alkhemst said:
Besides the moral issues, its an illogical "solution". Its a good example of black and white thinking I'd say too. The logic goes, humans and the environment are in danger because of human behaviour acting on the environment. The solution, which isn't much of a solution is to reduce the human population.
Yep, excellent points, OSIT.
Gurdjieff gave us a way of understanding the problem with these "if we could just change this one thing the whole problem will be solved" so-called solutions. He referred to it as the law of Reciprocal Maintenance. It serves as a kind of absolute reference for thought on these subjects - relative, but absolute within a domain like ecology for example, or even in the domain of "work on oneself."
It's not just about grokking that every entity at every level of abstraction is constrained to behaviors that maintain all the others. It's about a future-oriented world view that comprehends Earth and all of us on it as an integrated system. It's not just an intellectual framework, it's a very real change in a person's state of consciousness.
Frank White's study
The Overview Effect (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) found that Astronauts and Cosmonauts experienced this change in consciousness when viewing the Earth from space. Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences has also researched the implications of this experience.
This change in the state of conscious is a living Metanoia and is what is required for humanity to see through lies and actually do something useful that will lead to permanent, positive change in the world.
Apologies if I veered off on a tangent. How am I to stay on point or follow a line of force when I see everything as related to everything else? OK, give me a moment. It's just that it irks me when people-haters camouflaged as do-gooders poke their heads out of their closet where I can see them.
I don't have an excerpt on Gurdjieff's law of Reciprocal Maintenance to hand for relatively new readers to benefit from, but there's an explanation of it in ISOTM as it applies to personal work. All you have to do is look at it as an analogy as you extrapolate it to the subject field of ecology.
[quote author=ISOTM]
"Change under ordinary conditions is impossible, because, in wanting to change something a man wants to change this one thing only. But everything in the machine is interconnected and every function is inevitably counterbalanced by some other function or by a whole series of other functions, although we are not aware of this interconnection of the various functions within ourselves. The machine is balanced in all its details at every moment of its activity. If a man observes in himself something that he dislikes and begins making efforts to alter it, he may succeed in obtaining a certain result.
But together with this result he will inevitably obtain another result, which he did not in the least expect or desire and which he could not have suspected.
By striving to destroy and annihilate everything that he dislikes, by making efforts to this end, he upsets the balance of the machine. The machine strives to re-establish the balance and re-establishes it by creating a new function which the man could not have foreseen.
For instance, a man may observe that he is very absent-minded, that he forgets everything, loses everything, and so on. He begins to struggle with this habit and, if he is sufficiently methodical and determined, he succeeds, after a time, in attaining the desired result: he ceases to forget and to lose things. This he notices, but there is something else he does not notice, which other people notice, namely, that he has grown irritable, pedantic, fault-finding, disagreeable. Irritability has appeared as the result of his having lost his absent-mindedness.
Why? It is impossible to say. Only detailed analysis of a particular man's mental qualities can show why the loss of one quality has caused the appearance of another.
This does not mean that loss of absentmindedness must necessarily give rise to irritability. It is just as easy for some other characteristic to appear that has no relation to absent-mindedness at all, for instance Stinginess or envy or something else.
"So that if one is working on oneself properly, one must consider the possible supplementary changes, and take them into account beforehand. Only in this way is it possible to avoid undesirable changes, or the appearance of qualities which are utterly opposed to the aim and the direction of the work.
[/quote]
So, I'm thinking that Nature or the Cosmos is already on it.
