It seems counterintuitive that I’m trying to decrease the amount of cobras, India created a lucrative cobra market. In efforts to rid themselves of the pesky cobra problem in the country, India offered a bounty for any dead cobra brought to them. In the beginning, the plan seemed to work as the government received many dead snakes; but, the country was poor and riddled with poverty and the citizens soon found it more lucrative to rather capture and breed cobras to kill. Rather than decreasing the population of cobras, they increased it immensely and moved the problem into the homes of those they were trying to protect. This method is now the origin of the term, “Cobra Economics,” which by definition, in completely counterintuitive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
It seems counterintuitive that extreme obedience should become destructive. It was sixty seven years ago that Stanley Milgram performed a set of experiments to determine how destructive obedience could be. Though obedience is most commonly considered a good quality, but when obedience surpasses an individual’s better judgement, it can be destructive. Milgram found in his studies that sixty five percent of participants obeyed strict orders even when it involved electrocution of another person at four hundred and fifty volts. Those numbers increased as the voltage went down. This outcome was unforeseen and greatly varied from the low percentages that were first predicted. It shows that situational forces and absolute authority can turn obediance from a good attribute to that of destruction.
It seems counterintuitive that during the cold war, the Soviet Union had to destroy itself in order to destroy the enemy. In order to prevent the German army from defeating the Soviet Union used the scorched earth policy to deprive the Germans of the supplies necessary to their survival. While the plan did work, the Soviet union had many harsh consequences. These include the deportation of millions upon millions of Soviet citizens, along with the destruction of almost all raw material depots, and the annihilation of almost all goods necessary to sustain the country. The Soviet Union suffered from these consequences for years to come, and one must wonder if the effects of German control would have been more or less negatively impacting than that of the scorched earth policy.
Counterintuitive 