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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.
This ideology may work decently for you individually, although I think it takes a heroic individual to truly accept that brutal state of affairs.
Over time though, and on a societal level, this type of thinking will inevitably descend back into the might-makes-right, strong eat the weak world that we rose from. During the Axial revolution back around the time of Socrates, men realized that they could make themselves better. That there was a different way to live than simply accepting Nature as red in tooth and claw - we could master nature. But more importantly, we could master ourselves.
All the beauty and ease your life is filled with has been delivered to you from generations of your ancestors that rejected this naturalistic worldview in order to build a better future for their descendants. You can spit on their sacrifices and just focus on getting yours, man, but I reject your worldview as fundamentally selfish, and wrong.
Maybe I exaggerate slightly, but aren't we functionally there? In what realm is might not right and strong not eating the weak?
This sounds good but I think is facile. The beauty of capitalism is that, barring certain tragedy of the commons exceptions, the system allows society to flourish while people simply focus on getting "theirs".
I think it’s really more or less human nature that when push comes to shove, it’s still about the same laws of power and control that it always was. We’ve repainted the castles pink and lavender, we’ve given our serfs the veneer of control over things but if you’re sitting in a powerful position, you’re doing things pretty much the way we always did. And for those at the bottom, again life isn’t that much better outside of the sheer material comforts. If you’re in a low position on the social hierarchy, your life is still dictated to you. Your boss can choose your dress, your hours, and force you to say things you don’t want to. Those in the middle also have to be careful to be properly orthodox and to protect their positions in the social hierarchy. This is how human societies work and always have worked.
I’ve never seen much reason to pretend otherwise. The elite’s favorite game is the game of thrones, and when it comes to that point, you don’t have any say.
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