Before WWII, the United States solved all its problems with :free-real-estate: free real estate

Now it feels like we just gin up some war fever whenever people start noticing the problems...

Or is reality deterministic and I just happened to read some book or watch some movie or one day had cereal for breakfast instead of eggs and that set off some chain of events that reprogrammed my meat computer to make me susceptible to communism?

No. Determinism is silly. It is mistakenly identifies our models - our simplifications - of the physical world as the physical world.