Causal Mediation Principle
It sounds fancy. It’s actually a straightforward principle that happens all the time in life because it explains what happens when we interfere with cause and effect chains.
Cold weather is a natural part of our climate in Winnipeg. Kids are subjected to snowsuits, scarves, toques, multiple pairs of socks and mitts. But mitts are a frequent pain point for parents of toddlers because inevitably a toddler will decide they don’t want to wear mitts because the mitts make it difficult to do things.
Every single parent knows this drill. It’s a rite of passage of parenthood in Winnipeg. But it’s also a very simple example of how cause and effect works and the difference between a mediated chain and an unmediated chain.
An unmediated chain allows the child to find out the hard way. Go outside without your gloves and see how long it takes before you ask for them. A mediated chain is the argument the parent has with the child to make the child wear the gloves before they leave the house.
Which one is more effective?
Sometimes the parents that don’t fight this battle are considered “lazy.” It’s often seen as lazy parenting—but it’s not. It honours the cause and effect chain the child picks up when they choose not to wear their gloves. It leaves the chain unmediated, meaning the child learns for themselves that gloves are necessary. Over the long term, the unmediated chain produces the best result. The chain will close completely with no further power struggles.
A mediated chain results in a consistent tug-of-war. The child doesn’t get to learn the effects of their own choices, resulting in a never-ending battle of will. A mediated chain like this gets left open and often results in other battles in other areas of life where the child is asking to learn for themselves and the parent is refusing that opportunity.
This doesn’t mean adults should never intervene, or that harm doesn’t matter. It means that learning requires exposure to consequence where awareness is possible. Mediation is appropriate when awareness cannot yet exist. It becomes harmful when it replaces learning rather than supports it.
Mediated chains result in power struggles, whether we are talking about adults or toddlers. People generally want to learn for themselves. They want to understand the effects of their own choices because that is how people learn.
We can be told a million times that the stove is hot, but until we touch it, accidentally or not, we don’t really understand what that means. There’s a reason we give children sensory experiences like water tables and sand tables. They begin to learn the properties of water and sand through play. It also begins to teach cause and effect as it relates to water and sand. If I get sand wet, what happens? Can I build a sand castle with dry sand? If my clothes get wet, what happens? If I get sand all over the place, what happens?
These scenes of cause and effect play out with adults as well. But there is something different that happens with adults, because somewhere along the way adults learn to just trust what other people tell them. They stop questioning whether the outcome will be the same for them. That is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it can protect people from harm when we tell them not to play in traffic and they listen. On the other hand, it can stop people from trying new things, starting a business, moving to someplace new, or finding a new job.
Society as a whole puts a lot of effort into mediating the cause and effect chains of its people, largely protecting them from the true effects of their own choices. This begins to explain why laws don’t work and why control is often difficult to maintain.
Let’s pretend for a minute that there is an isolated community with one grocery store in it. The next store is at least 100 miles away by car. Someone within that community steals some lunch meat from the store and gets caught. What happens?
A mediated chain results in systemic intervention with police and court dates. It might result in a fine or a few days in jail, but ultimately that person is freed and allowed back into the store. Why are they allowed back into the store? Because they don’t have a car and they can’t drive to the next town. The system won’t allow them to feel the effect of their own choice. Even if they had a car, in many cases the system still wouldn’t require them to drive that far for groceries.
In an unmediated chain, the store owner is allowed to refuse service, whether or not the person has a car, resulting in a much harsher consequence for the same action. This specific chain then closes cleanly. It doesn’t prevent another choice from being made and it doesn’t protect anybody from anything. It’s possible the person makes a new choice to cause more harm; however, that is always possible, whether the chain is mediated or not. Mediated chains do not prevent additional harm any more than unmediated chains cause additional harm.
The system protects people from the true consequences of their actions, no different than the parent who fights with their toddler to put their gloves on before going outside. It results in external authority instead of learned understanding. This explains why laws are frequently ignored or broken and why children continue to challenge parental authority.
The underlying fight is the desire of people to learn for themselves without being protected from their choices. The guise of protection or harm prevention is often used as the reason to mediate cause and effect chains; however, it has the unintended result of leaving the original cause and effect chain open. Without closure that chain will keep happening. Systemic intervention does not close the original chain. It only creates a secondary chain.
If we trace the problems back to the original source, what we find is that the desire to prevent harm or control outcomes is what actually creates all the open chains. If we stopped trying to control outcomes and prevent harm, we’d have to fix secondary causes like poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity. But since we don’t want to do that, we continue to fight for external authority through mediating continually looping cause and effect chains.
Cause and effect chains are non-local, meaning that anybody can pick them up at any time. You can pick up the cause and effect chain of another person at will. Repetition is created, not just by a single person repeating the same action, but by many people picking up the same chain and trying it for themselves. When all of those chains are mediated, it creates an exponential number of secondary chains, while none of the original chains are ever allowed to complete.
The Causal Mediation Principle explains why things happen repeatedly, why laws are broken, and how secondary chains are created. A cleanly closed chain doesn’t mean we get the outcome we want; it simply means the chain is allowed to close itself through its own logical completion, whatever that is. Without that, the chain remains open to repetition and destruction if the chain collapses under its own weight before being allowed to complete on its own. A system that replaces learning with control will never reach a balance it can sustain.