He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneli… - Clifford D. Simak

To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.

We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow—a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology anymore. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already — a political system that broke down under its own weight.