Introduction to Ecological Thinking, Part 1: A Wisdom-Based Approach

Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow to Sophia, to Gaia Sophia and Cosmic Sophia.

This is a contemplation for everyone—a series of contemplations for everyone. It’s an incredibly important series, because the idea of ecological thinking as we will approach it relates to the basic question of why we have so many problems in our world, and how we can resolve them, and it relates to the nature of mind and the mind of Nature. In other words, it’s about what we are.

We may debate about certain aspects of our world, but we do still have pollution, war, extinction, famine, water shortages, severe weather events, shocking inequality, and unconscionable injustice, in addition to our concerns about nuclear threats and the potential threats of what we refer to as artificial intelligence. At least some of our best scientists seem concerned, and the militaries of the world most definitely have these issues on their radar.

Some people refer to all of this as a polycrisis, while some people try to brush it all off, declaring that we are already doing everything we need to do to make the world a truly better place. But, even if we reject the notion that we face a crisis, do we really know how to make the world a better place—in accord with our highest values, our most sacred ideals?

In relation to that question, we need to see that, from another perspective, in this series on ecological thinking, we’re asking the most essential questions we can ask: What are we? What is this world we live in? How do we live well here together? These are central questions of ecological thinking as we will understand it.

So, although you might assume you have no time or interest in ecological thinking or systems thinking, this series is exactly for you. We are ecological beings, so ecological thinking is not only our only rational choice, but it is also our birthright and an ethical imperative of the highest order, fully overlapping the basic questions of spirituality, philosophy, science, and politics. Resisting ecological thinking means resisting what we are.

So, in this contemplation, we’re going to get to the heart of some exceptionally important ideas, ideas that can begin to shift our perception and action in the world, helping us live better, love better, and realize the fullest potentials of ourselves and our world.

A lot of people talk about systems thinking and ecology. We will endeavor to take a wisdom-based approach to introducing some basic concepts of ecological thinking, which means philosophical thinking. If we care about wisdom, love, or beauty in any of their forms, we care about ecological thinking, which has to do with our whole way of living in the world.

If you have experience with systems thinking and ecology, our work together here will bring new insights. If you have more recently begun to get serious about ecology, philosophy, and systems, our work together will serve as a good foundation.

We need a note about why you would want to listen to a philosopher’s introduction to ecological thinking. Why would we want a wisdom-based approach? Isn’t ecology a science? Isn’t systems analysis a scientific endeavor?

The science won’t cut it, because we need a holistic practice of life. Science in the dominant culture cannot guide our life. We need philosophy for that.

If you are familiar with ecological science or systems thinking, you’ll hopefully hear things you never heard before—especially maybe a constellation, or we could say an ecology of ideas that you never quite encountered before.

On the other hand, if you have never encountered systems science, if you haven’t done a formal study, taken a course in college, or one of the online courses that are offered now by so many people, if you haven’t done that, this might be a really great place to start.

It can give you a spiritual feel for it—something like the feeling of dancing. And that’s what we need. We need to become good dancers in this world—dancers with the world, embracing the world and dancing.

Practicing with the spirit of a dancer doesn’t mean we won’t feel uncomfortable sometimes or that our mind won’t get pushed or provoked. The experience of confusion we encounter in authentic philosophical matters indicates we have started down a path that goes into the unknown. And, naturally, we don’t understand that unknown.

Instead of giving up and saying, “This is abstract,” or, “This is intellectual,” or, “This is over my head,” we, we could take the confusion and discomfort as a sign that something good is happening. If we work with it skillfully, we can enter the unknown—and we need that. We really need to enter the unknown in order to evolve.

Since ecological thinking is so important and also so foreign to us, we will need to remind ourselves that we need patience, and we need to keep going, to find out how things unfold. What doesn’t make sense at one point in the path makes sense when we go further, and we turn back and see the wider perspective that our climbing affords us.

It’s all quite natural. That’s how it is.

I would like to say a little more about our basic framework, and why we need a philosophical or spiritual approach, but we can leave further reflections for an additional contemplation.

Suffice it to say for now, if we contemplated ecologies here the way everybody else does, I don’t think it would help as much. We need to try to have a deliberately wisdom-based approach.

Since we want to take a wisdom-based approach to these essential matters, let’s first define wisdom in an initial way. Wisdom is what works—what actually functions in our lives and in our world, without causing new problems or merely moving problems around. The wisdom traditions have always offered a path to holistic well-being, true happiness and peace, and excellence that encompasses our fullest potential. Whatever you do, wisdom helps you do it better, and whatever challenge you face, whatever suffering you experience, and whatever inspiration you seek or want to take care of, wisdom offers the best way forward.

We’re going to try and think about ecological wisdom. It’s a bit of a dense subject matter. In some sense, we can call ecology the Queen of the Sciences. Once we begin to understand the nonduality of spiritual and ecological reality, we sense a lot of profundity in that title. Ecology is a Sophianic Science, a Gaia Scienza (and a Gaya Scienza).

Let’s get four things out in front of us right away:

1) Wisdom teaches the difference between “systems” and holism, and wisdom teaches us how to move from and toward holism, rather than to practice so-called “systems thinking”.

2) Wisdom explains why individuals, groups, organizations, and cultures create unintended negative outcomes and unintended negative side-effects.

3) Wisdom also explains why our attempts at improvement of our self and our world often create only partial benefits, while creating many harms.

4) Wisdom offers us a vitalizing way forward, so that we can cultivate the whole of life onward in mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation. The wisdom traditions give us our best chance of practicing and realizing a rejuvenative, regenerative, healing, and transformative kind of thinking that we can call ecological thinking.

We need wisdom even more than we need what we in the dominant culture refer to as science. That doesn’t mean we throw science out. It just means that wisdom gives us much better guidance overall.

Wisdom teaches us that we lack ecological awareness and insight, and we operate under significant delusion and ignorance—not just a lack of knowledge, but an active misknowing of reality. This explains why we create unintended negative side-effects and outcomes, even in cases where we intend to help. And wisdom teaches us that typical “systems” discussions will not suffice for getting us out of the challenges we face.

When we speak about ecological or systems science from a wisdom-based perspective, it sounds a little different, and the little differences add up to a major paradigm shift. We still cover the same basic ground, so you will begin to recognize a few terms and concepts if you have some exposure to systems science.

If this contemplation marks a kind of introduction to systems thinking for you—and even if you have a lot of experience—please practice patience. Genuine ecological thinking transcends our typical habits of thought, speech, and action. We have to enter a space of the unknown. But at least some aspects will make sense after an initial complete work through. Then you can go back, and review. From there, you can expand your education. We just want to introduce ourselves to some basics.

For those new to ecological or systems thinking, some key words you want to pay special attention to include:

Organism

Ecology

State

Flow

Input

Output

Process

Randomness

Complexity

Adaptation

Collapse

Chaos

Feedback-loop

Information

Thinking

Values

Intentions

Emergence

Analysis

Synthesis

Isolation of variables

Integration of variables

Facultative systems

Obligate systems

Interaction

Transaction

Linear

Nonlinear

Mutuality

Interwovenness

If you stay with this series, we will get to most of these terms in a way that you can understand them enough to begin to see yourself and your world in a new light.

We do need a few caveats about these terms though. For one thing, some of these terms have become buzzwords, and their capacity for helping us can get greatly reduced in that process. We start to mistake the words for the reality. These words cannot save us. They only point us along our path. We need to learn the stories, songs, and dances of the world, not simply create a collection of words and idea.

To the extent that these words can help us, we nevertheless cannot cover all of these terms in great detail. They function mostly as key concepts in a more technical scientific description of ecologies, systems, and the Cosmos in general.

And we won’t take a technical approach. Rather, we will take more of a philosophical approach that aligns with the science but goes beyond it, so we can actually help each other and help the world. The science doesn’t really do enough to help us live well, and feel at home in the world, and that’s why the philosophy matters much more than the science. Indeed, we can say that, in many ways, the science is simply catching up with the teachings of spiritual geniuses across time and culture.

If we inquire together in a skillful way, it can lead to transformative insights. When we examine interwovenness—when we begin to experience the interwovenness of the world, the interwovenness of wisdom and wildness—we can begin to see things rather differently, to live and love differently, and thus to make way for these transformative insights that bring us closer to spiritual and ecological integrity.

For instance, when we observe someone go to the sink and fill a glass of water, we might at first think that the water flowing out of the spigot fills the glass. That’s a very linear, cause-and-effect relationship, in which we can isolate a variable. But, with a more nuanced view, we may see that the rising level of water in the glass turns off the spigot, and the empty glass turned it on. That brings in a little more mutuality.

This more nuanced view liberates us from linear patterns of thought, and it can then also liberate us into seeing the fuller mutuality of human beings and hydrological cycles. Rather than isolating variables, we can liberate ourselves into larger ecologies of mind. We get free of isolating a cause to turning a spigot, or isolating thirst inside an organism and treating thirst as a linear cause or motive.

Thirst becomes integrated into the activity of water, integrated into the activity of ecologies, integrated into the living loving world.

Filling a glass becomes emptying the sky, emptying a glass becomes filling the sky, and the very openness of sky and water fills our drinking with the direct teachings of Nature.

Filling a glass reveals itself as the song of a river, and the gossip of frogs. The water in our mouth tastes like the nature of reality itself, and we imbibe the medicine of life with each sip, hearing birdsong and seeing the sun in the trees. We enter the intimacy of the great mystery, and activate our sense of reverence for life.

We fill our cup, and interwovenness drinks interwovenness. We enter the sacredness of life, baptized and born anew with each moment. Washing our cup, we wash the sky and the Earth, and emptying our cup we empty our mind and pollinate the world.

We find the mythopoetic dimensions of priceless value as we enter into new ways of knowing, being, living, and loving.

The great Daoist sage Laozi wrote:

8

The supreme good is like water,

which nourishes all things without trying to.

It is content with the low places that people disdain.

Thus it is like the Dao.

And he also wrote:

78

Nothing in the world

is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,

nothing can surpass it.

The even more impressive sage Dōgen wrote:

Water arises liberated in its actual occurrence. Having no fixed nature, no independent characteristics, it arises as freedom. Water is dependent on water, and also on non-water, and thus it can never exist in bondage.

Water is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry, neither moving nor still, neither cold nor hot, neither being nor nonbeing, neither delusion nor enlightenment. Frozen, it is harder than diamond; who could break it? Melted, it is softer than milk; who could break it?

This being the case, we cannot doubt the many virtues realized [by water]. We should study the occasion when the water of the ten directions is seen in the ten directions. This is not a study only of the time when humans or gods see water: there is a study of water seeing water. Water practices and verifies water; hence, there is a study of water telling of water. We must bring to realization the road on which the self encounters the self; we must move back and forth along, and spring off from, the vital path on which the other studies and fully comprehends the other.

We should realize that, when water descends to earth, it becomes rivers and streams, and that the essence of rivers and streams becomes sages.

All of this has to do with ecological vision. I recommend Dōgen’s full essay as a profound, but profoundly challenging text on ecological vision. It’s called “Mountains and Waters Sutra”.

How beautiful to hear that water depends on water and on non-water, and thus it arises as freedom and can never exist in bondage. We humans are like that too, as we shall soon see. We are liberated in our actual occurrence. Ecological thinking is the thinking of liberation. This is how we free ourselves and all beings, how we heal ourselves and our world.

When you listen to this discussion of an introduction to ecological thinking, I could understand how a person could hear some of this and think, “Well, now, wait a second, this is abstract.”

Because if you go to a lecture on systems thinking, and somebody draws out systems maps, systems diagrams, and so on, that seems very concrete.

But it’s not. It actually isn’t concrete. And the reason why it isn’t—and I know it seems like it is—but the reason why it isn’t is because all of that gets us operating on the basis of abstraction, and it can orient us toward manipulation and control, rather than attunement. I’m not saying it must do these things, but it very well can, and so far it has tended to work that way. We need better ways of knowing, being, living, and loving.

Therefore, our contemplation together here has to do with trying to get us out of that abstraction, and out of that orientation of manipulation and control. We need a shift in consciousness, into more subtle practices of attunement. They are far more precise. It’s just that because they involve a shift in consciousness, we don’t know where we’re going—and that feels abstract.

That’s the word that we use, the word we grasp after, ironically, to name the feeling of what happens when LoveWisdom invites us to let go of our abstractions and enter intimacy.

We grasp after this and we sense how we must enter the unknown. Since LoveWisdom guides us to entrances into the unknown, we don’t understand. Therefore, we say, “This is going over my head,” or, “This is so abstract.”

And this contemplation, what we’re talking about, is the very foundation for shifting into ecological thinking, which means shifting into spiritual thinking, shifting into wisdom, love, and beauty, shifting into magic and mystery. While we will definitely integrate some key terms familiar to systems science, that is not going to get us a better world and a better life. Those terms won’t do it. We will eventually need to integrate a little more wisdom and poetry into the science.

We’ll return to the question of how to move forward beyond the introductory considerations we will contemplate together in this short series. For now, let’s move to a question Dōgen’s work raises for us in an intimate way: What is an ecology?

Let’s say an ecology is a relative wholeness that consists of relative parts or elements, each of which can affect the behavior or activity of the wholeness as well as the behavior or activity of the other relative elements. The relational nature of an ecology means ecologies exhibit interwovenness. While each relative element of an ecology manifests a certain degree of relative autonomy, each relative element can only affect other elements or affect the whole in dependence upon (or as interwovenness with) other elements.

That’s a mouthful—and a mindful. So let’s reflect on it.

Our definition as a whole differentiates an ecology from a mere aggregate. If we throw a bunch of silverware into a drawer, we have an aggregate, but not a functioning ecology. That’s not too hard to understand. We can put that another way by saying ecologies evolve over time in a self-organizing way that seems to presence and inherent creativity.

Let’s think carefully about the last part of our definition. It’s quite radical. We said that each relative element of an ecology can only affect other elements or the whole on the basis of dependence upon, or as interwovenness with, other elements.

This means no part of an ecology has total “dominion” over the whole. The relative elements arise fully interwoven or interdependent, and we can say an ecology arises as a wholeness we cannot actually divide into elements that exist independently (or, exist “from their own side,” so to speak).

This characteristic of ecologies comes with an important implication: Relatively speaking, we cannot have global control over an ecology, and we must focus on local action that nevertheless moves from and toward wholeness. In your own brain, for instance, no single neuron controls all the others. Rather, the neurons collaborate with no controller, each one responding to the activity of other neurons. Scientists sometimes put this as emergence from bottom-up control.

Technically speaking, we live in a non-local Cosmos, so any strong claim that ecologies operate strictly on the basis of local interactions seems to face challenges in our own experience. But it does help us to avoid tyrannical currents when we think about the impossibility of any part of an ecology turning the whole into an object of knowledge, and the importance of local interplay and responsiveness.

might have a basic income of $: 1000

We could easily incentivize practices such as healing and cultivating trees and forests, digging swales, helping to bring back diverse wildlife, and so on. That would require good teachers and practices, including training in permaculture, agroecology, and restoration ecology. We could also incentivize practices the facilitate real democracy, and have all of these things coordinated.

We also need to note something profound in relation to how scientists think about bottom-up activity. Many of us have seen the mesmerizing videos of large flocks of starlings flying in undulating patterns. Scientists have modeled this behavior using complexity, which means no leader creates the patterns.

Rather, each bird follows what we could call an interaction pattern. That might mean keeping the same distance from your neighbor, and roughly following a kind of average of where your neighbor seems to move in terms of direction.

This behavior of the birds illustrates the principle of self-organization. We have no leader. Rather, a globally coherent pattern in the whole flock emerges spontaneously on the basis of local interactions between the birds. The birds naturally move from disorder to constructive order.

We find no conductor standing outside the symphony of movement, telling the birds what to do in order to create this order. However, we must not forget that the birds did learn how to do this. They don’t make it up out of nothing. Rather, the learning happened over countless generations in their ancestral lineage.

We don’t yet know WHY the starlings make these patterns. For all we know, they enjoy it. It might arise as an aesthetic aspect of their culture, and it certainly arises as an aesthetic aspect of the world we share with them.

But, in relation to human culture, we need to recognize that emergent behavior of an ecology depends on the interaction patterns of the relative parts. The birds follow a basic pattern of interaction that leads to self-organizing global patterns. Humans do too.

If we think of this patterning in its relation to human psychology, we have to realize that our basic worldview, our basic intentions, our basic ethical practices, and even our quality of mind will determine the way our ecologies move, and the large-scale patterns that emerge.

If we have a view of humans as basically selfish, then we must each pursue our own self-interest. But we also know that compassion provides a different patterning instinct, a different set of rules we would use to evolve our ecologies onward.

We can make decisions on the basis of anger, fear, anxiety, and so on, but we could also make decisions on the basis of calmness, clarity, equanimity, positivity, and so on.

And how do the humans decide which patterning to follow? They do so on the same basis as the birds—on the basis of education and learning, within lifetimes and across lifetimes. The great sages and philosophers of the world have therefore always emphasized education as the fundamental basis for allowing beautiful patterns to emerge in Nature and Culture, without dictators telling us what to do. We need that education, and then we can collaborate in order to cultivate the whole of life onward in beautiful, graceful, and inspiring ways.

All of this shows us that we already find significant implications in the definition of ecology, especially once we begin to think about how an ecology would function.

Let’s consider it a bit further. Our definition of an ecology evokes wholeness. That’s a more subtle notion than we may realize.

Gregory Bateson can help us think a little further into this. In his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, we find the following passage:

“any ongoing ensemble of events and objects which has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics. It will compare, that is, be responsive to difference (in addition to being affected by the ordinary physical “causes” such as impact or force). It will “process information” and will inevitably be self-corrective either toward homeostatic optima or toward the maximization of certain variables.

“A “bit” of information is definable as a difference which makes a difference. Such a difference, as it travels and undergoes successive transformation in a circuit, is an elementary idea. But, most relevant in the present context, we know that no part of such an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder or over any other part. The mental characteristics are inherent or immanent in the ensemble as a whole.”

“in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.”

“The significance of this conclusion appears when we ask, “Can a computer think?” or, “Is the mind in the brain?” And the answer to both questions will be negative unless the question is focused upon one of the few mental characteristics which are contained within the computer or the brain. A computer is self-corrective in regard to some of its internal variables. It may, for example, include thermometers or other sense organs which are affected by differences in its working temperature, and the response of the sense organ to these differences may affect the action of a fan which in turn corrects the temperature. We may therefore say that the system shows mental characteristics in regard to its internal temperature. But it would be incorrect to say that the main business of the computer—the transformation of input differences into output differences—is “a mental process.””

So, in our definition of an ecology, we find a new sense of mind, and a little bit of critical thinking about so-called artificial intelligence. There is a lot of nuance, but we have the suggestion that all living ecologies exhibit mind. That means forests exhibit mind, and human beings exhibit mind in the same way—which is not our habitual way of seeing things. We don’t sense how our mind is immanent in our organism and in the larger system of what we think of as “the organism” + “the environment”.

“Organism” and “environment” are abstractions. Mind is immanent in is, which is why we functionally have an unconscious, and why we say misleading things like, “the body knows”. I respect Gene Gendlin tremendously, but it seems misleading to suggest, for instance, that something called “the body” can interpret our dreams or knows things we don’t know.

Rather, mind is immanent, and that means we find it in our total ecology, and then even more broadly in the ecologies we arise with in interwovenness. It’s wild, but this is how things seem to be. And it’s why I sometimes say we need to worry less about becoming more embodied and practice a little more at becoming more ecologied. That’s what ecological thinking involves, and it therefore includes and transcends everything we think we seek when we try to get more into our bodies.

A little while ago we mentioned wholeness. The wholeness and interwovenness that characterize the basic nature of the Cosmos is alive and alove, which means it has a dynamism. That dynamism means impermanence, a constant flow and flux. All of this applies to ecologies, because it applies to the Cosmos as a whole.

The interwovenness and dynamism give rise to ecologies that evolve over time in creative, adaptive, and self-organizing ways, and they exhibit their creative patterning in a manner that involves nonlinear dynamics and phase transitions, including sudden shifts or bifurcation points in their development. We might get into some of those technical terms later. If they are unfamiliar to you, let’s not worry about them now.

Instead, let’s recognize that these core aspects of reality give rise to four major characteristics of ecologies that we can find rather difficult at times to fully accept and work with: precariousness, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. These characteristics arise directly as aspects of the nature of reality, which, again, fundamentally involves wholeness, interwovenness, and dynamism.

Resistance, denial, or active misknowing in relation to any of these characteristics gives rise to suffering. The primary ignorance is ignorance of the wholeness, interwovenness, and impermanence or dynamism, and so we cannot fully wonderstand these four characteristics while that fundamental ignorance remains, at whatever level of unconsciousness it may remain.

The wisdom traditions teach us that our suffering arises from a lack of attunement with reality, and they offer us ways to shift out of that and into proper attunement. We will go into this later, but for now we can all try to recognize the ways in which we resist, deny, or actively misknow reality.

For instance, we may live with our romantic partner. We leave in the morning and say goodbye to them. When we return home, we act as if they are the very same person we left. We act like we are the same too. And we act as if some of the things we did that day didn’t really matter to the world as a whole. We may behave as if the way we relate to our partner when we return home doesn’t really matter. But all of this goes against the nature of reality.

We will go into all of that later. For now, let us try to open ourselves to the suggestion that, at a very deep level, we don’t live in attunement with reality, and this causes all our problems. Our goal is to learn a little about how we can better attune. Ecological thinking is thinking in attunement with reality.

As part of attuning with reality, we need to understand that reality has an implicit or implicate order and a wholeness that can never become an object of knowledge—never. We can participate with reality in such a way that we co-discover and co-create the emergence of that implicit order, but we cannot turn it into an object of knowledge, which means we cannot truly manipulate and control the world.

This resistance to becoming an object of knowledge goes together with the inherent impermanence, precariousness, and uncertainty of our lives. Impermanence, precariousness, and uncertainty arise because of the interwovenness and its dynamism and holism, and this means everything affects everything all the time, even if those effects seem extremely subtle or even invisible to us.

We can’t get ground under our feet in this kind of reality. That’s almost a paradox of our interwovenness: We are so fully embedded or secured in interwovenness that we have no place to stand. It’s relationality through and through. This relational nature of the Cosmos gives us the complexity of non-linear and non-local relationships.

birds who want to fly: 1000

When birds fly in formation, they create an ecology of flight. The drag on the 9 birds together is less than the drag on 9 individual birds. And so, the total energy they need drops. They create a collaborative synergy that emerges in their interwovenness and interdependence.

We should note that the impermanence, precariousness, and uncertainty translates into risks, and the dominant culture seeks to mitigate those risks in relation to power and wealth. When massive businesses fail, the general population takes over their losses. We cover the risks. But we don’t get bailed out in return.

We find an expectation that we cover our own risks along with the risks of massive corporations. And when we fail, people think of us as deadbeats, or as irresponsible, and so on, and we can get buried in debt and guilt.

But we the people cover the risks of the corporations not only in times of crisis, but also in ongoing ways. We pay for research, we pay for roads, we pay for all manner of things, and the corporations get tax breaks, incentives, subsidies, and so on. The iPhone exists only because of massive public investments in the technology needed to create it, and the big stores that ruin the downtown areas of small cities arrive on our tax dollars.

We can go on and on. The wealthy want minimal risk, and when they face the reality of risk, they want us to bail them out.

In general, a culture rooted in ignorance will activate unhealthy feedback loops of praise and blame. To sustain itself, the system we have needs us to praise wealthy people for their wealth and any material success, and it needs us to blame poor people for their poverty and any apparent failings. But this flies in the face of reality. If precariousness, uncertainty, and nonlinearity belong to reality, then all our ventures depend in some measure on luck, and the matter comes to the degree of luck involved.

We can find this demonstrated scientifically in a variety of ways, but we can have a hard time accepting it.

See for instance:

sult-of-pure-randomness-study-: 246049

https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/the-mathematics-of-poverty-inequality-and-oligarchy

https://bigthink.com/the-present/highest-earning-men-intelligent/

https://www.neuroscienceof.com/human-nature-blog/psychology-meritocracy-self-made-made

Acknowledging the crucial role of luck doesn’t mean successful people never work hard. It means some people who failed worked just as hard and even harder than many who succeed. James Brown may have really been the hardest working person in show business, and Duke Ellington was most certainly a singular musical genius, but neither of them can rival the success of Taylor Swift, who may work pretty darn hard, but who also seems to be popular mainly because she is popular, and not because of any peculiar quality of effort or genius.

Taylor Swift doesn’t have the voice Whitney Houston had, she isn’t the lyricist Leonard Cohen was, nor is she the musician or composer Bach and Mozart were, and we cannot reasonably claim her income and fame, surpassing these other figures, happened totally free of sheer luck. Many geniuses die poor, and many truly good human beings die in obscurity.

This has nothing to do with bashing Taylor Swift.

I should perhaps emphasize that this subject isn’t a digression. But maybe we can save a few further thoughts for a separate contemplation.

These are nuanced things to consider—you may also want to listen to Episode 49, “Love, Luck, and the True Wealth of Nations: Seeds of a Gaia Scienza” to consider some of these issues a little further.

We should note here another nuanced and intimately related issue: Namely, that the precariousness and uncertainty of the Cosmos may relate to a certain level of randomness or noise in the Cosmos. Philosophically, people may differ on their sense of the role of randomness in our lives, but we have evidence that noise plays a role even in our thinking—a somewhat stunning finding that you can read about in the neuroscience literature.

In general we can say randomness in the Cosmos contributes to the impossibility of controlling our lives. In our contemplation of ecological thinking, we will understand potential randomness as a function of the precariousness and uncertainty of the Cosmos, even if the interwovenness and wholeness mean that somehow or other, in some paradoxical fashion, nothing is fully random. That’s a tricky metaphysical question we won’t go into for now.

And maybe we should take a break here anyway. We have a lot to consider, and this topic will require quite a few contemplations. We’ll pick up with the basic nature of reality and the four aspects of reality in our next contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.