Elizabeth,
It's not so much that causality doesn't exist, but that it is cyclical and circular. Thermodynamic feedback loops. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
It's just that our linear temporal perception of it is like a knife slicing through a complex organism, or the layers of sedimentary rock a river has cut through. Then we try to order it in terms of our perception, rather than the processes originally generating them.
When I was young, I would keep myself awake at night, worrying and wondering about death. Which I solved by simply letting my mind wander off onto other things it found more attractive and fruitful to think about. Which might sound like simple avoidance, but it does go to the fact death is part of the larger whole. We have this individualistic ethos that sees a person a singular entity, rather than a projection and extension of the larger process of life. The details through which the light shines.
Which is a very debilitating view of life, as we all run about in our bubbles of individual perception, looking for meaning, rather than seeing ourselves as expressions of this larger dynamic. Sentences in the larger story. Though for those controlling society, it is far more effective to keep society as atomized as possible and thus dependent on the system rather than each other.
As for the fact we are products of a constant process of evolution; I've spent my life working with animals and that this culture misses, with its emphasis on equality, necessarily then conformity, is that we are not interchangeable, but have adapted to fill the niches nature provides. If the conditions are hard, the extravagances and excesses get erased, sometimes brutally, but efficiently. Yet the system is also quite efficient in selecting those extravagances for which there is a niche.
For example, I mostly grew up in the Thoroughbred horse racing industry, from foaling, raising, breaking, exercising and even some training. Thoroughbreds are a form of working animal, for the entertainment of people. There has been some official effort over the last few decades to repurpose them to pleasure horses, after their careers are over and while this is often successful, the fact is that people who only want a relatively inexpensive horse to ride around on, are not often good enough riders for these sorts of horses.
Similarly I've found that people will try taking working dogs in as pets, but many of these breeds are not lap and house dogs. You can't go over to Ireland and buy a few Border Collies and bring them back over to breed cute puppies as suburban pets. Trust me, many similar stories.
Similarly many of those people in the upper classes, be they Victorian England, or 21st century capitalist globalists, are every bit as much a product of and adapted to their situation as any other group of people and as threatened by a changing ecosystem as any species of animal. Many of the people in these classes really are just pets and wannabe pets of those handing out the bling and cash. From the hipsters to the runway models to the social influencers, it's all about using their looks and talents for developing that flow of cash on which they feed. If the flows of money dried up, like a river in a drought, these people would have to adapt, perish, or ask for handouts from the parts of the cash flow still functioning.
Though the fact that capitalism has lost sight of the fact money functions as a contract, where the asset is backed by an obligation and now assumes it really can just be printed into existance, signals a classic debt implosion is somewhere in the non too distant future.
A lot of this goes to the point I've been trying make, that we have come to think of ideals as absolutes. Confusing the aspirational, with the elemental.
We all have and need aspirations, though many are a bit too simplistic so survive outside their particular belief systems. So when their adherents don't recognize these aspiarations as unique expressions, but think they should be unquestioned universals, it creates blowback.
An example is the rainbow sexuality movement. Necessarily sex is a binary, while people are a spectrum. Each of the cells in our bodies are like little magnets and when many of them line up in the same direction, that tends to be where we go, whether the larger society approves or not. Be it homo, trans, bi, straight, or even two teenagers eloping against their parents wishes.
Conversely, if those little magnets line up pointing away from something, such as other peoples actions, sexual or otherwise, we don't go there. This goes to the very depths of our being, so if some movement is going to come along and insist everyone line up with their ideals, it will create a reaction, good, or bad.
As such, we need to sit back and somewhat appreciate our own unique situation and act according to what we feel is right, not necessarily what the larger herd insists we must do. Our own inner compass.
We are transitioning from the cultural Age of Money, to.......
