Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry Niven

There’s a special kind of arrogance baked into forecasting: the belief that “the crowd” is a system you can model like weather. Niven’s line punctures that confidence with a dry, engineer’s shrug. The joke is in the phrasing: not “what people will do,” but what they will “suddenly decide is rational.” Rationality, in other words, isn’t a stable standard; it’s a social mood that gets retrofitted onto whatever the herd already wants.

The intent reads like a warning to anyone seduced by tidy predictions - economists with curves, pundits with panels, sci-fi readers expecting plausible futures to behave logically. Niven, writing from a genre that lives on extrapolation, is admitting the one variable that ruins every clean equation: collective psychology. Millions don’t pivot because of airtight argument; they pivot because status shifts, fear spikes, incentives change, information warps, and a new story becomes the one you’re allowed to tell at dinner without sounding crazy.

Subtextually, it’s also a jab at the way “rational” gets weaponized. People don’t merely choose; they justify. A society can decide austerity is “responsible,” surveillance is “safety,” a bubble is “innovation,” or a scapegoat is “common sense,” and the label does the laundering. Niven’s cynicism isn’t misanthropy so much as systems literacy: large groups are brilliant at coordination and awful at self-awareness.

Context matters: a late-20th-century science fiction writer watching technology accelerate, politics polarize, and markets swing knows the future isn’t just gadgets. It’s the stories masses agree to call reason.