Conveyance is one of the most concepts in human life and psychology. The phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” is a trope simply because of the universal human tendency to do exactly that, to attach causal responsibility to the mechanism that conveys an effect. People also make this mistake positively, chasing the phenomenon that conveys an effect without realizing that it’s only the most proximate cause, the manner of conveyance, and have no idea what actually produced the effect.
Human minds are designed to make these kinds of associations and assumptions, largely because we’re very practical and concerned with action and effect. We don’t like to waste time and energy looking deeper than we need to, and we care about effects, tangible results, so we have a natural prejudice of attention toward whatever seems most directly associated with them or conveys them. Ever since philosophy dilineated the four causes, however, we’ve had a very clear reminder that such an approach can be shallow and inadequate. Especially if you’re really trying to think about things and be deliberate and careful.
The problem is, we often don’t have time for that. The average person doesn’t have the time in their lives, nor the speed of reasoning, nor the availability of information, to do a deep dive on everything they see that they would like to avoid or pursue. So we keep making judgments at the level of conveyance. Which was fine when the world was smaller and less complex, and the limits of causal chains, especially when it came to human behavior and production, were more clearly laid before our eyes. Most people had plenty of chances to see exactly where the meat and bread on their table came from, how children were raised, how clothes were made, how the home was built and protected, how music and art were produced, and so on. You couldn’t get away from the realities of these things even if you wanted.
But life today is so complex, built of layer upon layer of things we have constructed, edifices of enormous complexity. Social complexity, legal complexity, mechanical complexity, economic complexity, logistic complexity, that it’s impossible to see or grasp exactly where things come from or how they really work, even for those with great intelligence and plenty of time. You could spend days chasing down the true origins and nature of a single element of your life.
As someone once said, the difference between barbarism and civilization isn’t what it’s individual citizens know, it’s how much more the civilized don’t need to know. There is so much more information and structure and craft implicit in the system; unseen machines that carry the burdens so you don’t have to, so you can operate on top of it all. In a frontier situation you can’t take anything for granted and must be aware and active in all areas, because there is nothing but you to produce and maintain them.
In the modern world, there are so many layers you’re standing on top of that it becomes hard to even perceive or distinguish them from the nature of the world itself, and it becomes extremely hard for our psychological systems, which aren’t really designed for such elaboration and obfuscation and distance, to easily draw accurate conclusions about cause and effect.
Making Nobody Happy 