The cause-and-effect chains
Scientists know very well about the cause-and-effect chain. Discounting quantum randomness in the macro world of human beings, nothing happens without something(s) happening first that contributed to the event in question happening. Medical professionals know it too and they always try to locate the original cause of the illness, instead of just trying to suppress the symptoms. So why don’t politicians, journalists, public servants and the police do that?
Some of you may have heard of the horrific mass shooting that happened in a Canadian Province – Nova Scotia – that ended up killing a police officer and 22 innocent people in their homes. The news item that prompted this tirade was the announcement that a petition was signed by many people to change the name of the local high school to ‘honour’ the memory of this police officer.
I would have been so much happier if they announced a task force made up of doctors, psychologists, criminal lawyers and other experts to investigate why and how this man, the killer, went crazy to commit these acts. He wasn’t born to be a mass murderer. No one in his sane mind would look at a newborn baby and say: “this boy will be a mass murderer”.
There was a cause and I am sure there were many, many, contributing factors of how he was treated growing up, how his parents were treated growing up, how our modern industrial, money based, predatory, super consumerist Capitalist system contributed to driving this man crazy.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how dehumanizing, alienating, mercilessly degrading our system can be to the most vulnerable of us. The answer is clear, but the solution will forever evade us. As I said in one of my 22 Tweets I have ever made: “Solution to mankind’s problems are simple an obvious. They remain unsolved because those who have the power to solve them don’t want to.”
Some of you may have heard of the horrific mass shooting that happened in a Canadian Province – Nova Scotia – that ended up killing a police officer and 22 innocent people in their homes. The news item that prompted this tirade was the announcement that a petition was signed by many people to change the name of the local high school to ‘honour’ the memory of this police officer.
I would have been so much happier if they announced a task force made up of doctors, psychologists, criminal lawyers and other experts to investigate why and how this man, the killer, went crazy to commit these acts. He wasn’t born to be a mass murderer. No one in his sane mind would look at a newborn baby and say: “this boy will be a mass murderer”.
There was a cause and I am sure there were many, many, contributing factors of how he was treated growing up, how his parents were treated growing up, how our modern industrial, money based, predatory, super consumerist Capitalist system contributed to driving this man crazy.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how dehumanizing, alienating, mercilessly degrading our system can be to the most vulnerable of us. The answer is clear, but the solution will forever evade us. As I said in one of my 22 Tweets I have ever made: “Solution to mankind’s problems are simple an obvious. They remain unsolved because those who have the power to solve them don’t want to.”
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Having said that, regarding cause-and-effect patterns, I think one issue is also that, more often than not, there aren't any simple answers in determining the cause (you do refer to "many, many, contributing factors", but I'm not entirely convinced we can always find a single cause; perhaps sometimes we can at best find a single triggering cause, but not a single core cause).
I think people often want simple answers to complex questions (it's human nature), which can be a dangerous field — this is what Mark Blyth famously referred to as "Trumpism": When you're a lower-middle-class American or European, it's easier to blame Antonio or Ahmed for your lousy life and the fact you're working 12 hours per day for pennies, rather than i) sit down and think why it's so easy to create money out of nothing for wars and Wall Street but oh-so-hard when it comes to student debt or social security; ii) (and this is the hard one) do something about it.