We spend a lot of time talking about problems, effects, and causes.
But, sadly, we talk mainly about the effects of problems rather than focus on their causes.
If you ask people what are the most pressing problems in the world today they’ll mention things like the climate emergency, multiple wars, and (well, certainly in 2020) pandemics. We all want someone to “solve” these problems. But when we talk about such problems in this way, we are focusing on effects not causes.
The climate emergency
“Everybody talks about the
weatherclimate, but nobody does anything about it.”
We talk incessantly about the effects of the unusual weather we’ve been having the last few years and decades.
But global warming creating a climate emergency has causes. And we know what they are. The massive generation of greenhouse gases generated over the last 200 years by the burning of fossil fuels. It’s time to stop focusing on the effects of human activity and focus on the causes, and what we have to do to change them.
Wars
Similarly, we read every day about the multiple horrific wars raging around our planet. Sometimes, they’ve been going on so long, they’ve become part of our mental wallpaper.
These wars are not the outcome of a chance event we can only wring our hands at. They are the creations of corrupt and/or mentally ill human beings (e.g. Putin, Netanyahu) driven by their internal demons to wreak havoc on the world. Or the culmination of decades of mistrust and abuse by one culture against another (e.g., Israel versus Hamas).
We rightly wring our hands over the devastating effects of wars, and try not to think about their causes.
Pandemics
And while pandemics are not directly caused by human actions, their severity and duration are. In the 5 year of the COVID pandemic, the virus continues to kill thousands every week and inflict severe long-term illnesses on millions. And we already know the causes, and methods (e.g., 1, 2) to mitigate this suffering. Yet there’s no question that we could do a much better job in reducing the loss of life and its quality.
Effects versus causes
Human beings respond in these ways for complicated reasons.
Extricating ourselves from these messes is very difficult.
But as long as we concentrate on problems that we define as effects, instead of exploring, understanding, and acting on the causes, we will continue to live in a world that contains far more misery than there needs to be.