Google [Nature’s recourse: How plants and animals fight back] to see how plants and animals fight back when mutual arrangements between them go sour.
Here’s a short excerpt…
Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skullduggery turns up.
In this sense, cheating means pretty much what it does among people, says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of VU University Amsterdam: One party exploits another, taking more than its fair share or happily reaping benefits without paying the costs. “There is always that one person that orders the most expensive meal on the menu and then insists on splitting the bill evenly,” Kiers says.
Examples of nature’s skullduggery support the view that an unspoken morality exists in nature and serves the same purpose ethical codes do in human culture. Our Ethics (p.594), and the religions that embody them, are simply emergent phenomena (see Tao as Emergent Property, p.121). This suggests that there is no chance that a ‘peace on earth and good will to all men’ ideal future will ever occur. Such ideals are societal hoodwinks needed to help large populations in civilization feel as connected as possible. Simply put, a shared cultural story is essential to bond together what are otherwise actual strangers. These cultural stories also tout an erroneous ability to be responsible and choose a path of virtue. (See Free Will, p.587, and Use Non-Responsibility, p.258)
Not surprisingly, cultural stories based on an ideal, rather than on nature, come with a cost. Nature’s reality never matches our expectation, and so we push to improve matters. Naturally, any path of competition with nature eventually delivers the opposite. Ironically, the human condition may be worse off due to our desire to improve its condition. Every solution leaves behind in its wake a series of unforeseen unintended consequences. For that reason, I regard all problems as natural constants. That means all solutions are impermanent “goods hard to come by”; as chapter 64 puts it, Therefore the sage desires not to desire, and does not value goods which are hard to come by. Of course, I frequently fail and desire solutions anyway. No problem, as that problem is simply another natural constant.
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