Astonishingly Simple Postulate

The Astonishingly Simple Postulate is to postulates what a husband's opinion is to his wife: simple, concise, and always wrong. However, it is the very lack of complexity that makes this postulate so alluring—if not downright irresistible.

The only problem is that the only known copy of the postulate was lost, destroyed, or eaten by an eccentric philosopher several hundred years before it became widely popular—so the only indication of its existence is from a margin note scribbled alongside some ancient Greek writing on arithmetic.

Yet the non-existence of the postulate hasn't stopped its wide adoption, hasn't halted numerous and lengthy books on it, nor has it prevented equally lengthy proofs of its invalidity by amateur thinkers.

Professional philosophers would, of course, decry these nullifying proofs as 'a failure of the individual to comprehend such a simultaneously simplistic and subtly complex statement'; however, off the record they'd admit to having no idea what they just said on the record.

And so the postulate remains an ongoing entity in society and the world—influencing politics and thought, occasionally causing a physical mishap here and there, but overall charming people with its elegantly simplistic (and yet absent) content.