There’s only one cause in the realm of man: choice.  The sciences of matter deal with forces outside themselves—gravity, inertia, pressure.  Stones don’t decide to fall.  They obey.  Stars don’t weigh outcomes before they burn.  They burn.  Man alone considers what is and what might be, then acts.

To confuse the natural cause of matter with the conscious cause of man is to blind reason.  The equation of a planet’s orbit isn’t the same as the intention of a person.  Only man imagines the future, selects among paths, and chooses one.  That choice may be wise or foolish.  It may achieve the end or fail entirely.  Even then, the cause is choice.

The collective has no will of its own.  “Society,” “nation,” “people”—these are abstractions.  They aren’t causes.  Each is shorthand for many individuals acting separately, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.  To speak of “the cause of society” is nonsense.  Only persons have reasons.  Only persons deliberate.

Every cause of man springs from within.  Two men in the same room may act in opposite ways.  One may speak, the other stay silent.  One may strike, the other forgive.  Even the same man may choose one path today and another tomorrow.  No formula can fix this variance.  To insist on one is to pretend man’s a machine.

It’s error, then, to build grand systems of control.  They’re always built on a falsehood—that men can be reduced to constants, that choice can be erased.  The planner, the engineer, the reformer all make the same mistake.  They mistake man for matter.  Because man isn’t matter, they’ve got to resort to force.  They replace persuasion with command, reasoning with compulsion.

Markets aren’t causes in themselves.  They’re the stage where choices meet.  To say “the market rises” or “the market falls” is to ignore what’s real: individuals buying, selling, saving, or consuming.  No invisible entity pulls the strings.  The cause is always the same—choice.

The true science of man is the study of action.  The method isn’t measurement but understanding.  To explain man as though he were a star or a stone is to abandon social science.  The cause of his world is free will, and free will can’t be pressed into a formula.

Man will always act, because he will always choose.  That’s the only cause that matters.

Reference

Murray Rothbard; The Mantle of Science