The “why” seems important, to me. It can help us in a couple of ways, one of which has already been mentioned (standard prevention). A slightly more controversial opinion is that it may also open our eyes to things we might be doing that unintentionally create enemies for us. It’s not a weakness to look toward ourselves from time to time, and see if we could be handling things better. I am in no way saying that “yo, we brought that shit on ourselves” or that we deserve it, or anything like that. Just that we may be able to avoid making unnecessary enemies in the future, by tweaking our policies if it is warranted.
On a side note, I wonder if how we approach the idea of “why” is another of those hardwired differences between liberals and conservatives. * It seems like most of the liberals I know always want to know the “why” of just about anything, whether it’s about why people ‘should’ do this or that, or why something works the way it does, or why people behave the way they do. Most of the conservatives I know are generally satisfied with ‘what’ or ‘who’, and don’t care about so much about the whys. Just as a * general example, take liberal parents vs conservative parents:
A child asks a parent why they have to do something. One parent answers, “Because I said so.” Another parent spends five minutes droning on and on, explaining why it’s important to do it. I bet most of us could make a guess as to who is liberal and who is conservative.
* Disclaimer: I know that every person belonging to any group is the same. These are just generalizations.