion, they all look at each other trying to understand what happened. Keep in mind they are all highly trained physicists (think PhDs). These are not dumb service workers. Suddenly a fellow worker rushes into the control room and cries “It exploded… the core exploded…” Everyone looks at each other realizing the implications and danger of the situation, if true. And what do they do? The lead engineer says “He’s in shock, get him out of here“.
Just like with Arya telling the truth to the very soldiers sworn to defend their Queen, these smart men, could not comprehend their truth. And as we normally do, they too, tried to reason their way out of it.
It is our inherit susceptibility to making sense of the world that often fools us into believing lies. Next time you are faced with something that does not make sense, stop for a second, do not dismiss it, and think.
