speculative gratitude

Some beneficial acts don't receive the appreciation they deserve. Preventions are in that category. Although they decrease the risk of a tragic event, the result might earn barely any credit. A tragic event which doesn't happen is an invisible nonevent, so the prevention's valuable role is superficially invisible too. If the event has several complex factors affecting its occurrence, one might be tempted to wonder how much that single prevention truly helped to stop it. Worse, a tragic event which does happen casts immediate doubt on a prevention's effectiveness at reducing risk; it didn't "work". In an unfair twist, it will do that whether or not the prevention's promoters were completely upfront that risk wouldn't be eliminated.

In the more noticeable examples of prevention, the act is discernibly connected to a chain of causes and effects. It readjusted the path of this chain like a railroad switch connecting up alternative train tracks to form a redirected route. The original risk and the lessened risk are clear-cut. It's often seen better in retrospect. For instance, having a spare item is a prevention that's utterly justified right after the first item is lost or broken. Not having the spare would have led to the event of lacking the item. The prevention has ensured that the lacking "reality" is now contrary to fact: it's a happily avoided counterfactual. The happier deviations that define it, and the preventions that introduced these deviations, are demarcated, specific, and identifiable.

This imaginative mode of understanding is abstract, but another word for a counterfactual is a story. Storytelling commands human awareness. When a counterfactual is backed by a vivid story, its features come alive. It recruits the showier layers of consciousness. The appeal overshadows levelheaded estimates of low plausibility. A possibility might be highly unlikely, but if it feels real enough then it gives the impression that it was previously on the verge of coming true—until a decisive prevention intervened.

A last important analytical link is the prevention's performing agent. As surely as each counterfactual is linked to the prevention that rendered it a mere counterfactual, each prevention is linked to whatever agent put it into action. Hence, for a given agent, its unique influences and abilities effectively limit the preventions that have been or could be performed. If it were one average U.S. citizen, they wouldn't be individually praised for preventing armed conflict on the other side of the Earth (or scolded for not preventing it).

On the other hand, this commonsense limit breaks when the agent is omnipotent yet covert. An agent with these qualities could do virtually anything, but it doesn't openly affirm its miracle work when/if it ever does. The ramification is that there's no firm basis for distinguishing exactly what it has done and what it was aiming for. So the range of its hypothetical past preventions isn't inherently restricted. Did it act to prevent counterfactual scenarios P, Q, R, S, and so on? ...Maybe. It could have been involved.

When it comes to converting newcomers, there's a drawback in too thoroughly extending the concept of prevention to such an agent. If the agent constantly receives adoration motivated by the nonexistence of miscellaneous counterfactuals, then gradually it looks less and less like an objective, independent entity. It looks more and more like an idolized empty shell with medals pinned to it for invented reasons. Anyone can spin myriad tales of prevented tragedies large and small. These aren't narrowly targeted proofs of an agent's undeniable deeds. It's not persuasive to hear expressions of personal gratitude for personal speculations regarding deflected personal calamities. The endless trend is hard to miss: whenever a person can envision a way that their existence could have been worse for them, they won't run out of rationales for applauding the agent they hold responsible.

In addition, it has a second drawback that newcomers may spot. The belief ends up sounding greedy in a closely related "optimistic" form. According to the agent's own principle of making the believer's existence less bad, it probably isn't flatly opposed to making their existence more good too. If it is said to have intentionally steered away from unreal adverse events they envision, then shouldn't they ponder why it has intentionally not steered toward unreal enjoyable events they envision? To be sure, not starving merits recognition. But it's a benevolent sculptor of the cosmos, after all. Why quit there? What would have been so terrible about having a small fortune?