Is pretending to be stupid a good defense?

“I don’t know what happened!” “That’s crazy!” “I didn’t notice.” “You should probably talk to _____ about that.” “Huh, that’s weird!” “I have no idea!”

All responses of people pretending and hiding behind their choices when they actually did play the lead role in a bad choice. So is pretending to be stupid a good defense?

Kids do it all the time. Addicts do it. Cheaters do it. And grown folks who want the benefit of your relationship without the consequences of their actions do it.

The problem with it is we WANT to believe people. We truly have a desire to think people act within the model we’ve created for them in our heads. It’s a reasonable expectation to think people will have reasonable explanations.

Some don’t. Some people don’t think about the implications of their behaviors and then wrongly believe you’ll overlook them if they tell you they’re not important or gaslight you into thinking they don’t exist.

So what do we do when this happens? It’s not hard to figure out little Johnny ate all the chocolate before dinner when there’s chocolate all over his face. It’s not hard to see the alcoholic showed up drunk. It’s really not hard to deduce a lot of things that people deny doing, so that’s when you have to rely on your intuition. Trust and also verify.

If it smells like a duck, walks like a duck, looks like a duck, but talks like a pig…it’s just a bilingual duck but it’s still a duck.