At the present moment people are responding to a failed assasination of presidential candidate Donald Trump. Any number of people are willing to tell us how we feel; let me join the crowd by riffing off another.
Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University, summarizes one thread of the human reaction:
"In the United States, we're really steeped in the idea of rugged individualism and self-reliance and meritocracy and you do it on your own, and you're in control, and you have agency," he says. "And to some extent, we are in control. We do make decisions. But another aspect of life is that ... there are things that happen to you that you have no control over.
"That's kind of unsettling," he says. "But that's the way life plays out. That's the world." [Note 1]
I read that and say, yes, that is true, at least in part, but it is not completely right, not in the sense it is wrong, but rather it is incomplete -- you don't need to know the content or even the subject matter; that is what I always think. I am always right too.
In what ways am I right? What additional truth is missing?
[A] In our modern western scientifically and technologically based worldview our thoughts are immersed in the idea of deterministic causation (the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics notwithstanding). We expect everything to be explicible with sufficient information, hence the expansive search for the murderer's motivation and the expensive engineering analysis of the airplane crash. If we could only know the critical points for intervention we think we would be able to intervene and physically prevent disaster.
[B] The "things that happen to you that you have no control over" are not only mechanistic. We also feel unsettled by possibilities which are rather fully explained but just as far out of our own control: We are fearful about the bureaucrat who can categorize you as dead and cut off your Social Security or as dangerous and block you from flying or as a non-citizen and keep you from being employed. (All those bureaucrats actually exist in the United States having been created by political factions fearful of other harms and disruptions.)
[C] We are fearful of the rise of dictators who concentrate power in themselves and negate our independence and agency. How this is done is fairly well understood. In actual reality it may approximate inevitability because the would-be autocrat's range of supporters overwhelm's any individual's resistance.
[D] Alongside fearing concentrated power we fear the distributed power of criminals creeping around the margins of technology looking for a gap through which to exfiltrate information about us to sell to others who will try to use it to walk away with our assets -- money, reputation, or trust. Whenever such a theft occurs our technological experts invariably respond with advice which seems rational but which if followed would have provided no protection against the crime.
We may also be unsettled by a vague awareness of the "map projection paradox". In actual reality the earth is a 3-dimensional curved body. Maps are projections of that surface into 2 dimensions. The map may accurately represent the direction from one point toward another and the relative distance between them but if so it will not accurately represent the relative area of one region compared to another. Any 2 of those can be accurate; accuracy in the 3rd will always be the cost.
Similar tradeoffs will appear in the example cited above. For example, we can set up laws and offices to prevent known terrorists from travelling on airplanes but not without creating a potential tool for despots to control freedom of movement.