Illusions are what people use to feel safe about something they don’t know or don’t want to know.

In times of crisis, such illusions can meet reality and find themselves shattered. In quite a few countries, COVID changed the view on the country’s health system. Brexit highlighted how one’s vote is one of many and transformed the individual’s belief that a vote can be a protest into a seismic shift in the UK’s political and economic future.

Once the illusion is shattered, people need to deal with the anxiety they have been able to avoid using the illusion.

A regular consequence is to blame the system.

It serves to push one’s anxiety back onto something else, this time the system that was considered the guardian of one’s safety.

It’s another way to avoid thinking about one’s contributions to one’s safety, and one’s responsibility to do so.

This doesn’t free the system from its responsibilities. But such systems consist of all the individuals involved in it.