When faced with seemingly insurmountable global challenges it’s worth taking a pause and asking, what would nature do? One of the only reasons I can remain stoic is because I know that the chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More and instability being forced upon us must be temporary. How do I know this? It cannot be any other way as they are triggered by decisions that contravene natural order. The resulting chaos and instability are more powerful primers for social cohesion than collapse. What if I told you how your powerful nature can stop a war?
… respect and collaboration that is key to our survival. In evolution, either biologically or culturally, populations will always collapse if they exert only a single trait or dogma or try to force a specific outcome that fails to heed the balance of nature. Violence is not the natural order of things, and most people shy away from a fight. Therefore it is in the minority ways of doing things – if proffered peacefully – where the greatest progress is always made.
The unfortunate fact is that aggression is visible yet, like so much in nature that is positive and progressive, the sparrows of war that get on with rebuilding are inconspicuous. This is how our media becomes consumed by fear, violence and conflict, often forgetting about the much larger peaceful and respectful collaboration happening underneath all that. The most important parts of the ecosystem – the ones that nurture, maintain and protect – hide in plain sight …
– from ‘The Sparrows of Kabul’ in How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature
I have included some quotes from my last two books that may help put this subject into more context. If you get the chance to read these in full, I believe they provide an important perspective that is missed from most media and can help resolve anxiety. The chances are you’re already reading far more bad news every day online anyway. So why fill your mind with that, when you could absorb alternative reality, being a tonic for the deliberately anxiety-causing content being forced upon you?
The challenges we think we face are a smokescreen
Overwhelming you are fed a litany of disaster which is simple and deliberate brainwashing. Like all brain washing, it’s not real. You’re not in prison though. You’re still able to exercise free thought because you can make a decision to get your head out of the fear.
Brain washing is a well-practiced formula and it’s inherent in the addiction that drives social media. It’s also coming from a few billionaires that have lied to the world and are now showing their true colours. They’ve used the Trojan horse of social media to convince you they will make your world better, all the while funnelling your income into a war machine that makes it worse.
You can’t even shop in Coles supermarket now without funding the largest military AI company in the world. The simple joy of music has been perverted into war funding by Spotify.
How did we get to this point?
Addiction is inherent in nature. It is positive in mild measure but leads to social disintegration if it’s allowed to take over. War, however, is only a trait of modern humans. It doesn’t exist in nature. It can’t.
The most successful species, those that have outlasted any other creature in evolutionary time, were never war like. Your inherently addictive biology is being used to make you believe war is a natural thing but in reality, it’s only there to make you poor and other people very rich.
Meta and Google just lost a landmark case that found their platforms were knowingly designed to be addictive. A week earlier, a Mexico court found they had deliberately concealed the risks of child exploitation. This was soon after Google had unsuccessful fought against the Australian government’s inclusion of YouTube in the forthcoming social media ban.
While we may focus on these as two problems, they are in actual fact two symptoms of one problem.
The real problem are a few tyrannical individuals who we have allowed to have too much power over us. We have been sold their lies and swallowed the coolade. Our income is now being stolen by these few individuals who have invested their ill-gotten wealth into warmongering.
What has this all got to do with nature?
There is no Universe in which a few people can behave this way and not collapse the very systems on which their behaviour depends. It’s interesting that we are beginning to see this unfold for real. Just in the last few weeks there has begun to be significant push-back globally.
This is because the knowledge systems society thrives upon have always been key to any communities’ survival and indeed our species. There is a wisdom that flows through the myriad second-by-second decisions of billions of people that is based in thousands of years of overall community wellbeing and animal instinct.
Most people are happy, content, and will make wise decisions to collaborate with neighbours and maintain a status quo over violence. Friendliness and collaboration, not violence, has been the natural order of things since the dawn of complex animal life.
One of those instincts, for most people, is to run away from a fight when you know you’ve a real chance of getting hurt. John Maynard Smith and George R Price in 1973 explained how avoiding conflict complements the population and broadly speaking represents the most evolutionarily stable strategyAn evolutionary stable strategy is individual behaviour that, when scaled to the population-level, means that population is relatively stable. As long as the outside environment remains in a steady stable-state, evolutionary stable strategies result in no net loss or gain in the species’ status. A species that exhibits these traits is expected to survive longest. More.An evolutionarily stable strategy is an individual behavioural trait, rendered across a whole group, that serves to maintain its population.
The people making our lives complicated with war, disruptionThe result of an action that creates a sudden change in the stability of an ecosystem or process. This tends to create a gap where there is free surplus energy and organisms will move in to fill the space. Disruption might be a tree fall, or the application of pesticide to farmland. Disruption is important to maintain dynamics in ecosystems More and intolerance are a very small number indeed. They and their kind do not serve your interests at all.
What do we do next matters
Ironically, the arguments tyrants use to convince you things will be better under their rule, are now being undermined by their own actions. It’s a clear example of the Emperor’s new clothes.
Instead, what society needs – and nature teaches us – is to harbour stability over chaos. This is how your powerful nature can stop a war. You choose leaders who make few changes. Strength is determined by stamina, not aggression. Holding back against rapid change and giving society (nature) time to find its own course reveals more progressive and lasting opportunity.
Animals trapped in rapidly changing environments have to race to change their behaviour, and the most likely patterns to survive in this new normal will be the ones that absorb the most energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More. This is what creates the pressure for natural selectionDarwin’s theory how species are formed, where those that stand in closest competition with those undergoing beneficial modification and improvement, will go extinct faster. Natural selection is by survival of the likeliest, not survival of the fittest. The fittest are only likely to survive because they happen to be most suited to the environment into which they are born. The More. Fighting happens on the margins, where the change is most extreme, and this is due to a breakdown in the information structure, the inherent knowledge that animals have built over generations. Conflict arises from the anxiety and stress of not knowing where to find food. …
Things you can do now
If you’re suffering from fuel price or food increases, you’re the victim of a particularly awful type of cruelty. One where you’re coerced into complying with the same measures causing your downfall and restricted from making decisions on behalf of yourself and the community in which you live. No animal that has ever existed in Earth, has been put under such duress. Indeed, it’s so far removed from natural order, that it creates the very antithesis for a healthy life.
It’s no wonder it’s making us anxious.
If you want your freedom back, this is how your powerful nature can stop a war:
- Get rid of any social media accounts connected to any companies that are directly, or indirectly funding war efforts.
- Stop using shops and services that are either directly, or indirectly funding war efforts.
- Write to your local MP and express dissatisfaction, if they aren’t beholden to more progressive and liberal ideas that support community growth and food security.
- Vote not for change but for progress towards stability and a better way of life locally.
- Embrace diversity*, because that is where you will find the breadth of opinion and perspective that fast-tracks real change for the better.
*The war on immigrants is a deliberate ploy to undermine this natural law. It’s done to distract you, while the perpetrators of this lie capitalise on your addiction. However, ironically, it will also undermine their own outcomes. So all it serves to do is cause more short-term societal harm for no long-term societal gain.
In nature, armistice leads to diversification quicker than fighting, and that’s the basis of adaptation and survival. Diversity of species, culture, creativity and cooperative behaviour are the keys to resisting the breakdown of ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More into chaos. These are the richest, most stable ecosystem structures that can support the most life and big-bodied animals like us.
Which begs the question. Would we have been better off without them after all? What if we could bring back a more tolerant society and use nature to improve our way of life. That is already happening and you will only read about it here!
