This is such an obvious fact that virtually everyone will defend it in their private lives, yet people often act publicly as if they can treat other humans as mere interchangeable cogs to be acted upon who have no personal nature or agency. As if all that really exists and differs between us are the machines we’re slotted into, and it’s the institutions that define and produce individuality, rather than individuals that define and produce institutions.

How much of our modern pathology is the result of our estrangement from the realities of cause and effect? We see effects, and we don’t see how they were produced, and so we assume that they were produced by the nearest associated thing. And therefore if we can just stand on top of that thing we will have gained the effect. It’s a very childish way of looking at the world. Children think credit cards are what let you buy things, because they don’t see or recognize the entire chain of causes that makes the effect of the credit card work. They have causality backward, but can’t see it, because we have hidden it away, and because we think in very simple terms.