Drugs, hysteria, racism, aliens and magic

 

What do hallucinogenic-drugs, mass-hysteria, systemic-racism and space-aliens and magic have in common? 

The explain EVERYTHING and predict nothing.

That is why airplanes are held together with spars and rivets rather than magical incantations.

Do drugs, hysteria, racism, aliens and magic exist? Certainly there is evidence of them.

Yeah, probably so. But the fact that they are "rear-view mirror" explanations severely limits their utility, especially when they blind decision-makers to ways of looking at the worlds that have predictive capability and give the decision-maker a much, much higher degree of control of the outcome.

Systemic-racism can be used to explain every booboo, injustice and stroke of misfortune that ever befell a person-of-color.

Systemic-racism can be used to explain much higher rates of maternal mortality (for instance).

But the screed of systemic-racism will not FIX hard issues like maternal mortality and, in fact, will prevent those issues from being solved.

Hard question must be asked. Some of them look into genetic predisposition and others examine sacred cows like Medicaid and the lack of monetary disincentive to blowing-off appointments.

So forgive me if I do not bow to the alters of magic mushrooms, rave parties, BLM/Systemic-racism, space-aliens and bigfoot.

I have a life to live and real problems to solve.