Generally we think of things in terms of cause and effect. As in the past informs the present. As in everything that is happening now is the result of some undisclosed happening at an earlier time. This is simply a function of the linearity of time. The ball hit the window and shattered it to pieces. The effect: the window shattering to pieces. The cause: the ball hitting the window. No denying that.
Now remove the cause. All that is left is a shattered window and a ball resting near by. A broken window and a ball and no explanation save for the obvious one: that the ball smashed into the window and broke it to pieces. Given the same set of circumstances, not too many people would think twice before blaming that pesky neighbor boy (Dennis!). From the effect, you assume the cause. And by Doyle's Law you'd be right most every time. But what if an opportunistic burglar found a ball in your yard and used it to smash in the window? What if a fat lady singing nearby hit that note that we all remember from cartoons and such that shatters glass and then the neighbor boy (Dennis!) smacked a dinger that landed in your living room?What if an over-imaginative blogger broke your window to make a point?
In any of those cases, or the literally two or three more zany (do they have to be zany?) examples I could come up with, the perceived cause would not be the true cause. You'd go on living your life based on the assumption that that no-good neighbor boy (Dennis!) was slated to grow up a social miscreant. Shortcut to making a point: without actually observing it, the cause can be one of literally five or six alternatives. You'll never know because you could possibly never know. Maybe Dennis (Dennis!) never grows up to be a social miscreant, he probably will though.
How we doing so far? You still with me? Please leave a comment if you are, you'd be the first.
Okay, so if you're not there to measure the cause, that means that you're only seeing the effect. Talking about the historical scale--measured in epochs, paradigms and/or milieus (at least one of those words is applicable to what I'm trying to convey. welcome to the 1%)--we're only observing the now. The right now. I mean, not even yesterday. Not even two seconds ago. But I digress, I don't want to sound too existential, so let's stick with the past as we see it. Images in black and white are old, older in sepia, and even older carved in stone. The past: newsreels, silent films sped up to comical proportions and contraptions. Always contraptions. I'm having way too much fun describing the past, so once again, I digress.
Every single notion that we have now based on what happened before is from accounts of those events that are not our own. Did Gutenberg invent the printing press (You're goddamn right he did!)? Shoot! We'll I didn't see it and all evidence leads to that assumption. So the printed word in mass quantities exists because of Gutenberg. Books are the effect. Gutenberg is the cause. (So he's to blame! Man books are lame.)
History is written by the victors. - Winthorp Churchill
Every assumption that we've ever made about our effect (our now) has been written by the victors. First, of all who the hell is Victor? And is he some sort of clone/robot/spider type individual?
So we have all of these effects, but we can't verify any of the causes. This can lead into two possible discussions, one of which I will latch onto and the other of which I will give a cursory explanation due to my growing drowsiness.
There are people writing our history to shape our now. Bah! Illuminati and all that tin foil hat wearing jazz. No fun. Please don't let me become that person. Yawn. Okay onto the one that I actually want to discuss.
Things happen and there is a cause. Cause then effect. But no, what if it is the other way around? Effect, then cause. The effect is the cause and the cause is the effect. The pesky neighbour boy (I changed my spell-checker to UK English) hit the ball through the window because it was going to break. The window was deemed to have broken at that particular instance because the neighbour boy's (Dennis!) entire life had led him to breaking that glass. His love of baseball, his lack of a strong father figure to teach him not to throw like a pansy, his stupid little sister hogging the TV watching Dora the Explorer. All of that as a result of that window needing to be broken at that particular time. The explanation follows the occurrence and the cause follows the effect. Such is the case in blame.
In shirking responsibility the first thing we do is look for a culprit. We look for a cause to our effect. The cause is determined after the effect.
Cause and effect. Effect and cause.
'Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
"Those who are doomed to repeat the past have not yet found a patsy on which to blame their troubles."
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