Free Will & Fate Quote by Mary Garden

A neat little metaphysical trick hides inside that sentence: violence gets laundered into destiny. By framing cruelty toward children as "not uncommon", Mary Garden isn’t just reporting a practice; she’s exposing how ordinary people learn to make the unbearable feel procedural. The passive construction matters. "To be told" dissolves the teller. No one is responsible, the story goes, because the universe already ruled.

The karmic logic is especially efficient because it borrows the moral authority of spirituality while delivering the convenience of bureaucracy. If a child is suffering, the explanation doesn’t have to touch poverty, caste, family shame, institutional neglect, or adult sadism. It redirects the moral spotlight onto the victim, then pushes the timeline safely out of reach: a past life. That move turns empathy into a kind of ignorance. Why intervene if pain is cosmic bookkeeping? Why feel outrage if the child "must have" earned it?

Garden’s wording also captures the psychological violence of the message. Children are being trained to narrate their own harm as deserved, to internalize guilt before they’ve even developed a stable sense of self. "Must have hurt a child" is a chilling mirroring: the accusation forces them to identify with an imagined perpetrator, making their punishment feel like justice rather than abuse.

Contextually, this reads like an outsider’s observation of a cultural or institutional setting where karmic belief is mobilized as social control. The intent isn’t to debate karma as theology; it’s to show how belief systems can be weaponized into a moral alibi, especially against those least able to refuse the story.