But do we judge the flower by the root?

And anyway: Which root cause? Hegelian alienation, Marxian false consciousness, Weberian disenchantment, Freudian defense mechanisms, Sartrean bad faith, Orwellian doublethink, Gramscian hegemony, or Goebbels’s Big Lie? Or is the root cause, in that famous “last instance,” Kuhnian paradigms, Foucauldian discipline, or God’s plan, or that sure bet, money—or have I stopped short of the Truly-Rooted Root Cause?

Root-cause explanations are exaggerated judgments, each pretending an outsized clarity. Root causes wash out contingencies and their differentiations. What if “the root cause” is more contingency?

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