the roots of good and evil

People mean very different things when they talk about a bright future, maybe including:

• good education
• financial security, economic prosperity
• good physical health, healthy children
• peace and safety (no war, low crime)
• an ecologically healthy planet
• technological progress
• benign government, "freedom", self-determination

(Each of these has its dark opposite:  failing in school, going into debt, losing your health, being subjected to crime and war, etc.  And of course these are just top level items.  Under "ecologically healthy planet", we need to consider ocean life, biosphere, water table, insects, mammals, atmosphere...  Of course, it is a giant kitchen-sink type list...)

And is it just a random list?  Is there some kind of priority?  For example, how can we be healthy if the air and water is polluted, or worse, radioactive?  

Maybe these should be numbered, so we can focus on the most important first.  

What's more important, health, or peace?  Well its hard to stay healthy if you're constantly getting shot at.  There is no point building hospitals, if they just get bombed right away.  We might say in some sense, health depends upon peace.  

Of course its not so cut and dry.  Even if there's a lot of crime or war, we still need to do our best to combat disease and provide nourishing food.  But it seems to me there is some kind of precedence here.

What if we listed all the big problems our world faces, and thought really hard about what depends on what, and what causes what?  Then we might be able to reason about what the root causes, and root solutions might be.

Some people call this type of thinking a "dependency graph", which is a fancy name for a bunch of bubbles representing things (problems/solutions), and arrows between them to show "A causes B", or "B depends upon A".

In the graph shown, it looks like 276 at the top, is a "root issue", and 666 at the bottom is a "leaf issue".

If we put all our energy into solving issue 666 at the bottom, well congratulations, we solved one issue.

But if we put all our energy into solving 276 at the top, we can help solve all the other issues.  And in fact, its the only reasonable way to tackle all the problems as a set.

This might be easy if the graph is small, but if we are considering the real big issues we face as a planet, we are talking about a rat's nest of issues: thousands and millions of issues with even more dependencies. Consider the graph on the left, and multiply by 1,000,000.

To make it worse, its all a matter of opinion.  Some people might not think that polar bears dying is really a problem, and some might think that a certain war is actually a good thing.  Some might say the root cause is obviously the fact that everyone isn't Catholic, or Muslim, or whatever, and others might say, its all due to fiat currency, or Coca-cola.

So, the graph is really a detailed representation of the opinions of the people who construct it.

Ah, now we are getting somewhere.

So, what do you think are the root problems?  Are there root problems?  Root solutions?

The purpose of this post, is to draw attention to the roots.  

Our best chance, is to spend more time and energy and conversation and thought, on identifying, and addressing, the true roots of the matter.

Otherwise we are just plucking leaves.