Life is really sustained by life. The more life in the oceans, the more life that’s available. You’ll get significantly more biomass as the biomass of certain species grow. Take menhaden off the East Coast. We, as in humans, destroyed the ecosystem by taking away the prey fish, Nature left to balance just creates more life.
The same can be said with natural agriculture. If people manage the land properly you get more life. There’s more grass growth, more water infiltration and the entire ecosystem thrives drawing in more and more species that eat more insects because more can be sustained. Sure, things “die”, but in a normal world they’re more like recycled back into life.
There’s no horror to it for me anymore. The only horrors are man made, or man perhaps acts as the vector of hyper dimensional influence.
Nature doesn’t torture either, if you watch a cheetah or leopard kill a gazelle, it’s quick. Or look how a mantis shrimp was designed to destroy it’s prey, there’s very little suffering.
Anyway, probably a comment for another type of thread but I figured I’d mention it here….
I agree with your assessment of Peterson. He seems lost.
Yeah, I don't know if there is horror in me personally about all the death that's required for life... but I'll see how this holds up in the face of a certain space virus that is forecast to reduce the human population by 79%. And while there may not be horror at the moment, there is grief and depression at times.
I'm not sure about some of what you've said. There's mention of a benevolent Great Mother Nature that is distinct from human destroyers (Dark Father), with a potential for human stewardship or right relationship with the earth (Benevolent Father). But there's a key element missing - the dark side to the Great Mother who is responsible for suffering, disease and death. As mentioned by TC above, this is one thing what JP warns about pretty consistently, partial myths that don't reflect reality.
Not all kills are clean and quick in nature, not by a long shot. A cat playing with a mouse is one example that comes to mind. Is that torture, as in causing suffering for enjoyment? Hard to say, 'cuz we can't really know the mind of a cat, unless there's been some research done to that effect.
It's not just domesticated animals that do this, either. I think raccoons can be terrible avatars of the Dark Mother when they tear apart every single chicken in the coop and leave without eating a single one of them. A pack of wolves will sometimes start eating the entrails of a moose before the poor guy is dead. On Saltspring Island in BC, Canada, it is legal to hunt ravens because they have taught themselves to kill ewes in the lambing season by swarming and slowly pecking her apart, starting from the vulva. Even dolphins - yes, everyone's favourite water angels - have been known to beat porpoises to death! And not for food. What's the reason for this kinda surplus killing, or killing for reasons other than food? One answer, from the archetypal perspective, would be that it's the impulse of the dark side of the Great Mother making itself manifest in the world.
And perhaps the most telling example is that squirrels will often run directly at your car tire in attempt to murder you in a horrific car crash! Never trust a squirrel - they're nuts.
Here's what Peterson says about chimpanzees and empathy:
One of JP's main points on this topic is that without the benevolent Father (a culture based on decent values, or your stewardship example), people will easily revert to a becoming something like the chaotic children of the Dark Mother + the Dark Father, destroying themselves and others through a strategy of short-term pleasure or lust for power.
In the broad scheme of things, I think the C's would say that even this crazy behaviour - which we're seeing all around us today - is also a natural part of the grand cycle, or the movement towards 'balance' or something like that.
I do remember from my ecology/systems theory studies back in the day - 'balance' in ecological thought has generally been construed as a dynamic equilibrium, and is never stable. The basic example is a forest. It sprouts, grows through its seral stages, enters its climax state where all kinds of organic matter accumulates, and then a lightning strike hits, a wildfire tears through, and the cycle starts again from the ashes. This cycle of exploitation, conservation, collapse, and reorganization was popularized by the ecologist
Buzz Holling who called it panarchy, which described adaptive cycles in nested hierarchy. In other words, all the way up, and alll the way down. Fascinating stuff for those interested in systems theory and ecology:
I'm thinking of the diagram in
Earth Changes: The Human-Cosmic Connection... although it is strange to say, is this an accurate depiction of 'the balance of nature'?
