Title: The Ripple Effect. The Major Consequences of Minor Actions | by Brent Cooper | The Abs-Tract Organization | Medium
Headings: The Ripple Effect
The Ripple Effect
The Major Consequences of Minor Actions
Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters.
(This update is to resolve some ambiguity.) The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official…

Content: We see global environmental devastation and social strife on the news but we remain completely dumbfounded as to our contribution to these effects, and we’re at just as much of a loss to know how make a difference for the better. While the risks we face are systemic and seemingly beyond our control, on some level one must reduce society to its individual unit: You. To this effect, risk theorist Ulrich Beck writes,
“Whatever propels risk and makes it incalculable, whatever provokes the institutional crisis at the level of the governing regime and the markets, shifts the ultimate decision-making responsibility onto the individuals, who are ultimately left to their own devices with their partial and biased knowledge, with undecidability and multiple layers of uncertainty.” — Ulrich Beck
Here it would seem that our ripple effects are so incalculable that it would be an encumbrance to stop and consider them. Decision makers are expected to do their job with incomplete information. Consequently, they aren’t held accountable when shit hits the fan. This leads us to make decisions and take actions with a sort of indifference or amoral conscience. More specifically, the complexity of it all engenders a sort of wilful ignorance. Along these lines, the famed sociologist Max Weber wrote,
“In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning.