John Singleton with Bob HowardRip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 34-35, under “Causes — Not Symptoms.”

Suppose you had appendicitis. How would you know? By the pain that is transmitted to your consciousness by your nervous system is how. Suppose that doctors were able to isolate those nerves and cut them, so that no pain was transmitted? Would that fix your appendicitis? Obviously not. The pain is only a symptom of the problem. The appendix will still rupture and kill you.

Although it is perfectly obvious that problems can only be solved by treating causes, and not symptoms, an enormous amount of energy and money is spent today on a hopeless attempt to do the reverse: to solve problems by treating the symptoms. This criticism can be levelled at the medical profession; the psychiatric/psychological profession, economists, politicians, educationalists, lawyers, marriage counsellors, social workers, and as many more as you can name.

In many cases, this is done for the simple reason that there is no immediate alternative. But there is a difference between doing it because there is no immediate alternative and doing it in the belief that it actually will succeed in solving the problem. It won’t. The very best it will do is buy time, but the time will be bought at a price — usually a more severe problem to be confronted sometime in the future.

Nowhere is this mistake of treating symptoms instead of causes made more regularly, nor with more tragic and disastrous results, than in the fields of government and politics. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that the cause of most, if not all, of our economic, social and political problems is government itself. It is understandable then, if not forgiveable, that politicians should be loath to look too closely at the causes.

For example:

Inflation: rising prices and wages are an effect, or a symptom, of inflation, not a cause. So prices and wage controls and fiddling with the consumer price index by tax adjustments do nothing to attack the cause of the problem, yet that is where most government attention is directed.

Drugs: drug abuse is a symptom of a much deeper social problem — a desire by people to escape from an intolerable situation into a more tolerable one. Banning drugs is an attack on the symptom not the cause.

Unemployment: this is a symptom of a far more complex economic problem — government make-work schemes and public service feather-bedding might improve the statistics, but they do nothing to attack the cause.

Pornography: the demand for pornography is created by repressive community attitudes and anti-pornography laws.

Education: the root cause of most of the problems in education today is the fact that it is compulsory. Thus, the simple spending of more and more money and modifying the details of the system won’t solve the fundamental problems.

Subsidies: when government taxation, inflation and regulation ruin an industry, the government then props it up with the aid of subsidies. Again treating the symptoms and not the cause.

All of these problems are very complex, and will be difficult to solve under any circumstances. But if we are to solve them at all, it will only be done by searching out and attacking their causes. They will never be solved if we only treat their symptoms. And never is a long, long time to wait.