The single beat of a butterfly’s wings can create a tornado. As irrational as the literal butterfly effect sounds, it expands our understanding of the footprint we, and everything else, leave behind. From living and breathing to inanimate and unable to act for itself, causality has led to the rise of science, technology, medicine, philosophy, and even warfare. Every effect has a cause, and every cause has an effect, whether we see it or not.
For every raindrop, water evaporated from a near or distant water source and for every strike of lightning, the clouds were both negatively and positively charged at high density. The fact that the first country that comes to mind when thinking of WWII is Germany, the depressingly ironic reality of Israel committing the most recent genocide, and the fury sparked by the United States’ most recent stance regarding Ukraine all originate from the same foundation. Knowledge, though often through no experience of our own, creates the basis of our thoughts and opinions.
The symbiosis between history and projection, past and future melting into present, is what constructs the unique lens every individual experiences the world through. Be it aspiration or apprehension, guiding or triggering our conscious actions, it’s all supposedly rooted in some form of logic that is ever-evolving.
The law of cause and effect serves as the modern construct to explain transformation through space and time where the first intuitive impression would be chaotic.
Chaos, indeed, is unacceptable; that much has been proven by history. From the creation of ordered civilization in contrast to anarchy, to religious after-death constructs, humanity has always sought to make sense of what doesn’t. It is in our essence to seek understanding, and though the undying curiosity of a 4-year-old child constantly asking ‘why?’ can become annoying, if Newton hadn’t wondered why the apple fell straight down from the tree, ‘gravity’ might have been called something dramatically different. But Newton did wonder, which led him to seek answers that would end up impacting the world and its distant future, his concept becoming a basic notion.
The law of cause and effect means that something must come from something, and therefore nothing must come from nothing, though the very existence of nothing is debatable if you ask me.
We, as a society, have decided to build a world governed by law, in the intuitively judicial sense as well as in the physics we accept from someone we have deemed smarter.
Like air and water that feel vastly different but have the same value on a thermometer, we accept truths we deem undeniable. Still, this does not preclude the fact that 15°C water will feel terribly cold compared to a sunny 15°C outside temperature, though even that has been explained by science.
What about this thing then? Feeling? Do we live in a deterministic world where every emotion could be explained through the basis of experience? Is every moment in life and perception of it, a simple consequence of the past?
In some sense it must be. But rather than restricting us to chains of the past, the future must be factored into this understanding. Individual or collective perception of what the future has in store, I argue, has even more influence on emotion and action than the past ever could. It’s what makes the difference between pessimism and optimism, striving for change instead of succumbing to it. If everything that’s happened until now is a product of history, then every action in the present is equally important in shaping what the future will look like.
Every effect has a cause, but every cause will have an effect, and it is our duty to ourselves, and to others, to factor this into every step we take. The past has shaped the present, but the present will shape the future.