One Thing Leads to Another

The ongoing FIFA scandal broke out due to a tax evasion investigation in the US about a man, Chuck Blazer, who just happened to be a FIFA official. A long and interesting trail followed. Richard Weber, head of the US tax agency summarizes it thus:
“One thing led to another, led to another and another.”
By the end, there were so many FIFA officials in the crosshairs of that tax evasion + organized crime investigation that the US decided the easiest way to arrest so many foreign officials at one shot (instead of asking a zillion different countries to extradite a couple of people each) was to wait for the FIFA elections to happen: all the eggs would be in one basket at that time!

The “one thing led to another, led to another and another” comment reminded me of something Alan Jacobs wrote. He cited one of the answers to the question, “Which Contemporary Habits Will Be Most Unthinkable 100 Years From Now?”:
“Sadness. Drug companies will have developed an over-the-counter, side-effect-free pill (or patch or lotion) that combats the feeling. People will swallow this pill casually, in the same way they take Advil, when they feel the first glimmers of melancholy. It will have no stigma and will be as common and unexamined as the Band‑Aids and Tylenol in every medicine cabinet.”
Assuming that indeed happens, Jacobs wonders of its consequences:
“What effect will that have on innovation and creativity, in the arts and in humanistic scholarship as well as in the sciences, especially medicine? What do we profit if we abolish sadness without abolishing the things that make us sad?”
What effect indeed! If sadness had been eliminated just 8 years back, we’d never have seen the iPhone invented nor the smartphone becoming ubiquitous. That in turn would have meant we’d never heard wonderful lines like this:
“We were lost, but not really lost. We were lost in the way that you can get lost with a GPS on your phone, which is to say we knew exactly where we were.”

One thing leads to another leads to another…

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