My father used to say: “Life is lethal.”
There is a certain brutal elegance to that sentence.
It contains one of the few certainties we are ever given. Life ends. Every one of us will die. The only reliable way not to die is never to be born in the first place.
That is not pessimism.
It is reality.
We can dress it up. We can invent a bazillion reasons why it is unfair. We can search for someone to blame. We can construct elaborate explanations for why this particular outcome should not have happened to us.
None of it changes the underlying fact.
We die.
And yet human beings have an almost uncanny talent for attributing causes to effects they dislike, particularly when the alternative would require looking in the mirror.
It is hot — climate change.
I am overweight — fast food did it.
My lungs are failing — the cigarette companies are responsible.
I bought a house in a flood zone because it was cheaper, after the area had been redesignated for construction, and then the predictable flood destroyed my livelihood — the authorities are to blame.
There may be truth in some of these explanations.
That isn’t the point.
The point is that explanation and responsibility are not the same thing.
We have become extraordinarily good at confusing the two.
Sometimes there really is an external cause. Sometimes somebody else genuinely did something wrong. Sometimes a company, a government or another individual deserves blame.
But the existence of an external cause does not automatically absolve us of responsibility for our own decisions.
That is the part we increasingly seem reluctant to discuss.
Because responsibility is uncomfortable.
It means accepting that some of what happens to us is the consequence of choices we made, risks we accepted, warnings we ignored or things we simply failed to do.
And sometimes it means accepting something even more uncomfortable:
Some things happen without anyone being at fault.
Reality does not require a culprit.
Take wildfires.
Many are caused deliberately by arsonists. Some are accidental. Some arise naturally. And once a fire starts, the conditions on the ground determine how rapidly it spreads.
There are legitimate arguments about forest management, undergrowth, land use and fire prevention. There are also ideological arguments about what forests should look like and what humans are allowed to do to them.
But once again, we have a tendency to turn a complicated chain of causes into a single moral story.
And sometimes we make the physical environment part of the problem ourselves.
We like trees.
Trees are good.
Trees are beautiful.
Trees make us feel virtuous.
But not every piece of land was naturally covered in trees.
Along parts of the Mediterranean, landscapes have been planted with trees and dense vegetation where historically there was little or none. There was often a reason for that.
The land itself was telling us something.
Climate, soil, water availability and natural fire regimes determine what belongs where. Nature does not consult our aesthetic preferences.
We do.
And then, when the consequences arrive, we are remarkably inventive about finding someone else to blame.
This is what attribution often really is.
Not an attempt to understand reality, but an attempt to make reality emotionally acceptable.
If something bad happened, there must be a reason.
If there is a reason, there must be somebody responsible.
And if somebody else is responsible, then perhaps I am not.
That chain of reasoning is psychologically comforting.
It is also frequently wrong.
The world does not owe us a consequence-free existence.
Neither does nature.
Neither does society.
Neither does the economy.
Neither does our own body.
Life is lethal.
We can make it longer. Safer. Healthier. More prosperous. We can reduce risks enormously. We can learn from mistakes and build systems that prevent some disasters.
That is what civilisation is for.
But we cannot abolish consequence.
And perhaps the first step toward dealing honestly with reality is to stop asking, every time something goes wrong, “Whose fault is this?”
Sometimes the better question is:
“What did I do, what did I fail to do, what did I knowingly accept — and what was simply beyond my control?”
That question is harder.
It is also considerably more useful.
Because attribution can protect us from responsibility.
But it cannot protect us from reality.