Excerpt #14 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
IDENTIFYING CAUSE
We live with the consequences of our actions as we are constantly reminded by the media.
What we experience daily in our personal and professional lives are but expressions and effects of what came before.
These manifestations serve as evidence of our power to influence our lives and consequently each other’s.
The problems, of all scales, we witness and experience today are consequences of our prior individual and collective behavior.
We too often overlook this fact in our scramble to find solutions.
We become so enmeshed in the ramifications of these symptoms that we don’t stop to consider, or we lose sight of, the underlying causes.
We become so consumed and overwhelmed by these effects that we sustain, extend, and sometimes even enlarge them by our involvement.
As our concerns with the symptoms intensify, we find developing an even greater distance between ourselves and the underlying causes.
We discuss, debate, suppress, bemoan, surgically remove, and do every other thing conceivable with the symptoms while paying little attention to the identification and the elimination of the causes.
Instead, what we’ve done is to create industries out of these symptoms.
For example, we fight with each other.
Instead of stopping the fighting or emphasizing the benefits of peace, we created an ever-expanding military/industrial complex.
Another example is the extraordinary number of illnesses we contract and from which we suffer; the large majority of which are caused by unhealthy lifestyles.
In response, we created an ever-expanding medical-industrial complex network of corporations which supply health care services and products for a profit.
The resources that are consumed to support the avoidable dimensions of these kinds of enterprises represent a direct drain from that which constructively advances our civilization.
The unnecessary amount of bickering-warring and preventable ill-health are parasitic to our lives, impediments to our potential, and threatening to our existence.
We have become victims of institutions that, because of our behavior, we have created, but can no longer afford to support.
As they grow, we decline.
It is essential that we distinguish between our problems and their sources.
To concentrate only on the symptoms does little, if anything, to prevent their reemergence at another time, in another place.
This is not to say we can ignore existing problems as we apply our economic and human resources.
To be sure, there are urgent matters that require immediate attention.
For the long run, however, our focus must shift toward eliminating the basic causes of our problems.