I've been thinking about the human tendency to blame people for their illnesses allot lately, and a few days ago it occurred to me that Humans, being social animals, have brains which instinctively seeks Agents for any event they encounter because their "native environment" is society; is Other People.
So: when a human is dealing with a sick person, and they're making concessions to that illness(doing this, not doing that, investing their time in care instead of personal pursuits, etc) there is no native impulse to blame the illness because the illness isn't a person and People is what the human brain impulsively seeks. The most proximate person TO the illness, is the ill person theirself. And, of course, the ill person is the one needing accommodation, i.e. the "cause", to the non-sick person's mind, of their concessions. Ergo, person gets sick: sick person asks for things; people blame sick person.
That's entirely irrational of course: people don't get sick by choice they get sick by encountering pathogens in the correct context in large enough quantities to be infected by them or by something going haywire in their bodies. And the above is just my own reasoning, of course; I dont have any data pointing to this conclusion so it's just Riffing at this point.
