In the movie The Counselor, a lawyer sees an opportunity for quick money. But things go awry. A man is dead, a shipment is missing, and he finds himself accused by dangerous people.
His friend is not optimistic about his chances.
I am perfectly willing to believe you had nothing to do with this but I am not the party you need to convince.
The friend, played by Brad Pitt, offers little help.
They’re a pragmatic lot. They don’t believe in coincidences.
They’ve heard of them. They’ve just never seen one.
Most of us are not quite that skeptical – or that dangerous. We often find coincidence believable.
The national election of 2016 is just one example. We start with a series of facts that would require a series of connections much harder to believe than simple coincidence. Hillary Clinton stumbles in the heat of New York City while cameras roll. Paid speeches to Wall Street banks come back to haunt her. Her technical clumsiness with emails get amplified way beyond its actual significance. Key people, one a valued friend, are lost to killers in Benghazi. Votes are distributed in just the right way in a mishmash electoral system originally installed to preserve slavery.
Coincidence.
Add to that other coincidences: A frightened FBI director, scared down to his socks by the possibility that Republicans will see him as unfair, decides to act unfairly in order to look fair to conservatives. He administers a rhetorical beating while announcing that nothing legally wrong has been found. And, of course, the Wikileaks campaign using stolen, and occasionally edited, electronic documents.
All coincidence.
I do have to confess that other against-the-odds events form an accidental pattern that is hard to ignore.
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