Irrationality Can Be Trusted, Inconsistency Cannot

Irrationality and inconsistency are both generally disliked, but when it comes to whether they can be trusted, they’re worlds apart.

Here’s how an irrational person gets disliked. If it’s a superior: unreasonable demands, harassment, impossible targets, plans whose purpose is unclear, “That guy acts important but doesn’t actually understand anything.” If it’s a subordinate: inefficient, does unrelated things instead of following the boss’s instructions, hard to manage.

Here’s how an inconsistent person gets disliked. All talk, no follow-through. “What that guy says changes depending on the time and place.” Last week the boss said “make more detailed documents,” so you made them, and now he barely glances at them and says “just tell me the conclusion, briefly.”

That’s the general tone.

The word “irrational” negates “rational,” and “rational” literally means being in accordance with “reason.” The “reason” here might be mathematical logic, physical logic, psychological logic, or some combination, depending on the time and situation. It’s actually a very unstable thing.

The word “inconsistent” negates “consistent,” and being consistent means being coherent throughout. Whether the act or choice is right or wrong, whether it serves society or not — those questions lie outside the discussion. In other words, this one is actually very simple.

Whether something is irrational depends on your perspective. It’s a famous story that Facebook started out as a service only Harvard students could join. From the viewpoint of “growing the user base,” that’s clearly irrational, but the result was that after Harvard came the Ivy League, then more schools, and it gradually expanded until, as you know, it became a global service. Airbnb didn’t use the internet or social media to find its first hosts. Sales team members visited house by house and negotiated with landlords directly. There’s no shortage of cases where actions that looked clearly irrational for the purpose of scaling turned out to be exactly what enabled scaling.

In other words, these things only “appear irrational.” Inside the person themselves, the logic actually holds together. Other people simply can’t understand it, or can’t accept it. But in most cases, situations like this get dismissed outright as “irrational” — by ignorant critics. In other words, when it comes to approaches to problems without clear answers, questions about the future, or unknown challenges, there’s no need to worry about whether other people find them irrational. Frankly, that worry is wasted effort.

Believe in yourself. That’s it.

Inconsistency, on the other hand, is a serious matter. It calls your character into question, and no one trusts you. More often than not, the person exhibiting inconsistency isn’t even aware of their own inconsistency. That’s because they’ve fabricated “consistency” inside their own mind. For instance, even the inconsistency of “saying different things yesterday and today” might feel, to the person doing it, perfectly consistent — consistent with a rule like “always say whatever benefits me most.” Someone who casually steals other people’s ideas and achievements might likewise feel internally consistent, believing something like “whose achievement it is isn’t the essential issue; the only thing that matters is reliably launching a good service for society.” That possibility can’t be ruled out.

What’s actually happening here is this:

a mix-up between “consistency” and “rationality.”

They force down the inconsistency happening within themselves using some plausible-sounding “reason,” ignore it, and keep moving forward. Living this way is, obviously, full of contradictions and close to collapse. The person who got promoted but is hated by their subordinates, the person who succeeded socially but whose family relationships are a disaster — most of them, I think, are simply paying the bill for inconsistency they sowed somewhere along the way. Inconsistency is betrayal, and it’s self-protection. It produces nothing.

Irrationality: yes. Inconsistency: no.

And most of what the world calls innovation lies within irrationality.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2016/10/87/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.