John Wick and The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I once saw him kill three men in a bar, with a pencil!

I deeply value your attention, but if you haven’t seen the Keanu Reeves masterpiece “John Wick” in the last 48 hours, your time is probably better spent re-watching it. It’s one of those wonderful movies where the plot takes a back seat to the celebration of how cool the central character is. The movie exists to produce the numinous feeling we experience when we imagine a Persian emperor, drawing up his battle lines in front of a narrow mountain pass and seeing 300 Spartans warming up with calisthenics as if they were preparing for a high-school wrestling meet.

The action scenes in the John Wick films are cool, but they only exist to justify a few lines of dialog that the films inscribe on the tablets of the viewers heart (2 Corinthians 3:3). Of course I’m talking about the scenes where the mob bosses talk to their underlings about how much of a bad-ass John Wick is.

“I hope you’ve said your prayers because I’m going to kill you all in 4 seconds.”

Both movies contain Russian mafia bosses delivering the same speech. I will self indulgently repeat my recollection of the speeches here so that people who have already seen the movie can join me in a happy memory. “John Wick wasn’t the Boogey Man, he was the one you sent to kill the fucking Boogey Man…John is a man of focus, commitment, and sheer will. Something you know very little about! I once saw him kill three men in a bar, with a pencil! A fucking pencil! Who the fuck can do that?” Then the lackeys don’t listen, and John Wick inevitably kills them all. You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Mafia bosses exist at the center of the curve, and Lackeys cluster toward the left. John Wick is so far to the right that a scale model of this graph would be over 17 meters high.

As explained in the diagram above. The Dunning-Kruger effect, is a thing that some psychologists noticed. It’s hot right now because people have used it to explain why Trump thinks his stupid-ass can figure out the North Korean problem. If you don’t know what it is, look it up on wikipedia. I’m not going to bore you with a perfunctory attempt to explain it within the confines of this article. Given my lack of credentials, that would be an extremely ironic thing for me to do.

Every John Wick movie has a really cool lady assassin in it.

In every movie of this kind, the Mafia boss is the boss, because he’s smart enough to know that he can’t stop a man like John Wick, only redirect his fury. His lackeys are lackeys because they think if they try really hard they can “just put a bullet in him.” Their limited experience in the world of super assassins gives them no context for just how hard that would be.

This phenomenon is not limited to criminals. If not for the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Oregon County Sheriff's department would have left Rambo alone. They never would have “drawn first blood.”

“He’s only one man! Lets just run into the woods and kill him!”

So now that I’ve taken three minutes of your time, custom dictates that I owe you an explanation of how you can use the half-baked ideas in this article to improve your material circumstances. Here goes:

Lucky for you, you don’t need extraordinary talent to become a success, just develop a sense of perspective about your limitations and learn to be patient with those that don’t. You’ll do well in a world that needs leaders with enough humility to know whats possible, and If by some miracle you employ someone with actual talent, respect their skills and don’t make them angry.

These men are visibly excited about John Wick III. I wish them all painless deaths.