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How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?
I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.
Indeed, as others have pointed out, this mindset is at the heart of Stoïcism. It's also fairly close to Taoism.
What Stoïcism instructs is what to direct your will at: yourself. If you think that you have some influence over the DA, even just as a private citizen voting and writing letters to other people, then consider doing that. Or shape yourself into someone who would become a DA that would achieve the outcomes that you consider optimal. Make yourself into a better person and a better world will flow from that. The world is what it is; it can be improved if the people in it are improved, but the only one you can ultimately control is yourself. "But this DA is bad and is encouraging more bad people to do bad things!" Good is virtue, bad is vice. And virtue and vice can only be truly known from the inside. If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA? And your view that these charges should be brought up against these criminals, it's important that you observe your own thinking to understand if that's truly driven by wisdom, a virtue, or by a vice (in that case I think most would see wrath as a vice). Broadly: worry about yourself. Your soul, your actions, your reasoning.
And couching things in emotional terms, is a sure way to lessen your power of reasoning, to lessen the quality of your very soul. You see it everywhere; the originally well-meaning extremists that believe that because they see what they consider an injustice, it gives them licence to cause similar injury to others. Or single issue political/social crusaders who become blind to unintended consequences because they see one thing as "bad".
Ah, yes, I should have thought of stoicism.
With this, did you mean to reinforce the idea that it's a waste of energy to fret about what the DA does? Because my interpretation is that it simply doesn't matter whether s/he's driven by what s/he thinks is virtue or vice. A crusader or jihadist could genuinely believe his actions are divine will to cleanse the world of evil, but why does that matter, at the end of the day? The average person is not intelligent or well-reasoned; attempting to understand how much of their actions is driven by virtue seems like a fool's errand.
Yes. It's not a waste of energy to understand his actions in the sense that if you have to make a decision on his actions, like voting for or against him in an election, you need to act wisely and justly. But it doesn't really matter to YOU whether it was driven by vice or vertue, I was simply pointing out that you can't really tell whether something outside of yourself is good or bad; you can't know all outcomes, and you can't know other people's internal thoughts. All you can really know is your own.
Now this is one of the parts where Stocism tends to lose some people, but Stoics, like most ancient virtue ethics philosophers, consider that ethics are simple and innate. When we're close to nature, we do not need to be taught that being rash, cowardly, mean and violent is bad, it "feels" innately bad. Likewise being wise, bold, nice, and calm feels good. The Crusader or the Jihadist who commit large scale murder are doing so because instead of focusing on themselves and their actions, they focus on the world, which they see as "evil". And trying to correct the world directly blinds you to your own actions. If instead of focussing on whether the world or other people are good or evil, he were to think "is my conduct virtuous?" as he's about to massacre an innocent, he would likely come to a different conclusion. You can commit an awful lot of evil when trying to improve the world, that you wouldn't be committing if you were trying to improve yourself.
I get your point, though I suppose in the end it comes down to blending all these systems and beliefs into some kind of approximate heuristics, since few decisions we make day to day entails whether we should massacre an innocent or not, and the moment you step away from the extreme example, things start looking mighty murky.
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