Well said Larken, well said. This is so indicative of the lack of critical thinking pervading our society. It is a manifestation of our lack of responsibility to discern the underlying causes. That isn't always easy to do though.

It's one thing to look at a diseased tree and say, we need to cut that branch off, as I see it is infested with a terrible fungus. The branch is removed, thinking the problem is solved. This continues until the tree is completely cut down and gone. The disease was in the roots, but what was the cause? Why is the fungus there in the first place? Perhaps the soil condition is the reason. What is contributing to the soil condition? Could it be something in the nearby stream? What is that yuk floating on the stream, is that caused by the fracking the city council has allowed? And on and on.

Getting at the root cause of a matter can be a rabbit hole. The planet is a closed biosphere, everything is related in one way or another. How direct must a cause be related to an effect to say the buck stops there?

I completely agree with you that we must get rid of our belief in authority as one important and direct cause that underlies the empowerment of tyrants, but is that really the root cause, or does it lie even deeper than that?

I paid a visit to Philadelphia decades ago and was awestruck with a room sized machine (similar to this one) that I sat for almost an hour watching as it ran. Sometimes I see the world just like that big Rube Goldberg machine, and we simply can't see it for what it is, because we're too focused on only a part of it. Until we gain perspective to see the entire "machine" we may never understand the actual root cause of symptom X.

One might argue that all we can do is point out relationships between symptoms and suspected causes using inductive reasoning, and then use deductive logic to validate that relationship. Going so far as to label a cause "root" is not something we probably can do due to the inter-relatedness of everything. Saying that a cause X leads to symptom Y may be logical and true, but is that the whole story, or is there an even deeper truth that leads to why the cause exists in the first place?

The search for truth is never ending, but that doesn't mean we give up the search. Finding the primary causal agent of a symptom is not only a matter of discerning that a relationship exists, it also requires assessing the degree of influence a suspected cause has and evaluating whether others might be more important.

It's frustrating to see people believe they're efforts are addressing causes when from our perspective we see even deeper ones, as in your example with a corrupt cop. It's not the cop or the police or the city council or laws or .... government. It goes back to our belief in authority.

However, we should always be asking ourselves: are we looking deep enough?