Conversations

[degringolade]

René Magritte The Art of Conversation 1963

Lately I have been spending a lot of time writing emails.  Good way to run a discussion.  I kinda feel bad that I have a circumscribed amount of time to write every day and use this little "e-vanity" that I call a blog as my primary means of addressing issues.  I am trying to get better at returning detailed emails, but I only have so much time.  A lot of these e-mails are better than what I come up with sometimes.  So I will grab on coat-tails and take a fun ride with the authors. 

Today's odd little titdbit.  Hexagram 46 two days in a row.

Today I will be working on e-mails and I think that I will give the stage to Michael.

PIMPING MOTHER NATURE, NOT FOOLING

Mother Nature has no problem with the “fittest”, until it is time to rebalance things by eliminating an overpopulation of the fittest. When the theory of natural selection is moved off paper and put into action in the whole of nature, the perpetuation of the “fittest” as defined by biology, if it happens, will ensure that the most individuals can later be eliminated by a required adaptation.

If the argument against this outcome, is that the characteristic of “fittest” includes adaptability, then the characteristic itself then loses its meaning with regard to a species surviving, and there can be no means of rating fitness, other than with sophistry. Being fit is defined as not needing to adapt, and ability to adapt is typically reduced with specialization/refinement.

A big deal has been made about survival being a function of competition, and people have found it surprising that the survival of some of the planet’s lowlife, is dependent on cooperation.

People look at a diagram of the food chain and they see just a wide range of individuals competing and eating each other; but this anthropomorphic view sees the opposite of the essence of the whole of nature that is represented on the diagram. The essence of the whole operation is cooperation - in the sense that every species depends on the others.

Cooperation is balance. To fool Mother Nature, means to intentionally cause an unnecessary unbalance within nature, and the reason behind any effort to unbalance nature, can be captured by the idea of a desire to profit.

For some reason, the concept of cooperation is always considered an option to competition; probably because of how language influences thinking. What is shown on the diagram of the food chain, is that survival depends on sustained coexistence of cooperation and competition – where each is given a definition in nature’s terms, rather than in human language.

In nature’s terms, competition is not a means to profit. In human terms, nature itself has become a means to profit. Modern man is not trying to fool Mother Nature; he is pimping her out to the highest bidder.

Things in nature that can cooperate or compete typically do both. The operation of a wolf pack is an obvious model of social cooperation within a species, and the operation of the pack includes a plan to kill members of the species, if they are not members of the pack and they come into the pack’s territory. This will be done for the simple reason of preserving the pack’s food source – which is the prey contained within a specific area claimed by the pack.

The traits that set humans apart from the rest of nature have been described mostly in glorious terms – the human is the creator of words, the human has a natural drive to understand and seek meaning, and the human blah, blah. But perhaps the most important difference with regard to the survival of any species on the planet, can be summed up by defining a human as the animal with a desire to profit.

One effect of so much intelligence, is that humans are able to use science and sophisticated mathematical modeling to see why, how, and when Mother Nature will conduct a large-scale elimination of humans and all manner of other species, due to climate change caused by human activity. But if humans can stop such events, they are clearly not able to do so. A population driven by desire to profit from nature, does not have the ability to allow a natural balance to exist, or to restore any natural balance that is profitable to maintain.

How smart were humans to discard a god that might have been Mother Nature – one who provided for everyone if nobody got greedy. How about the god that made hubris the worst sin of all? The current president of the US is not an aberration, he is Mother Nature hitting humanity over the head with a baseball bat, trying to wake it up. Unfortunately, humanity will probably open its eyes, see the obviousness of the problem, and set the clock back 4 years, instead of 2,000 years.

What makes this scenario an unhappy one, is the idea that a human must be an animal with a desire to profit. History supports this definition with descriptions of past gods that punished greed and hubris; but before that, there must have been a time when a desire to profit did not exist anywhere on the planet.

The subject of wealth disparity points to the issue of balance, and it also inadvertently points to the inevitable problems that stem from human desire to profit from nature. Wealth disparity is a measure of differences in wellbeing between groups of humans, when ideally, it should be a measure of differences in wellbeing between groups of all living things on the planet.