The Cause of Causes

The world generally evades categorization. Humans do not like this, and do all in their power to hide the disorder of the world. This is why people have created innumerable categories for all they can imagine. For example, the categories people have for themselves (black, female, asian, married, muslim) are overwhelmingly numerous. Language itself is an expression of this desire for order. People created all manners of language from fearing chaos. This fear generates an instinct to find a cause, also known as a “causal instinct”. This is explored in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Morality as Anti-Nature, David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife, Stephen Gould’s Nonmoral Nature, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.   Ironically, this causal instinct can sometimes cause illogical conclusions. Although a human’s causal instinct is invaluable to the pursuit of knowledge, overexcitement of this instinct leads to inaccurate, dramatized conclusions.
The causal instinct is simply an urge to know what precedes an event.” Most of our general feelings…excite our casual instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that…” (Morality as Anti-Nature,” 723, para 20) People’s minds do not readily accept randomness. It is human to wonder if the chicken came before the egg, or the other way around. This thinking extends to everything thinking extends to. Human emotions are automatically placed into a “logical” sequence by a person’s mind. This is one of the many behaviors stemming from our causal instinct. It is the absence, rather than the presence, of this thought process that is strange.
Sometimes the causal instinct becomes overexcited and a person reaches for an ideal and/or easy conclusion, instead of one that makes more sense. This is especially true for emotions. “We dramatize an incident by taking events and reordering them…so that we understand their personal meaning to us- to us as the protagonist of the individual drama we understand our life to be.” (Three Uses of the... [continues]

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