The Bike, the Ramp, the Wall, et al.
I once was employed by a large defense contractor. It was not a mutually satisfying joint venture, and it ended with my resignation. Suffice to say, we did not have a set of similar objectives nor the skill sets by which we might reach an accord about our differences. They (those above me in the pecking order) wanted control over me via a blanket veto power that included all that I said and did (mostly ex post facto in that they were not very forward looking in their thinking), while I acknowledged them (the same group) as too far below my mental abilities (past, present, and future) to be of any value to my decision making skills. To use a marriage breakup analogy, we had irreconcilable differences, so we parted company
Come to think of it, those same conditions followed me wherever I found myself in some one else’s employment. So I hold no particular animus against that employer; it was and remains a universal condition that permeates my daily activities, and is, more likely than not, a primary causal source of my poverty surroundings. And that leads me to the central issue of this essay: Why doesn’t the world understand much of anything about cause/effect reasoning?
An incident occurred at the defense contractor’s facility that illustrates my point.
It was a large plant, and most of the on-site managers moved about via bicycles. I shunned them inasmuch as my wayward youth did not include either a bicycle or the skills by which to navigate around on one. But on one occasion the opportunity to learn was thrust upon me. I was needed somewhere on the far side of the plant, and a bike was put at my disposal with the expectation that I would promptly propel myself along myriad narrow pathways cluttered with people and other assorted objects without harming them or me en route to my destination.
My wobbly course was a dead giveaway to most others that a bike and I were not well acquainted with each other. The pedestrians scattered without benefit of an alarm other than my verbal screeching. Toward the end of my journey, I came upon a concrete ramp with a sturdy looking railing. At the bottom of the ramp was a concrete wall directly in my line of sight and plane of navigation, thus requiring a sharp 90 degree maneuver at the bottom of the ramp in order to avoid a crash into the same wall, bicycle, me, and all our contents.
As I started down the ramp, the bike and I picked up speed rather quickly, necessitating that I apply brakes and slow down the bike and me. To my surprise, there were no brakes on this outdated contraption, and I hurdled onward and downward at an ever increasing speed. Near the bottom of the ramp, my survival instincts kicked in. I turned this wretched vehicle to my left, leaned backward on in, and thus began a slide toward the wall. I felt many body parts scraping the concrete floor, while my clothes were being torn away. The bike hit the wall, tried to climb it, but fell into a pile of junk after several flips and flops. I was relatively intact with many scrapes, bumps, and abrasions, and with but two broken rib bones.
After being treated by a pleasant and empathetic nurse, I was handed an incident form to complete. It did not ask about me, or my injuries, or my tattered clothes, or my mission, or my avoidance techniques that more or less saved the day. No, it merely wanted to know “the cause” of the accident presumably as a way to find me at fault, the company innocent, and a fait accompli in their favor as to legal culpability.
Calling upon my astute powers of cause/effect reasoning, I wrote: “The bike, the ramp, the incline, the speed, the concrete, the wall, the lack of brakes, the lack of super stuntman skills, the lighting, the angle of attack, the exigencies of the mission, bad luck, good luck, the presence of all the surrounding buildings, my employment, and my parents who had the misfortune to bring me into this world without an alternate means for stopping and/or controlling a future bicycle ride in an environment not conducive to my safety, or to the safety of others, or to interactions of all the preceding factors in the unique manner in which they occurred.”
When asked to choose just one of the reasons, I refused, and I quoted John Stuart Mills’ canon of concomitant variation as my philosophical support. This canon merely states that if we vary any surrounding factor that precedes a consequence, and the consequence changes, then we may infer that that factor is linked in a causal manner to the consequence. It made sense to me then, and it still does.
Mills was quite a good thinker in his time, and I am reasonably certain we would have enjoyed each other’s company, provided he was open to the possibility that others might find the two of us a royal pain in the ass.
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