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Notes -
Observation:
Conclusion:
This observation doesn't have to lead to that conclusion.
The world is the world. You likely won't fix it by yourself. But nature, society and civilization are emergent properties of aligned collective effort by sentient individuals. So, yeah, your efforts won't do anything on their own. But, find like minded people, set up systems, and get things moving in a one direction. Over decades and generation you will see it become the next version society, nature and civilization.
The way I frame it, is to focus on actions instead of outcomes. Plan your actions to best achieve the outcomes. Readjust your actions depending on how badly your previous actions have missed the target outcome. But, don't place any importance on the outcome itself. You have agency, but you do not have determinism. If the action was right, given the information you had, then you did will. The world is the world, it is going to throw unforeseen wrenches in the works.
You have agency, but you also have limited time. Identify your circle of concern and put in effort to help those people & initiatives navigate around nature. But repeated navigation around nature leads to desire paths that eventually becomes the roads that facilitate the future of nature itself.
An awareness of this helps you stomach losses and failures more easily. A resignation to it leads to Nihilism.
Sounds a lot like Indic religions and the 'dharmic' way of life. Both tie the concept of 'harmony with nature' to 'ego-death'.
Most Indic religions can be notoriously hard to capture in short quotes. The diversity of philosophical schools and the the prioritization of metaphor over specifics is not conducive to concise expression. But, newer Indic religions that take Abrahamic inspirations do a better job of being concise and grounded in their claims. In that spirit, I quote Guru-nanak of Sikh-fame.
Strictly/rhetorically speaking you've caught me slipping, but more colloquially I think you follow my logic. Immutable doesn't mean that we have no free will or our free will is unable to bring about any change, but rather that even if you can lift a rock, when you stop lifting it, it will fall back to the ground. A slightly more meaning example/metaphor may be that, if I'm a monkey, and I don't want to be eaten by a tiger, I could learn to climb trees, or perhaps even set up specialized roles within a communal system with other monkeys so one or two scouts alert the rest of approaching tigers while everyone else create tools to hunt down the tigers. But that only applies to my tribe. If a rival tribe's monkey or antelope gets eaten by a tiger, it really does me very little good to lose sleep over it, especially if the other monkey can easily copy my tribe but chose to nap instead. Except this simple cause-and-effect and reap-what-you-sow system breaks down when the tribe of 20 monkeys grows into an ecosystem of a city of a million that's subject to state oversight at 10 million and federal oversight at 350 million, and even if you are keen to set up a scout against the tiger, others can brazenly defect, and when you get too zealous about shooting a tiger yourself, a pack of mules from a far away forest issues you a consent decree to avoid systemic prejudice against the oppressed tigers.
Fascinating. Thanks for the insight, though I do not fully understand just from the quote.
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