Contrarianism

Contrarianism:When the opposing outcome is presumed the more plausible resultant, you are taking the contrarian view. In short, Contrarianism is the belief that the unlikely will likely occur.

Contrarianism is useful because despite man's efforts at predicting the future, events are constantly running contrary to his best forecasts. There are three major factors that cause forecasters to predict events that never occur. Those three are pride, fear, and greed.

Pride
Men have always sought to unveil the future. By being able to predict the future, one hopes to gain for himself a supernatural quality. Pride causes men to go beyond the limits of good reasoning and predict things that are unlikely to occur.

Fear
For the most part, fear confuses people's better judgment; it causes them to overstate the dangers that face them, fear causes the majority to hold on to the status quo, and the fear of losing wealth or status will induce some people to make dire predictions.

Greed
When individuals excessively desire an outcome to occur, they will often manufacture the means by which that outcome can be realized. The level of greed generally indicates how extreme the prognosticating will be.

Looking past the problems with human nature, there is another reason why mankind is continuously wrong when it comes to predicting the future. Because of the sinfulness of man, God purposely causes him to be lead astray. It says in 2 Thessalonians, "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 THS 2:11-12)

Although the unreliability of man's prognostications about the future would cause some to pause, for contrarians that unreliability can be used as a productive forecasting tool. By simply taking the opposite viewpoint, contrarians are able to gain a better grasp of those events that are yet to occur.

Contrarianism does have its limitations. Sometimes events happen just as man expected, and sometimes events transpire in ways that are different from the positive and the opposite expectancy. Contrarian thinking, however, can be a more reliable tool in forecasting events.

Here is some Contrarian Examples from the Past

Predictions that failed people
Ronald Reagan would die in office due to the 20-year curse. We all known that he remains alive today.
The killer bees were going to create havoc throughout the US.
The price of oil would reach 50 dollars a barrel and gas would be selling for 5 dollars a gallon. Today gas is cheaper, via inflated dollars, than it was in the seventies.
We were all going to burn up from a hole in the ozone layer.
A global computer crash from the Y2K bug.
Events that people failed to predict
The Cuban Missile Crisis.
The collapse of Eastern Communist Europe.
The outbreak of AIDS primarly among gays.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
People who live contrary to God often suffer a contrary fate.
John Lennon said, the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ. In 1980 Lennon was killed by an assassin.
Graham Chapman, of Monty Python fame, played a Jesus parody character in the "Life of Brian." He was claimed by cancer in 1989.
The Rock group Nirvana had a video that showed a very old man on a cross while a girl in a KKK outfit pranced around him. The leader of that group Kurt Cobain shot himself over depression.
I can recall the clamor over the Robert Maplethorpe art exhibit. Maplethorpe's "art" spanned the whole spectrum. It went form child porn, to the homoerotic, and ended with a picture of himself as a horned demonic figure. Mr. Maplethorpe died of AIDS just before the big uproar over his work.
Bon Scott, the first lead singer for AC/DC, died from alcohol abuse. After passing out, he suffocated form an air blockage, possibly caused by vomiting.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair is famous for playing a key role in the Supreme Court decision to ban prayer from public schools. A former office manager of O'Hair killed the atheist, her son and her granddaughter. The motive for the crime was simple greed.