Why does it matter what caused it?

“Why does it matter what started it, Mark? All that matters is that it happened. And now we need to fight it?”

Fighting it, I am!

But getting the cause right matters. It may not be everything, but it’s nearly everything. That’s why we at FreeX are obsessed with understanding the cause, and the “physics” underneath.

If you get the cause wrong, your efforts to stop it will be misdirected.

If you get the cause wrong, you’ll have no chance to stop it the next time.

And, if you get the cause wrong, your efforts might further exacerbate the problem.

If the cause of our 20 months long Covid nightmare is psycho-societal in nature but we fail to realize it, then we’re more likely to spiral into our own psycho-societal sickness. The only thing worse than one mass hysteria is two.

And, if you mistake the cause as, say, an intentional one, and come to believe that the converts have intentionally signed onto their master plan aiming to push authoritarian policies on everyone, the way you treat the converts will likely be more extreme. Remember, the Covid Cult is filled with members of your family, many of your friends, many of your neighbors. These are regular people. I’m not saying they don’t have some level of culpability (they do!), but assigning the right level of culpability (and how you treat them) depends crucially on understanding the causes and the forces at work.

At FreeX we’re trying to understand what happened in March of 2020 that the world got overturned, so much so that it’s uncertain when and if 2019 is ever coming back. We believe that the forces behind these events are of the same fundamental kind that’s always plagued human societies, and always will. The same forces that were behind the great 20th century evils.

The scientific community has little to no grasp of these forces underlying totalitarianism. What exists tends to be wispy psycho-analytic sorts of stuff. A pinch of anxiety, a dash of psychopathology, a sprinkle of cognitive dissonance. It’s old school, mostly embarrassing, and completely unable to explain what needs to be explained.

And lay people tend to attribute everything to intentional acts, having little appreciation of complex emergent phenomena.

So, getting the cause right is crucial, especially so for we scientists aiming at a 21st century grand unifying theoretical framework for understanding mass hysteria and totalitarianism.