making new-sense from apparent non-sense
Events and their circumstances are complicit processes; there are no simple cause and effect relationships. Our minds, however, prefer 'narrativium', a simple story when events and our responses to them are in sequence.
In reality, actions, events, contexts are multicausal and recursive; interacting complex systems modify each other, over and over, and any result can differ radically from what's gone before. As we're learning after the financial crisis in 2008, old rules don't work, order whirls, surprise is unnervingly insistent, no-one is in control.
But our minds baulk at apparent randomness and disorder. Many of us flail and try to "simplify complexity" or demand quick meaning from the inexplicable in order to manage or control it. Yet if a system can be seen in something closer to its full exhuberant state, however complicated and difficult, previously hidden opportunities will emerge.
Just as a dashboard with its carefully calibrated gauges, cannot be mistaken for the moving car, no single mental model provides The Answer. New perceptions,new 'gauges' in our minds will help us to see non-sense for what it is, and make new-sense of what's happening and might happen.
In modern times, we have a mathematical understanding of how epidemics function. Contrast the reasoning behind vaccination programmes or the provision of emergency services with the superstitious beliefs about disease and other misfortune from earlier eras.
Epidemics are riddled at many levels with what are known as 'small worlds'. These are networks of interactions. Networks and their dynamics give us an important suite of mental models. For example, when we bump into a school friend from decades ago in some foreign city, we're surprised at the 'small world' we've just encountered, feel something eerie has happened. Amazement at the meeting is misplaced.