Uncorrected Causes Equate to Ineffectual Treatments
Sub titled Reversing the Deadly Destiny of History
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
November 15, 2009

If the causes of illnesses are the unassailably established structures and systems of a nation’s culture, as I believe they are, then even the most scientifically confirmed successful treatments of the people’s illnesses will not prevent the eternal recurrence of those illnesses.  As history repeats itself because history has no human causal agent, the mechanism propelling eternal repetition, which is composed of the structures and systems of nations, cannot be stopped.  Analogously, both the physical and social ills of a society will resist treatment and correction or reform as long as the structures and systems encompassing them continue unabated. 

Someone might say that humans create these structures and systems.  People build the buildings, roadways, and vehicles.  A few elite people legislate the rules to regulate the population.  To legislate is to law as instinct is to behavior.  One or a few extraordinarily gifted people issue directives to build a building.  Some issue requisitions for materials.  Some transport materials.  A mass of people scurry to and fro with materials while others take them and, in a quite orderly fashion, assemble them in accord with predestined blueprints until the building is finally constructed.  With the completion of one project, they move on, repeating the process, just as ants; salmon; lemmings; butterflies and birds do, on to the next project as the seasons, the runaway multiplication of tribes’ progeny, or, as is the case with the Cicadidae, in 17-year cycles, or as misfortunes like the displacement by rivals or enemies dictates.  Choice is a puppet on the strings of structural change.

Someone might say that this depiction of causality overlooks the human role in social progress.  This impersonal perspective ignores the innovations brought about by the feats of creative human scientists and engineers.  The role of political leaders or heads of corporations is also slighted.  On the other hand, is all of this not very much like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny with an occasional bit of mutation and serendipitous creativity thrown in to give a boost to biological evolution and similarly, but in more noticeable ways, to social evolution as well?  By analogy, ontogeny is like the structures and systems of contemporary culture and phylogeny is like all of the proceeding stages of cultural evolution.  Or, do I hear a protest, emanating from behind the hallowed ivy halls of academic philosophy, recapitulating Hegel’s proclamation that it is the human spirit that is the ultimate source of all of this magnificent human progress (I have to insert a scribbler’s version of tongue-in-cheek here with regard to the phrase ‘magnificent human progress’.)  Recall reverberations from Hegel across time showing up in the poet Henley’s “Invictus.”  Even today, that same “Invictus”, so  often cited by those who stride proudly atop their Olympian skyscrapers, is the title of a new movie paying dubious homage to our apotheosized, triumphant, human will.  This eloquent homage to humans so perfectly exemplifies the narcissistic, egocentric, arrogance of human’s philosophy of their own human nature. 

Were other ‘lower’ species to be able to speak and to define humans, would they not see how like their instinctual drives our human industriousness is?  Were some super-civilized aliens from a far-flung galaxy able to define our nature, would they too disclaim instinct or external structures as the cause of human achievements, as we humans are wont to do?  Were there gods to make pronouncements about the nature of human nature, would they eulogize us as lavishly as we are prone to do?  As a species, are we not incorrigibly, myopically, and narcissistically person-centric?  Consider opportunistic peacock preachers strutting about proclaiming false-modestly that they owe it all to god.  I recall the Smith-Barney TV ad that had this old man saying, “We make our money the old-fashioned way.  We earn it!”  Would that, today, he were on a stage with the whole world watching and made to repeat that haughty, phony declaration.  Further, consider the Ad-Nauseum proclamations like Hitler’s “Triumph of Will” and the Germans’ “Sieg Heil!”; winners’ perennial self-endorsement as “I am the greatest” a la Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo!”; Ayn Rand’s superman ideology; American politicians perpetually announcing that we are the best in the world in everything; and Frank Sinatra’s arrogant “I did it my way.”  No, rather, I protest, ‘Beware the Man’.  Beware the man who looks in the mirror and sees the ‘Image of God’!  How easily humanity overlooks the grooves in the road more traveled.

Those wealthy, powerful, and famous who fly in their ego-over-inflated, too thin balloons far up into the stratosphere, look down upon their peon servants below and disparage them.  They attribute their peon’s lowly status to inferior genes and yet attribute to an inferior will their laziness and criminal transgressions, trifling though the latter are when compared to those of their white-collared brethren.  They take vastly unsubstantiated leaps of logic and faith in making their vain claims that attribute their fame and fortune to superior genes and will power.  Somehow, we let them get away with having it both ways.  With such a wide gap separating those who venerate themselves with elevated monuments and those of shabby couture groveling at their feet, must it not be that it is only those lofty ones who are made in the image of god?  On the other hand, ironically, could it be that their very successes, arrogance, and self-infatuation are mere products of the causal forces of structure and systems just as is the case with those who namelessly and futilely struggle for mere survival in the gutters below them?  Their paradoxical explanations for lowliness being both genetics and will, may, after all, simply be an obfuscating ruse just as is the fashionable attire they so ostentatiously display is a mere façade to induce obeisance.  After all, self-made men are prepackaged by accident of birth, fate’s hapless distribution of advantages, powerful facilitating connections and support systems, and a multitude of unearned privileges disbursed by heritage.  That so many high flyers eventually have their balloons burst and fall back into discredited anonymity should reveal the bathos of their braggadocio.   

Ruefully, I reassert that the medical and social ills of the impoverished, disempowered masses, as well as the vaunted successes of those dubbed with elongated titles and ensconced in ill-gotten luxury, are all to be identically accounted for by the same impersonal structures and systems functioning as inviolable and inevitable corridors that inexorably pave the paths of each person’s destiny, millennia after millennia.  Nothing remotely resembling “Invictus” is the causal agent of these humongous class distinctions.  Only when humankind is able to renounce its anthropocentric, individualistic perspective and call up some heretofore-unknown gift for an objective, global-history-spanning, perspective will it make the leap to ascribing the actions of all humans to a structure-centric rather than a person-centric causality.  Then, and only then, will humankind find, in this ‘structural’ perspective, the effective means for treating, no I rather must say correcting, both our impending globally catastrophic crises and our many national economic, medical, and social ills.

I urge the reader to begin to search for the antiquated structures and systems within our culture that could be the causes of what you consider our own nation’s economic, medical, or social ills, all of which are inextricably interlocked with the earth’s impending global doom.  Meeting this challenge will be more of an art than a science.  Science and technology must become subservient to an overarching perspective on structures and systems of the world’s cultures.  In a sense, I am saying that this should be the Piagetian ‘Beyond Formal Operations.’  This perspective on structures and systems must be guided by a quest for natural systems.  Natural systems should be seen as diametrically opposite to the self-serving interests of prior millennia’s’ power cultures with their devotion to an underlying, ubiquitous cult of the individual. 

If you program yourself to do this kind of looking, listening, and reading, then you may find that many television dramas and documentaries, radio programs, as well as printed media, and even Billboards, almost glaringly, implicitly designate or imply that structures and systems are the causes of either pervasive errant, self-defeating human behavior.  Nevertheless, sub-rosa within the plots and yet, if you take note, unambiguous in the conclusion, there will be deference to the exploitative corporate sponsors’ ideological agendas and descent into subtle forms of self-exculpation.  Class superiority and ideology is rarely absent from the media.  Begin to train yourself to look at and read media not just for entertainment, nor for their ‘ostensive’ information value, but instead look analytically in order to decipher and discern the sub textual, cultural, anthropological implications imbedded in them.  You will begin to see the disordered cultural class biases and class prerogatives that are propelling that media.  Once you do this, you will find that a multitude of intriguing new questions arises. 

This media detective work will be a daunting challenge.  Furthermore, as you proceed, you may and should construct and discard one hypothesis after another, as this new discipline is both novel and extraordinarily complex.  For a populace that is conditioned to be mere munchies gorging, screen goggling receptacles in lazy-boys, this approach will require discipline and a stringent, unsettling, questioning of one’s preconceptions.  However, in the process you will find you are gaining completely fascinating and startlingly new perspectives.  You will be delighted to discover that you have a wonderful altered state of being awake and aware.  Even better, some exciting and promising, tentative, prospective, potential solutions to our disordered culture’s problems will begin to emerge.  This is an adventure not just into the ‘why’ things are the way they are but into the ‘how to’ of making things different.

If you tend to write and share prospective solutions with friends, encourage them to pass along your insights.  Yet, the blog, the email, the article, and such should only be a catalyst for organized action.  Additionally and even more urgently, our nation and all other nations are sorely in need of a ‘movement’ that is expressed in deeds and not solely in words.  With realized revolutionary ideas and actions, we will be turning cultural-political history on its head, as was said of what Marx did to Hegel’s philosophy.  The irresistible force of history that was previously driven by mindless structures and systems will be reversed as we begin to transform our culture’s structures and systems rather than vice versa.  This will mean we will be turning upside down those many unenlightened, wrong-headed millennia as we take control of the course of world history.  Finally, we will be correcting the prior ‘Uncorrectable Causes and that were making Treatments so Ineffectual.’

For me, my journey, begun over forty years ago, of discovering the relation between external structures and systems and the person’s internal structures and processes has been an unbelievably great delight.  The dazzling insights yielded by this approach showed me how to reform mental hospitals, prisons, juvenile correctional institutions, educational programs, and community development programs.  It made my efforts increasingly, highly successful over those years.  Now in my retirement years, as I have begun extending that same analytic approach to politics, economics, and many other aspects of our culture I feel I am finally approaching that coveted objectivity of perspective and clarity of vision.  Increasingly, my eyes are opening to the gigantic foibles of our prior systems.  Yet, I confidently feel, these insights have also foreshadowed faintly fathomable future possibilities. 

I implore you to join me in this existentially essential and timely challenge.  Try to imagine that one day the progeny of a distant future generation will be looking back in awe at us and saying, “Were it not for their defiance of a seemingly relentless, deadly destiny, we would not be here!”