The Force of Nature
As i sit here looking how much snow I need to shovel. I can't help but wonder why nature is so crule. It brings to mind the stories of the God in the Bible destorying the world with floods and fire. I guess my God is the same as the christian god, I thought. Then i saw the picture and thought again. Nature loves us and is just correcting the system for the good of the system.
Thousands of scientists, judging by the latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already state that we must stop working against Nature, as we have been doing for centuries, and begin to work in harmony with it. They explain that Nature already knows what to do and when to do it. If we only get out of the way, things will sort themselves out. Just as each body has its immune system, Nature has mechanisms that maintain its balance.
This balance is a dynamic equilibrium controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms, where Nature thinks not of particular elements within it, but of the whole system. Just imagine the havoc our body would fall into, if each organ cared only for its own good, instead of caring for the good of the whole body.
In such a state, organs would steal blood vessels from one another, denying neighboring organs nourishment and oxygen. Organs producing antibodies would direct them against other organs because other organs would be considered foreign bodies, and the ones with strongest antibodies would destroy the other organs. Soon, very soon, the body would die, and its self-centered organs would die with it. When such a process happens in an organism, it is called “cancer.”
The fact that Nature does exist and that it isn’t destroying itself every single moment is proof that Nature does not work egoistically. It is a proof that Nature works as a system, putting the well being of the system before the well being of its parts. In Kabbalah, when the system’s needs come before the needs of the part, it is called “altruism.” In an altruistic system, the particular elements constantly contribute to the system, whether it is an organism or a human society.
Humans, in almost every aspect, are just another animal species. But there is one aspect where we are different from Nature: we put our own interestbefore the interest of the system. This is the essence of egoism. We don’t need to teach animals, plants or rocks how to behave. Their behavior is always in harmony with Nature, altruistic, putting the system’s needs before their own. This is why when prey animals hunt, they hunt only enough to sustain themselves, and thus maintain the natural balance of their habitat.
The only problem with the human race is that, unlike animals, it runs on an egoistic “operating system” instead of an altruistic one. To mend ourselves and to stop disrupting Nature’s homeostasis we need to install an altruistic operating system instead of our current, faulty system.
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