The Eponymous Principles of Management : The Murphy’s Law and Its Variants – Florentin’s Laws – The Adventures of Variations of Passing It On

Florentin’s Laws are mixtures of pessimism (output of Murphy’s Laws) and optimism (Peter’s Laws, with a good pinch of humour added.

Thus,

Murphy’s Law

“If anything can go wrong, will go wrong’

Or

Peter’s Law

‘If anything can go wrong, fix it’

When transformed to

Florentin’s Law

Becomes

‘If anything can go wrong pass it on to others’

Being paradoxist in nature, Florentin’s Laws are especially deviations, modifications, generalizations, contra-sayings, parodies, or mixtures of the previous Murphyís Laws and Peter’s Laws. And also of aphorisms, proverbs, known citations, clichés, scientific results (from physics, mathematics, philosophy, …), etc. Alternatively, collations of opposite ideas – gathered from folklore, from ads, from literature, from familiar speech.[1]

Florentin Smarandache, the creator of (so-called) Florentin’s Laws has been the Founder of neutrosophy (generalization of dialectics), neutrosophic set, logic, probability and statistics, since 1995[2]. Neutrosophy is a new branch of philosophy that studies the origin, nature, and scope of neutralities, as well as their interactions with different ideational spectra. Etymologically, neutro-sophy [French neutre < Latin neuter, neutral, and Greek sophia, skill/wisdom] means knowledge of neutral thought. The term was coined by the author.

This theory considers every notion or idea <A> together with its opposite or negation <antiA> and with their spectrum of neutralities <neutA> in between them (i.e., notions or ideas supporting neither <A> nor <antiA>). The <neutA> and <antiA> ideas together are referred to as <nonA>. According to Neutrosophy theory every idea <A> tends to be neutralized and balanced by <antiA> and <nonA> ideas – as a state of equilibrium.[3]

Devoid of this clutter of the seemingly complicated theory of neutrosophy, Florentin’s Laws are neither Murphy’s (pessimistic) Laws nor Peter’s (optimistic) Laws, but partially pessimistic and partially optimistic, while another part is neutral (Ambiguous: neither pessimistic nor optimistic) – as in neutrosophic logic.

As Florentin Smarandache puts it across in his book, Florentin’s Laws (If anything can go wrong pass it on to someone else!), referred to earlier,

in philosophical parlance, Peter’s law can be considered as Weberian (you know, those who think that hard-work ethics is the basic element of good society, and it does), while Murphy’s law may be more like ‘Malthusian’ (for who can escape from the fate of anything that can possibly go wrong?). In this sense, Florentin’s law can be considered as something between these extreme situations: it is more comparable to Zen attitude, in the sense that it is advising us to keep the hard work but keep it fun too.

Or if we are allowed to rephrase a wisdom saying:

“Give me strength to change what can be changed,
And patience to accept what cannot be changed,
And courage to pass it on to someone else to make the changes happened,
And wisdom to keep the change.”

The video clip’ Florentin’s Law’ – by Amalia Grigorescu – very succinctly goes on to present several other variations of the Florentin’s Law.

[1] Florentin’s Laws (If anything can go wrong pass it on to someone else!) – by Florentin Smarandache

[2] Florentin Smarandache

[3] Florentin Smarandache: Law of Included Multiple-Middle – Book Review

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