Incidental Progress

How do things happen? Cause and effect implies one, or an ascertainable number of causes, to one or an ascertainable number of effects. But does that fit with the chaos we see every day?

The earthquake off the Chilean coast changed the axis of the earth. Only an inch or two, but what are the effects?

Key figures in geopolitical discourse are still human beings, and so how do their personal biases, internal monologues, patchwork psyches, affect geopolitical progress/regression?

Incidental progress is a theme I like to layer into any works of art or writing I pursue, lately. It is the idea that all things human remain generally the same: desire, fear, love, survival. Meanwhile the chaotic nature of things in general creates an unconscious progression of all things human. Thus, faith.

The narrative we choose is that people affect people, and  movements of thought or economy drive progress. But that must remain only a narrative structure over the unknowable nature of cause and effect.

So history must be called into question at every step, since it is only a story, since all that has happened is gone and dead. The story is a memory, redrawn over and over, not a collection of information.

This story is perhaps the strongest tool humanity possesses against the inevitability of the future. But no matter how nuanced the picture, the lines and progressions of what is to come remain undrawn. Truly, the lines we draw over the past are all we can rely on, and yet this reliance is perhaps also our greatest weakness.