The reality of cause and effect imposes limits on the world: the firing of the bullet doesn't pull the trigger, and nor does a smashed egg unbreak itself.
Were it otherwise, then anything would be permissible. The just-murdered victim springing back to animation, picking up where they left off, and sparing the killer from prison; people becoming progressively younger as we reverse the videotape of their life.
So the idea of causality is hard-wired into us, and it is no less than the narrative structure by which we connect sequences of events. First I.... and then I.... and then we.... the end. If the sequence of events doesn't make sense then the person describing them is lying, or unwell, or mad, or recounting the images of a dream, or attempting to piece together a work of fiction.
The above, then, is an approximate idea of how one occurrence causes a second, which causes a third, which.... and how human minds come to expect certain outcomes after event a but not others. This is best-encapsulated by the peerless Gaarder:
After a while Mom gets up and goes over to the kitchen sink, and Dad—yes, Dad—flies up and floats around under the ceiling while Thomas sits watching.
What do you think Thomas says? Perhaps he points up at his father and says: “Daddy’s flying!” Thomas will certainly be astonished, but then he very often is. Dad does so many strange things that this business of a little flight over the breakfast table makes no difference to him.
Every day Dad shaves with a funny machine, sometimes he climbs onto the roof and turns the TV aerial—or else he sticks his head under the hood of the car and comes up black in the face. Now it’s Mom’s turn. She hears what Thomas says and turns around abruptly. How do you think she reacts to the sight of Dad floating nonchalantly over the kitchen table?
She drops the jam jar on the floor and screams with fright. It all has to do with habit. (Note this!) Mom has learned that people cannot fly. Thomas has not. (Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World)
Habit and the idea of causality, then, are the boundaries of experience, and anything outside this causes confusion.
So imagine, then, going to sleep in 1878 in Podgorica, then part of Ottoman Montenegro. Upon waking, in the same bed you have been in all night, your little country is independent - no longer a speck on the Eternal State, and not yet a component in the pan-Yugoslav psychosis. Everything has changed, and yet everything remains the same.
To ordinary Montenegrins, it must have seemed as though their independence had fallen clean out of the sky. The decline of the Ottoman Empire and the forces which tore their little country away from imperial clutches are so contentious - and so complicated - that causality breaks down, and the fruits of experience rot at the source.
A Montenegrin, then, could fill the causality gap by concocting the story that a couple of hundred local soldiers routed the Turks, or that God (who is from Montenegro) wrested back the nation in the name of all that is good, right, and just.
