Taoist Economics
~ eat poop! ~
There was a planet, much like ours. On it, folks were constantly in a rush to consume, waste, splatter their stinking, rancid garbage into every crevasse. Sound familiar? Their poisonous poo and toxic trash filled the soil, down deep. The chemicals in their rot-piles seeped into the soil-beds, permeating them, binding with other compounds to create NEW toxins! The chemicals flushed down rivers into the sea, noxious! The air was filled with their fumes, miles deep. SO!
Everyone was dying, obvs. By the Billions. Total Armageddon-style. Starvation, war, refugees, havoc. Entire biomes were collapsing. And one dude? Still laying in furry crocs and lounge chair, with week-old stubble? Dude says… “I’m… huh. I hadn’t found food in a week, and most of my friends and co-workers have died. I think… I’m just gonna start eating POOP.”
“The fnck, Jake?! Don’t you know that’s what goes OUT, not coming BACK IN? You’ll die! We’re all dying from the pile of turds in the driveway; we can’t even shovel a path to the mailbox! Jake? Jake, aren’t you listening to me? JAKE! STOP IT!”
Jake started scarfing those turds. Damn fool. And you know what? He’s got such a contorted origami of a genome… he survives. Jake CAN eat Poop! Whaddaya know!
Jake starts having a great time. Eat’n poop, splashing around, laughing. Nearly everyone else died. Bound to happen sometime.
That planet? That WAS Earth, somewhere back a Billion years or so. Jake’s kin? They were pooping OXYGEN into the air, water, and soil. To THEM, Oxygen is TOXIC. It triggered one of the biggest, most wide-spread extinctions in Earth’s history. And Jake’s great-gran-kids? That’s us. We EAT Oxygen. We EAT that POOP! That is the Path to Market Viability, in the Long Term: Eat Poop.
“One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure.”
Taoists seek to find the BEST Niche for themselves. Where they can generate the greatest REAL-value OUTPUTS for their System. If they can do that, then their existence is precious to their System. They become a Keystone Species. That is Market Viability, Long-Term.
When that happens? The Taoist GROWS. This is the Metabolic Imperative of Life. We expand to new niches, new environs, new worlds. Going backwards is Extinction. And staying on a treadmill of stagnation is ALSO extinction. Taoists are NOT fans of ‘Sustainability.’ Huh?
Sustainability, in its actual physical form, involves REMOVING yourself from Nature. You ‘don’t leave anything behind!’ None of your poop gets left in the woods. And you didn’t take anything from the woods while you hiked there. You ‘leave nature ALONE.’ That’s NOT what a Keystone Species does.
Then, you have your own ‘Sustainability’ closed-loop. Everything you consume is recycled, like Nature’s Nutrient Cycle, except it’s within YOUR Consumer-Cycle, NOT part of Nature. Nature NEEDS the Nutrient Cycle, and you took a CHUNK of those nutrients for yourselves, regurgitating your own poop forever, to claim that your THEFT of Nature’s nutrients is ‘nice to nature’. Put that poop BACK in the woods, for Nature to make use of the nutrients! Draw your resource from that Natural System, and recycle BACK INTO NATURE, NOT your kitsch-industries.
You seek to separate yourself from Nature, ‘leave it un-touched’, which operates upon the PRETENSE that ‘we can perform a complete nutrient-cycle BETTER than Nature.’ No, you cannot. 80% of your recycle-bin is incinerated or landfill, because you still cannot recycle MOST plastic. Your eco-friendly tiny-cabin necessitates immense ROAD networks and FUEL miles for supplies, incurring many times the cost on Nature compared to my cramped apartment uptown. Get REAL. You are NOT better than Nature at nutrient-cycling. Fit-in, or get out. Your civilization is in the lead for the race to win a Darwin Award.
