Cause and Effect
Where to start?
This post is meant to follow my previous one, Another Worldview. You wouldn’t have to read it to understand this one, but at least realize that I tend to look at things a little differently, and it comes not so much from special upbringing or training as from autism. If you understand autism to mean inability to speak or control one’s temper, or something to that effect, you might want to read the other post first.
We live in a world where a lot of unpleasant things keep happening. This seems to have been going on for a long time. There are also good things happening, fortunately. These are the “effects” to which the title of this post refers. What causes all of this? We often wonder about it but how often do we take a serious look?
Let’s dip into a slightly different world for a moment, one in which I have spent some time and you might well not have, the “high functioning” autistic “community”. (The reason for the quotes around “high functioning” is brought out in the previous post. The quotes around “community” are because we tend to be quite an asocial lot, but then I said this world would be different). Little communities of such people exist online (preferentially) and in person. There used to be one that met regularly at a restaurant a short drive from my house. I don’t know if they still do — I never went.
Twenty years ago I belonged for a while to an online community made up of allies (leading), spouses, friends, and such, along with a few highly verbal and sometimes vocal autistic people, and one woman less able to write but fascinating to try to understand. She had her own variant language. In that group I learned about “neurotypical” (NTs) vs. People With Autism (PWA; translated: us vs. them). I received an earful from the spouses and friends (translated: finger pointing), not that any of it was aimed directly at me, but I learned much about what this looks like from the other side of a relationship. There were also peculiar goings on among the leader/allies and other NTs. I don’t remember the details, and after two or three rounds of this I left the group, but it had something to do with people playing games of disparaging and attempting to evict other group members.
This odd little group was a microcosm of the world in which we live. What was going on there?
Well, rivalry for one thing. Us vs. them. Fingerpointing. We could go deeper, but that would keep us in “what” — the effects. What can we say about cause? First, notice that rivalry and sabotage and other such behaviors can be found in just about any group. That should be a clue. Some kinds of groups would appear to offer greater “opportunities” for this kind of behavior than others.
The clue points to a cause. Not quite the root cause, but to a common constituent of all such groups — people. Us!
My early upbringing was as a Christian fundamentalist, morphing at age 12-13 into involvement with a Christian cult (now essentially defunct, although there are spinoffs) under the influence of my mother. That actually somehow proved to be of advantage, and I learned a great deal at an early age from that experience. Of course I then spent a considerable portion of the rest of my life deprogramming from it, but oh well, sometimes that’s how it goes. There’s an acronym for it, SGA — Second Generation Adult (cult survivor). I left the cult at age 21, for a variety of reasons, and many things happened that I won’t even try to touch upon here.
The early fundamentalist upbringing offered a realistic worldview that supported understanding the causes of humanity’s problems. I don’t have a problem with fundamentalism as long as it sticks to fundamentals. By strict definition, I am a fundamentalist, in that I am an “originalist” interpreter (to borrow a political/legal term) of the Christian faith. There is nothing in that, however, to suggest that I must judge, condemn, or avoid anyone not agreeing with my understanding of things. Quite the contrary. That’s where fundamentalism and I tend to part company.
What I learned in those formative years I learned by rote. I didn’t really understand it. As I came into my 20’s, I began, in the cult, to see the kind of group behavior I wrote about above, directly contradicting what was being taught (translation: hypocrisy). There were also many deviations from scripture in the teachings, in spite of claims to the contrary (translation: lying). There is much more to the story and reasons for leaving, but it is not important here. I left.
What a strange situation. Many of the people in that cult could precisely cite what causes humanity’s problems, and yet many were also being part of the problem. They could easily quote Jeremiah 17:9 —
The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?
A personality cult like that must have a “draw” that attracts people and holds them there. My mother and I both felt it, and she never left although she died only a few years later. I won’t go into great detail, but we were told that we were special, that we were preparing now for the “world tomorrow” and that the rest of the world would eventually follow, with us leading. We were early investors. The first to receive the truth. It was a ground floor opportunity. The One True Church. To a degree, some of this reflects orthodox teaching, but it went above and beyond. Way beyond. But enough said. That was the draw.
The result illustrated what Jeremiah wrote. Cause. You don’t need to believe it because of where it appears. Just consider the possibility that it is true, and that it applies to all of us. This hard-core Substack bunch has managed to take in a lot of truth. Try this piece on for size.
You may hold differing ideas, but I believe, based upon the evidence I have seen, that we are created — that we are in fact engineered — and that we are purpose-built. When we reject our purpose, things go badly because the “desperately sick” part (“desperately wicked” in the King James, or “incurable” in one reading of the Hebrew) takes over and we weren’t engineered with the solution to that problem built in. It’s an add-on module, an extension.
We’re not designed to do just anything, and we can’t do just anything. Sorry about that, but as created beings we can’t. We were designed with limits and dependencies — dependencies upon our creator. Limits and dependencies can readily be observed among all lifeforms, specific to each species, and we are no exception.
As a database and software developer I place constraints on the databases I design (declarative referential integrity and other restrictions) and I build constraints into the code I write. Our own design incorporates limits, although we do possess the freedom to cause trouble and do damage to a greater degree than I would intentionally give to my software. We are nonetheless limited.
We also have great capacity for good, but when we are out of alignment with our design purpose, even that is limited.
I know there will be disagreement with this among you readers. Good. I’m not exactly the bearer of absolute truth myself. I point things out, and I attempt to clarify. I get things wrong. Some truths you have to wrestle with. Look at the struggles going on in the world with you-know-what (name your poison). This truth is fundamental. It is causal. It’s hard to take.
While those who have their eyes and ears open to world events are doing a terrific job of working to understand what is happening, the why remains highly elusive. And while we all try to understand what’s wrong with what “they” are up to, we are failing to notice our own brokeness.
As awful as they can be, our “leaders” are a reflection of us as people groups. Not of every last person in a given population, but definitely as a reflection of the culture. That’s important to notice! So why don’t we? See above.
I doubt at this point that there is any way out of what is coming for the world in general. I expect that it’s going to be even worse than imagined, but not without purpose and with a good outcome. But there is another way forward for those willing to consider the proposition that broken as we are, we were put here for a purpose and it can be achieved when we align with it. Either way, there is hope.
The widespread belief seems to be something to the effect that everything that exists somehow just happened to come into being, and our job is to fix the problems that remain if we want to survive. This is not having your eyes and ears open. It is false hope.
So where to start? Seek out our purpose, and what is known about our corrupt state of existence. As you can see, I tend to take a biblical approach now, although I have explored a number of other paths over the years. All the others led to the same hopeless situation of trying to solve problems through human effort. When humans are the problem, that doesn’t work. And yet we keep trying.
Matt. 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
Others will point first to Romans or to some other pattern. I’ll get to Romans soon enough, although not necessarily in the usual way. I start here in Matthew because it represents what I did and it worked. Perhaps the others could say the same for their approaches. I don’t claim that there is only one way to present the things I am discussing. But I do claim that you can ask questions and receive answers, if you are asking earnestly. In an earlier phase of my adult life, post cult, I asked questions of the Universe, an idea I got from reading Buckminster Fuller. If that is what is available to you, try it. Start somewhere. It can work.
Answers do not ordinarily come in the form of a voice from heaven. If they did, I’d be concerned. My answers have come in all sorts of ways, but usually from other people that didn’t know they were answering my questions. Sometimes there is an unusual pattern of events that suggests an answer — I call those “signs”. I like to see confirmation, not just one sign. After a while, the patterns themselves may become familiar. When I see that, I roll my eyes a bit, and still seek confirmation.
What is there to discover that we don’t already know? Well, many of us do know much about it already, but we don’t necessarily do anything with the knowledge — such as ask what to do about it. Many realize to one degree or another that we are badly broken in certain ways, but what’s a person going to do with that? Make New Years resolutions?
Possible problems here are that we don’t like to think about these things but if we do, we then look to how we can correct things ourselves. Again, we can’t. That should be clear if not from personal history then from human history. Why is it so hard to ask for help? Or is it just too easy to blame somebody else for our problems?
In the next installment — there could be several more at the rate I’m going — we might just dip into Romans. Its author has some interesting things to say that can apply to educated, knowlegable people that happen to overlook certain basic aspects of our existence. Look out, Substackers!