King Lear once observed in the depths of his sorrow ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods, they kill us for their sport.’ (King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 37). Many people have an inclination to a conviction that in this life ‘something is going on’. Strings are being pulled. Destiny, fate, puppetry; this is the point where religion jumps in and conspiracy theories emerge. This is the place where we just have a feeling because it happened to us it cant be chance. Too see something so huge it just has to be capricious, there has to be an answer to it because that much mayhem makes us deeply uneasy. Nature cannot be blind.
Part of the reason for this is that we are creatures of cause and effect and in an endless series of causes we believe there must come a place where there is one ultimate cause of everything. Part comes from our own ignorance. After all we don’t lose any sleep about killing and hunting animals; but the ones we kill in the wild are individual animals. Was it unlucky we killed them that day? Was it the fate of that animal to be shot or poisoned by us, just then?
The strings of fate are no more than the fact that in Nature we have no names, no nations and no individuality. We are just another animal. And our leaders view our millions in the same way: a series of statistics.
The physical facts that govern existence deal with everyone en masse.