The snowball of cause and effect

One of the biggest ignorance that we let ourselves believe is to blame others for the horrendous status of every aspect of our lives, be it the status of today’s world, our country, our professional field &industry, our culture, and so on.

Blaming others usually is not enough, so we transfer the blame, and by that the power to fix/responsibility to a group of people who are stronger or untouchable.

It gets much easier for our ease of mind to blame everything on governments, mafia, celebrities, Hollywood, media, social networks, etc. In the word, they blame the masters of the world, the invisible hands, the ones behind the shadows. That’s the birth of conspiracy theories.

You can argue that it’s not about shifting the blame, but about the substitution. The way we substitute celebrities instead of real friends, however, the outcome is the same.

It’s their fault that the status of the world is like today and therefore, it’s their responsibility and their job to fix it. In other words, we’re sheep and they’re wolves.

This way of thinking is the result of how we see cause and effect. We see it as a one-way, linear situation. The fact is cause and effect is circular.

Let’s have an example, a film producer creates two movies. One of them a masterwork and one of them a weak chick flick with no value that has been done 100 times before. The film producer sees that although they spend 80% of their budgets on the masterwork, it only accounts for 20% of their revenues, and on the other hand, with almost no investing or hard work, the chick flick is a hit and prints money.

So because a lot more people are willing to pay much more for the chick flick, the second time they’ll divide their budgets, they will choose to create more chick flicks. This is a logical and very economy-accurate decision.

On the other hand, now there are more empty movies out there, more people will tune on them, more advertisements will be spent on them, more medial coverage they will have and more empty celebrities will be created. So the masterworks will be berried under a lot of empty entertainment.

This is a vicious cycle. The cause created the effect, but the effect is feeding the cause at the same time and forcing the same, now stronger cause, to create stronger and stronger effects.

This is the snowball effect. The snowball effect is a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger (graver, more serious) and larger.

Now, a lot of people, not liking what the new status has become, will blame that film producer and others like them, for the fact that their industry has turned shallow and meaningless.

They ignore the fact that if they tried to fix the cycle instead of blaming the invisible hands, that vicious cycle will turn into something amazing, growing, and useful for the world.

“We change the world not by what we say or do, but as a consequence of what we have become.” — David R. Hawkins

The snowball effect in “cause & effect” can be designed into giving a positive outcome, only if everyone tries to fix it.

So if you really want to make the world a better place, you have to stop blaming others for the status and think about how you’re the cause of what’s happening right now.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Ignorance drives most of humanity’s beliefs, understanding, and therefore, decisions.