[RudyRuetigger]

Why?

well, too small of a sample size. One person can not truly equal out to average for how they act.

Over the course of a population, karma does exist..but i like to call karma "statistics".

[RogueScholar]

Karma is an extension of the belief that humanity itself is a single organism. Thus if you directly or indirectly cause harm to someone else, then you are really causing harm to yourself as well, even though the time between the action and reaction could lead you to believe that they are independent events. As our population continues to grow and the average distance between us and our nearest neighbor continues to shrink, it's becoming increasingly easier to witness this principle at work.

Let's take the example of a busy supermarket, and as you approach the beverage cooler to retrieve your favorite libation, you notice two things:

1) There's only one bottle of it left
2) Someone only a few feet away from you is about to reach for it

If you grab it before they do (perhaps cackling with glee and uttering something douchey like "Better luck next time") then at first glance it would seem that you only cause harm to them, while reaping a benefit for yourself. However you've now soured the environment in which you live. That person may never see you again, but their brother, sister or best friend might be someone who interacts with you later. Maybe their brother, sister or best friend is your mechanic, UPS man, or the loan officer at your bank.

The guy who had to watch you walk off with the beverage he wanted will undoubtedly relate the story several times as proof positive that the world is going to shit and we all need to watch out for ourselves more as the level of civility and decency around us is in free fall. They may brush aside the experience as meaningless, but they can't help experience the negative energy that comes from hearing someone they care about be unhappy.

Next month your car breaks down and the mechanic quickly spots a split hose which would cost $15 to replace and 5 minutes to send you on your way. However his daughter needs braces, and it would cost him nothing to tell you that he'll look at your car during the day and in doing so, find a whole bunch of other things that "need fixing" in order to get you back on the road. It goes against his nature to bilk a customer like that, but he can hear that story about the asshole who told his buddy "better luck next time" at the store playing in his head. Realizing this is "just the world we live in," you return to the auto shop to a $250 bill.

This is karma. It's usually not so direct, oftentimes there are tens or hundreds of people involved in the simple reverberations of your actions from person to person until it gets back to you in some way. This example was simplified just to convey the principle behind it. Especially in this day and age when everyone is a specialist and we all have to rely on each other just to get through the complexities of the average day, its existence is undeniable.

You can even see it manifested on a macro scale in the relationship which the Western World now has with the Arab States. Their dislike of us didn't just spring up out of thin air, we spent decades manipulating their governments in order to suit our interests. In the 50s, Britain controlled 100% of Iran's oil industry and made a fortune in the process. Then once the Iranian government nationalized the industry to keep those profits for themselves, Britian got our CIA to orchestrate a coup which overthrew their democratically elected leaders and install a dictator which would return the Iranian oil fields back to the British (who shared them with us as a token of gratitude).

That dictator, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi oppressed his people for 25 years, with the help of a Secret Police force that we trained. We told him to covertly attempt to engineer a coup in neighboring Iraq, whose President was aligned with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. In a roundabout way our efforts were successful, and then-Vice President Saddam Hussein came to power. Years later, Saddam's former citizens are still killing American citizens daily as we once again find ourselves meddling in their affairs under the guise of "nation building," which amounts to little more than yet another resource grab.

I'm not saying that we, ourselves, caused 9/11 or anything so dramatic. Regardless of how interconnected we all might be, we're still individuals and have to answer for our actions, no matter the justification. It would be foolish though to think that the long course of human history, and the short course of our own little lives, are something as sterile as a series of coin flips in which the last result has no bearing on the next. Part of the social contract is that we accept the fact that our actions will influence the lives of others as we allow ourselves to be affected by their actions.

The longer you deny these things, the more you will toil needlessly against a force as difficult to overcome as gravity.