Is it really the cause?

When I was around 13-14 years old, I remember having this very strong belief that money is the root of all evil. I also remember having very strong reasons for it. I used to often think, why don’t we ban money? Clearly, movies where rich people with a lot of black money were criminals had a lot of impact on me 😄. But that was not just the reason. I saw that people committed heinous crimes for money. I saw that rich people had no morality left in them. I had very valid reasons to hold that belief. But I don’t need to tell you how naive that was.

All of us do this more often than we think. We often misattribute the medium, the tool, or rather an amplifier (money in this case) to be the root cause of the problem (crime and corruption in this case). Money is just an amplifier. When people say things like, “he was a good person, but money corrupted him!”, that does not seem to be the case, it seems more like “he was never really a good person, just that with money, his constraints were removed and his corrupt self was unmasked”. Similarly, quotes like “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” blame power for the corruption rather than the person holding the power.

If a murder is committed using a knife, the knife did not cause the murder. The murderer did. If someone was driving on the wrong side and caused an accident, the car did not cause the accident. The driver did. All of us agree on this, but when it comes to abstract concepts, we often blame the tool rather than the person. Maybe because in these cases, the “person” is not always visible.

Here are some other examples of such common misattributions. “Religion has caused a lot of riots and terrorism throughout history”, this is a very common sentiment and another classic misattribution. Religion, in many such cases, seems to act more like a tool, while the underlying drivers could be things like power, identity or greed. One more example, “Social media is toxic and has led to a lot of polarization”. Again, social media is just a tool, it essentially amplifies the opinions of people. People have an inherent need of “us vs them” as discussed in my previous blog The human need for an enemy, social media just amplifies it.

Why do we do this? Maybe because blaming the tool is psychologically comfortable. It is much easier to blame a tangible object or an abstract concept than to confront the dark, complicated realities of human nature. If social media is the problem, we can just delete the app. If human tribalism is the problem, that requires deep, uncomfortable societal reform.

These are some examples that are on the societal level and also easily observable to some extent. But some of them are much more difficult to spot, because they happen inside us. One such example is intelligence. “Intelligent people are unbiased”, “Intelligent people tend to understand things quickly” are some common beliefs. If we define intelligence by the IQ, we can use our intelligence to justify wrong things with rational arguments, or we can use it to find flaws in arguments to debunk a myth. IQ is a tool, not the cause of having correct arguments. It has the ability to make false arguments feel believable. If we include EQ as well in our definition of intelligence, that’s when things get a little tricky. EQ can be divided into two parts - internal and external. External EQ is the ability to understand others’ emotions and act accordingly. It can be used to understand people and heal them mentally; it can also be used to manipulate or deceive people. So external EQ is also just a tool. Internal EQ is the trickiest one. It is the ability to understand our own emotions and act accordingly. It might seem like this should lead us closer to objectivity. But I’m not sure it always does. It is introspective in nature which in itself is considered a virtue. It is often assumed that if someone is introspective in nature, they are doing it to improve themselves. One example of where the internal EQ is weaponized to use against ourselves is discussed in my blog The ego of the humble. High emotional intelligence is used to shield our ego, mask it, and make it appear like humility in that case.

Let me give a simple example. You meet someone for the first time and something about them feels off. Now, if you are not very introspective, you might just say, “I don’t like this person”. But if you are more introspective, you start analysing it. “Why do I feel this way? Maybe it’s their tone. Maybe they are slightly arrogant”. After thinking about it for a while, you arrive at a conclusion “I’ve reflected on this, my feeling is valid.” What just happened here? The feeling came first. The reasoning came later. Internal EQ didn’t remove the bias. It just made it feel justified. Good IQ can give us great logical justification for our biases, good external EQ can help us communicate our biases effectively, good internal EQ can help us validate the bias internally.

So how do we effectively distinguish between the tool and the cause? One thing that might be useful is asking: did the issue exist before the tool? If the answer is yes, the tool might not be the issue. For example, there were conflicts before religion as well. There was hunger for power and greed before money as well. Another question we might want to ask ourselves, “If we remove the tool completely, will the problem vanish? Or does it just change shape?” These questions are useful for external situations, but for internal ones, I feel deep introspection with radical honesty is the only answer, which many of us are incapable of. Facing ourselves with radical honesty is the most difficult thing to do in my opinion. But I feel it is worth it.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think about this one, see you next time.