Everything doesn't happen for a reason. Often things just happen.

Having written a book about karma (specifically, the karmic rationale for vegetarianism) called "Life is Fair," I'm well acquainted with the idea that everything happens for a reason.

For karma, when stripped of its supernatural notions of reincarnation and such, basically is just a law of cause and effect. You do this, you get that. Pretty damn simple. What complicates things is that while the effects are clear, in our life or the world at large, the causes are generally hidden to a large extent. 

In Eastern philosophy this may be due to actions in previous lives bearing fruit in a present life. You wronged someone in the sixteenth century. Now that person is reborn, as are you, and does something nasty to you.

I no longer believe in that religious view of karma. However, I'm still very much a believer in cause and effect, or determinism, since it seems clear that this is how the world works.

That's one reason why I'm enjoying Fluke by Brian Klaas, so much, a book I first wrote about here. Though the subtitle, "Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters," implies that life isn't deterministic, actually chance and chaos involve causes and effects as everything else does.

But when the cause of something is unknown, we call it "random." Actually, randomness is another word for our ignorance. Klaas explains this in a footnote:

When I mention "random" events, I always mean apparently random -- events that seem random to us due to our ignorance. A dice roll produces an unpredictable outcome that appears random to us, but it isn't random -- each roll of the dice is a deterministic event that follows the laws of physics.

Apparently random events still have definite causes, though they're not part of some larger hidden purpose. (As far as modern science can tell, the only phenomena in the universe that may be genuinely random are quantum effects at the atomic and subatomic levels.)

In this passage Klaas sounds a lot like Robert Sapolsky in his book, Determined, which argues persuasively that free will is an illusion. Both men say that praise and blame aren't really justified. Sapolsky looks at this from the perspective of determinism; Klaas, from the perspective of chance and randomness.

Yet, if luck plays such an important role in success, that should affect how we think about fortune and misfortune. If you believe you live in a meritocratic world, in which success is doled out to the most talented individuals rather than partly by accident or chance, then it makes sense to claim full credit for each success and blame yourself for every defeat.

But if you accept that apparent randomness and accidents drive significant swaths of change in our lives -- and they do -- then that will change your outlook on life.

When you lose at roulette, you don't kick yourself for being a useless failure. Instead, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognizing that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less credit for our failures.

Here Klaas speaks our tendency to ascribe more meaning to events than is justified. Again, when he says that some things just happen, this doesn't mean that they pop out of nowhere. Rather, they happen without an apparent reason, because the cause(s) are hidden from us. Since this ignorance can be uncomfortable, we humans have a strong desire to make up spurious reasons for something happening.

We're particularly prone to inventing and clinging to false explanations in the face of seemingly random misfortune. We can't easily accept randomness as an explanation for why we get cancer or end up in a car accident. Bad news requires something behind it that makes sense. It's impossible to move on from misfortune without figuring out the real reason for your suffering.

It becomes a quest for an elusive meaning in what may have been a meaningless calamity. "Everything happens for a reason" is a coping mechanism most often heard when jobs are lost, when we're blindsided by breakups, or when people die.

While it can help to make sense out of the senseless, comforted by the myth of a neat, ordered plan for everything, the saying isn't true. It's a useful, reassuring fiction. Some things -- even important and maddening and horrific things -- just happen. That's the inevitable result of an interconnected chaotic world.

Accidents, mistakes, and above all, arbitrary neutral changes create species, shape societies, and divert our lives. 

Comments

[Ron E.]

It’s really difficult, or even counterintuitive to accept that we are fundamentally not in control of our lives or of things and events that surround us. Perhaps, as with the free will issue, the fact that we make choices (although based on existing and previous causes), gives the impression that such choices are made independent of any earlier and existing conditions.

And yet, our thoughts and actions can still influence ourselves and the world around us. Seems a bit of a paradox; are we responsible for the effects that our thoughts and actions cause even though we did not ‘choose’ them? Makes sense that we do influence everything and that everything influences us. I’m thinking at the moment of how we have adversely affected many of the eco-systems around the world and conversely, how they are now affecting us. But there again, by definition an eco-system consists of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Viewing Earth as an eco-system, we are also responsible and influenced by the totality of the planet.

It seems we cannot divorce ourselves from such cause and effect: It is only our somewhat egotistical and customary habits of thought that want to imagine we are separate from the whole and even more arrogantly, think or believe that we can ‘fix’ it – just as we have often ‘fixed’ some environments by introducing alien species only to often realise later that they turn out to be worse than the original ‘problem’.

To quote Fluke, “Accidents, mistakes, and above all, arbitrary neutral changes create species, shape societies, and divert our lives.” And yes, I do tend to think that our separative and self-isolating type of thinking we regard as the pinnacle of evolution, has in itself become the type of influence we would do well to transcend.

To quote Fluke again, “We control nothing, but influence everything.” With the likes of Putin, Trump and other self-serving ‘leaders’ – and perhaps with regard to humanity’s insecurities that drive self-serving practices while believing they are in control – the prospects of a benign and holistic approach to any intelligent and integrated existence is remote.

[sant64]

I'm currently reading

You Are Not So Smart:
Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

By D. McRaney

He goes through a bunch of the common fallacies, such as the argument from authority, the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, and so forth. I can't deny I've been guilty of being deluded at one time or another (or perhaps right now) by all of them.

When I think back to my youth I cringe at the many things I believed simply because I read them in some book or other. 400 year old Tibetan lamas who can materialize themselves in people's bedrooms. Stuff like that. I read it, and the more incredible it was the more I was apt to believe it. As Eric Hoffer wrote, "people believe most what they understand least."

Archly cynical perhaps, but it seems to me that delusion makes the world go round. Archly moralistic perhaps, but I'm deeply troubled at the blithe acceptance so many have of what's going on in the ME. Every bit as much genocide and ethnic cleansing as anything Dolf put in motion. And yet, to them, it's not evil at all. They sleep well and have sweet dreams while their tax dollars fund atrocities. As they are, so was I.

[reasons]

Everything doesn't happen for a reason. Often things just happen.

Life just isn't fair.

[um]

@ Sant64

>> When I think back to my youth I cringe at the many things I believed simply because I read them in some book or other.<<

Yes, yes ....
What is in the books is maybe not the point, but why and how did you become to believe others, what they say and what they write ...and .. probably still do?

PS
An answer you could and should ask yourself,while drinking some coffee.
It is not MY question to be asked by you.

[um]

@ Sant64

>> When I think back to my youth I cringe at the many things I believed simply because I read them in some book or other.<<

This reminded met later also0about something the late MCS said one evening:

If an video recording is made of what is going on NOW, something gets lost.
If from that video tape the audio track is copied, something else gets lost.
If there is a transcript made from this audio tape, something gets lost
If that transcript is translated into another language, something gets lost
How can one reading that translation reconstruct what is going on now?

Before we had books there was an oral transmission of information. People could, generaly speaking, inform themselves about the speaker; look him in the eyes and probably what was said was related to one another.

Than came the books, The books do not address anybody in particular. The reader has no part in the information as does the listener in an conversation. Nor has the writer anything to do with the mental reconstruction of the content of the book by the reader.

Now we have AI and in using it even the last traces of human interaction gets lost

Oral traditions and in the beginning the of making books, was to preserve knowledge and information. Slowly books became to be used as teachers and now we have ourselves taught and spoken to, informed and instructed by AI

Imagine what that does to information and to people

The minds of people gets more and more filled with information that consist of empty concepts; empty in the sense that it has no correlation with personal experience.

I learned making Ice cream from my dad and official schooled to be informed about the regulations around this craft set by the government. There I understood that the transmission of knowledge does not come from books as the reality cannot contained in any carrier of information, be it paper or otherwise.

It is funny how suffi mystics describe those that have book knowledge.

[sant64]

It's equally true that everything happens for a reason.

Many years ago I got a job selling cars. Or actually, the dealership put me in an unpaid training program on how to sell cars. The instructor had a very unique way of teaching us.

His big message was that results are 100% a product of personal choice. Maybe he picked it up from EST? But his teaching lesson on that concept went something like this:

One day a guy came late to class. The instructor asked the guy why he was late. The guy answered, "there was a lot of traffic on the way over here."

The instructor asked him again why he was late. The guy looked confused, and repeated that the traffic was the cause of his tardiness.

The instructor asked him again, why was he late...this went on a bit longer and the poor guy was bewildered.

The instructor finally got to the end of this struggle session by declaring that it was completely the guy's choice for being late. Traffic wasn't a valid excuse, because everyone who drives knows that incidences of heavy traffic are a possibility.

What the hell does this have to do with selling cars? Great salesmen, ie those who make big money selling cars, know that it's all due to cause and effect. Greater efforts make for more sales.
Lack of effort leads to few or no sales.

There is no such thing as luck, or kismet, or synchronicity. These all fall into the category of mumbo-jumbo. Everything that happens can be traced to choices, and to cause and effect.

[um]

@ Sant 64

If these things you named are all mumbo jumbo or menaingless .. then many abstract concepts if not all are meaningless, for which people kill and be killed ...l