A problem is a point where several counteracting forces are acting upon at the same time.
A chronic problem is a situation that will not go away, whatever you do.
Examples of the latter are easily found in health and politics. But they abound everywhere. I bet you can think of perhaps a hundred of them yourself unassisted. That is how common they are.
How to proceed? There is a natural law, an immutable law, which will help analyse and solve your problems. I found it in 2012 and published it then but was remiss not to communicate it on a broader scale
We are talking about The Law of the Multiple Causes.
They teach the old Newton adage that any effect must have a cause. And
then you, layman or scientist, start looking for that one cause to handle it. This may work in normal situations although it is completely false. It certainly won't work in undesired situations that continue to exist. For when you found a
cause, you thought it was the cause, but when you handled that particular cause you observed the undesired effect may have lessened a bit but it remained in place nonetheless. And then you wondered
what you did wrong. And precisely at that point, you start to err. For the answer is that you did nothing wrong, it just
wasn't enough. Other things needed handling, too.
The Law of Multiple Causes
The Law of Multiple Causes
A continuing condition always has multiple causes working together on the same point at the same time.
In more precise language it reads
Any chronic condition is caused by a conjunction of multiple forces affecting the same point during the same time period.
From this you can derive the first step that will help you solve undesired conditions.
The Solution to Undesired Conditions
A proper name would be
The Law of Multiple Causes for Undesired Conditions.
If an undesired condition continues to exist, there must be two or more factors present that cause that condition, at least one of which is denied or unknown.
Formulated more precisely, you get
Any undesired chronic condition has multiple causes acting upon the same point at the same moment in time, at least one of which is denied, unknown or not seen as causative to that condition.
Some scientists and philosophers and all people in politics have discovered that there are always multiple causes. But what they did not acknowledge and what is novel in all of this is that at least one of these causes is denied or unknown.
Applying this law explains why Donald Trump could be elected president, why Brexit happened, why we have no anti-gravity machines, why an increasing number of people seem to be insane, why climate change is happening, why some marriages seem beyond repair that need not be, why cancer is still rampant, why people get heart attacks, why this and why that. There is an endless list of unwanted and undesired situations.
The way to solve undesired conditions is to dig for all possible causes and handle them one by one. Even if you do not get immediate results, you need to follow through and continue down the list.
In politics, and often in life in the West, we want immediate results. This is the reason why we all are in such a mess. A politician who would apply the Law of Multiple Causes and would diligently work down the list of all causes to handle the problem, will not have handled them in time for the next elections and therefore the list is never done in full, despite the good intentions of all involved. This is what causes the unorganised state of affairs in our societies. For there is one other factor and it is the worst. The worst that can happen is that in order to solve an undesired or unwanted situation, a new situation is created that hides or disguises the original undesired situation, and then itself becomes undesired. Now you have two undesired situations stacked on top of one another. And this can go on forever.
In health care in the USA and the UK, you will find that undesired situations have been created concerning finance and laws, that have been put on top of undesired situations in the organisation of health care that in their turn have been stacked on top of undesired situations in the practice of health care that, again, have been blanketed over undesired medical situations caused by the honourable and laudable desire to help the ill and incapacitated. People who live in those countries know what this is all about.
The theory of the Law of Multiple Causes
If you want to work with The Law of Multiple Causes, you should know the theory behind it and learn the various types of causes that exist. It helps you think things through quickly and with precision.
If an undesired condition persists and seemingly nothing will make it go away, like the European debt crisis or the climate change that is happening too fast, then there are at least two causes active and one or more of these causes are unknown or denied, otherwise, the undesired situation would have disappeared or would have been solved. In the European debt crisis of 2010-2012, it was for all to see that a lot of things were being denied to exist like corruption, embezzlement, incompetence, lack of good will, laziness, fraud, crazy ideas from way back when but engraved in culture, ineffective and destructive economic and political theories, sly politicians, bankers and investors interests, long-term misinformation campaigns, geopolitical motives, and so on and so on. The multitude of causes for the debt crisis made it almost impossible to solve and one can predict that it will never really be solved except by a war or another crisis that would wipe away all old considerations and situations. You know what kind of war I am talking about here.
The theory is best explained by a graph as shown below.
Actually, there are five different types of causes that create a condition. We can call them Direct Causes. These are:
- #01 Visible or perceived causes;
- #02 Causes that are denied to be causative to the undesired condition;
- #03a Causes that are half-hidden;
- #03b Causes that are hidden;
- #04 Causes that are unknown.
Every cause is a condition or an existence in itself and these have also causes that bring them into existence. We can call them Indirect Causes because they act upon the condition through a Direct Cause.
A Visible Cause is a cause that can be perceived with physical means. For instance, a date. The date passes and this causes a debt to be in arrears because an IOU document states a debt has to be repaid before or at that particular date.
A Cause that is Denied, a Denied Cause, is a cause that people or some people are not willing to accept. The most glaring example of this is the immense emissions of greenhouse gases by humankind as a cause for accelerated global warming. Carbon dioxide is the best known of these greenhouse gases but there are others, too, that are far worse, like the gases used in old-school refrigerators. The greenhouse effect is that heat rays from the sun are caught by the atmosphere of Planet Earth and then are reflected back from the surface of the Earth into space but subsequently are reflected back by these gases. This increases the heat retained in the atmosphere and eventually, the atmosphere heats up like in a greenhouse or hothouse. This happened with the planet Venus in the extreme. Almost its entire atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide. The greenhouse effect is so intense that its surface temperature is over 467 °C or 872 °F. Metals like lead, tin, zinc, and many salts have become liquid by then. By denying that there is a climate change, which is the undesired situation, or by denying that this climate change is accelerated by greenhouse gases, let alone human endeavours, it becomes impossible to solve the undesired situation and therefore the undesired situation of accelerated climate change continues to exist and, eventually, this will cost mankind trillions of dollars, massive famines, massive migration movements and thousands of lost cities. The people in power and the billionaires are wrong to think they can buy or force their way out of the problems of climate change.
A Cause that is half-hidden, the Half-Hidden Cause, is the most vicious of them all. Somebody or some group spreads a mix of truths, half-truths and lies, all blended together in one single story and it is this story that makes the Cause half-hidden. Because part of it is true, people tend to also believe the lies that hide the rest of the truth. It is the most horrible thing one can do to a person because it leaves him with the firm conviction that he has been told the truth while in actual fact he has been deceived. This may destroy his ability to think clearly, it may even destroy his mind. It is the work of the devil. And yet, this trickery with half-truths is the most prevalent type of story on this planet. Why? Because it works. That is all. The receiver of the story thinks he has ‘proof’ that the story is genuine because he has discovered that part of it is true and correct. Because part of the story is true and part of it is a lie and the propagator of the story has an interest in asserting that everything in the story is true, all examples of half-hidden causes are controversial.
The half-hidden cause trick works because somebody who is unsure about a story about something that he is telling, but who experiences an advantage from it, will do his utmost to convince others of the veracity of the story; especially, he will try to establish in the minds of people that he himself is not misled, for nobody likes to be fooled by a someone who has been fooled himself. When others concur with you, whether rightly so or not, you are all right even when you know you have been misled, fooled, taken for a ride, compromised. So even when people know they have been misled, they still continue to try and convince as many people as possible to assent to their way of thinking, all the while pretending they themselves have not been fooled and know what they are talking about.
Two glaring public examples of misinformation campaigns based on this principle of half-hidden causes, or half-truths, that are being conducted today and which the reader can verify easily for himself, are the fossil fuel lobby’s massive misinformation campaigns that there is no climate change and if there would be, it could not have been human-induced. The other massive one consists of the stories by the pharmaceutical lobby that all illnesses can only be cured with medicine, i.e. molecules that can be patented and exploited for profit. Both use the mechanism of the half-hidden cause. They tell a sufficient number of verifiable truths to be believed and in that package they put their lies and false standards that enable them to continue to make profits of many, many billions per company.
In public relations and politics, there is a word for using this mechanism of partial truth as the cause, it is called “framing”. It is a very specific technique, part of which is the necessity to be the first one who is heard, in other words, to be the first one who puts the story out. By framing the speaker puts a particular scientific or political statement in such a light that you draw the conclusion that the manipulator, i.e. the framer, wants you to draw. In other words, ‘framing’ makes it difficult for you to think for yourself. And that is exactly what the manipulator wants. He does not want you to think at all, he wants you to follow his commands, accept his statements, and make them your own like they were your own thoughts. You think you made the conclusions yourself but you did not, you were framed. Framing is putting things in a particular context or in a specific light and this is then being presented as the context of light in which the event, statement, or situation is to be seen.
Framing is a very effective method of manipulation and therefore it is the most used method. It has a drawback, though. Eventually, the truth will come out and then the manipulator, i.e. the framer, becomes a suspect person, a person who is no longer trusted. This happens when education levels rise or when investigative journalism is done. That is why usurpers, dictators, and manipulators try to stump education and stamp out facts, they fight, arrest, and even kill good journalists.
The fourth type of cause is the Hidden Cause. This is a cause that, theoretically, could be perceived because it is known and understood; only it has not been found yet to be related to the Undesired Condition.
Because of the drawbacks of ‘framing’, manipulators resort to the method of Hidden Cause if they can. The cause is now packaged together with something that you will accept in such a way that you don’t realise you have accepted the lie as well. For instance, computer hackers package their spyware into something you like and make their spyware and malware invisible or very difficult to detect.
The trick of the Hidden Cause is done by playing upon the needs and desires of people and fulfilling these so that there is no resistance. Computer viruses are spread by fun games, interesting websites, seemingly innocuous emails and advertisements. The funny thing is that these Hidden Causes are openly present but that the attention is being directed elsewhere. The diversion of attention hides the cause.
This mechanism is also used in military operations where misleading the enemy and attack by surprise generally wins the day.
A special case of the Hidden Cause is the False Cause. A false cause is a lie about what the cause would be. The lied-about cause not only prevents a solution but also obfuscates and hides actual causes.
The lied-about cause is the principal reason this world is such a mess. People are led astray when they try to solve something. Because of the lie, the undesired condition continues to exist. You try to solve it but the lie directs you to address something that is not causing it, thereby keeping the undesired condition in place.
You find this in medicine where pills are used to counter symptoms but never to address the cause and make it go away. As long as the cause remains in existence, pills can be sold. It is unpopular with stockholders and board members to develop medicine that addresses and removes actual causes of diseases. It happens but it is not popular. And there is no need, either. People are not interested in removing causes of illnesses, they are only interested in removing symptoms that bother them or hamper them in their ambitions.
You will find plenty of examples of this in politics. Some kind of dogma hides a hidden agenda and the politician attributes a societal problem to something that is not the cause. For instance, promoting the idea that immigrants are the cause of drug abuse or societal inequity or whatever happens to be the undesired condition of the day, like unemployment. By attaching fear to something that is undesired, you can gain a lot of votes, regardless of whether the fearsome thing and the undesired condition are related or not. It is all trickery and manipulation.
The correct way to go about is to apply the Law of Multiple Causes and go and look. For instance, inequity in Western societies is rising and people are rioting against it. What is causing it? Make a list and do your research. But no, instead of doing one’s homework, easy actions that play on popular fears are offered as solutions and these hide the actual causes of societal inequity. Think this over for yourself. It is a good exercise that will free you from the entanglements of the dogmas and intricate webs of lies and nonsense that politicians weave to lure you into their lairs.
Last but not least is the Unknown Cause. The people of this planet want to have levitation or anti-gravity machines but there is something wrong in the science of physics and therefore flying cars are still not here and we still need gigantic rockets to get three people off the ground into space. The problem is that it is unknown what is wrong, in other words, the scientists do not know in which direction they should look. On the other hand, it is not always necessary to know everything. Sometimes, chance and time will handle the situation. The latter happened with the plague. Nobody had ever been able to find its causes but the plague disappeared eventually. Centuries later a Japanese scientist discovered the cause of the plague but then it was already a thing of the past, a solved problem.
Proof of the Law of Multiple Causes.
The Law of Multiple Causes for Undesired Conditions can be proven in various ways. The simplest and fastest proof is statistical logic. Over time, things and situations change, and they keep changing. So, at a certain point in time, these changes will produce a period in time where all of the causes are gone, by coincidence or by having been handled. And then the Undesired Condition will disappear. This happened, for instance, with the bubonic plague or Black Death that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351 and killed about one-third of its population. It appeared suddenly, it took a while but eventually, people did come to the conclusion that it was not vapours in the air but had something to do with rats and that is where their knowledge ended. It was sufficient to end the plague. It took a long while of false attribution of causes before the biological cause was found. Even the clairvoyant Nostradamus, who was a doctor by profession, walked around with a bird’s beak filled with herbs to guard against any foul vapours that may float around in an infested house. See the illustration of an actual cap and beak.[i] It took six centuries before some Japanese scientists found the plague was caused by a bacteria, called Yersinia pestis. These plagues disappeared for the simple reason that the fleas that carried the bacteria from one host to another, died from bubonic plague, too,[1] and because some things had changed, like people got rid of rats as much as possible, other people got immune and the bacteria had understood that killing their host is not the smartest way of survival; the bacteria actually morphed into something else and that is still with us today. I give this example to show how strange this Law can work out.
An alternative view on The Law of Multiple Causes
From classical philosophy and classical science, we get the idea that there must be one cause. There is not one cause but there is always more than one cause. One could reconcile classical science and the Law of Multiple Causes by considering that there is a main cause, which in classical science would be the cause, and there are conditions that make the effect of that single cause possible. If these conditions would not be present, the cause would not have the effect. Other words are ‘context’ and 'conditions', more scientifically called 'pre-conditions'. The context or pre-conditions contain the other causes.
For instance, in a motor car engine, an explosion is caused by the spark of the spark plug. But gasoline does not ignite by a spark. Throw a match in gasoline and nothing happens. Cars that roll down a slope and then turn into a ball of fire can only be found in Hollywood films. Necessary conditions are a certain amount of vaporisation of the gasoline and a mix of that vapour with oxygen within a certain bandwidth and pressure and predetermined temperature. When all that is present, the gasoline will explode when the spark is added, and then we correctly say the engine of the motor car is being fired up. But have a look under the hood, please, and see how many factors are needed to make that to happen. That is a lot of context, a lot of conditions that need to be present for the spark to be able to set the explosion in motion. And that is why you better think from the concept of The Law of Multiple Causes when you try to fix an engine that does not want to fire up; no use just to look at the spark plug.
Against classical science
The Law of Multiple Causes goes against the tenets of classical science. Because there are all these beautiful mathematical formulas, it seems like they have the cause-effect chains down pat. Where there is smoke, there is fire, as the saying goes. Well, there is also smoke without fire, just go to any disco. And there is fire without smoke, just light your gas oven. People just say anything, don’t they? Fortunately, science has made advances that replace the classical notion that an effect has a single cause. Contrary to what the Greek philosophers and Newton said, single causes do not exist. Everything has multiple causes; if it would not have multiple causes, it would not exist or would cease to exist, by chance or because times change.
Understanding is a necessary condition for the solution of a problem. For instance, cleaning up all the plastic in the oceans is a good thing but it is curing a symptom. A thorough understanding of how such an ecological disaster could come about makes a solution to the problem possible and, eventually, will keep the oceans free of plastics. The same goes for climate change. I predict climate change will come in its worst scenario. Politicians and billionaires and CEO’s don’t care. They make the fundamental error that they will be able to buy their way out of the problems they cause. Yes, not doing anything when you should do something, is also a way of causing something. If the result is destructive to the benefit of the people and the planet, in legal terms it is called a crime of omission. This kind of crime is the thing most politicians and CEO’s and stockholders make themselves guilty of and that is what causes the distrust within the population toward such people. But the exact mechanisms of that go beyond the scope of this blog.
The best is when you think it over and work it out for yourself. Why would a person not do what he is supposed to do even when this lack of action amounts to a crime or even when this inaction will be detrimental to the survival potential of his own loved ones? Try to figure that one out for yourself and then you may find something amazing.
Illustration: courtesy of Shadow Figures, Wales. (https://www.shadowfigures.co.uk/)
[1] This bacteria spoiled or blocked the stomach of the flea. The fleas were starving, causing them to bite their host and suck in blood which is their food. But they could not retain the blood and had to vomit it out right away which they did while biting and then the bacteria were vomited into the wound of the host caused by their bite.
[2] See blog post https://bit.ly/2SuylqS.
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