What's wrong with us?

Imagine a hiker who is led only by the source of food and burns everything behind him. Where will he end up? Somewhere there is no more food ahead, nor behind.

In my previous blogs, I have expressed my idea that we all live in and live by our future projections. Our projections determine our value and actions. All actions have consequences.

Our ecological and economical calamities are direct results our our projections. What do we expect? To be richer and ... nothing else. We are even willing to shorten our life span for wealth.

Our illness is "Everything for Money".

With the paradigm of "everything for money", civilization became a place where lack of money means unfit for survival. The clash between Capitalism and Socialism thus lies in the tolerance of poverty. It is a jigsaw that can never be balanced. On one hand, the government must maximize the national wealth by protecting the rich, but on the other hand, it must also protect the underdog to maintain long-term sustainability because all forms of social inequalities will result in class conflicts inevitably.

In a world where Communism is practically dead, regardless of their self-labeling, all governments shift between Capitalism and Socialism at different times. When they have more wealth to spend or at very dire times, they are "more" socialistic and vice versa.

There is another bigger picture we need to see. We, the whole world, are getting richer, at the expense of consuming our earthly resources. By getting richer and richer, modern societies all depend on a highly elevated standard of living. In a most modern city, the worst poverty still live like kings to many parts of the undeveloped world. The result is that it is getting more and more difficult to lead a "basic" life in such cities. And with the growing importance of cities to National economy, we became "addicted" to wealth. That's why "deflation" is the most scary word for economists and world leaders. To stop becoming "richer" is nothing short of a death penalty.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with being richer. The question is: where are we heading? Is there a limit to this path of wealth?

If our common goal is JUST to get richer and richer and richer and richer, we have got what we have asked for, with the price it carries.

Ancient Chinese wisdom has always warned that there are limits to everything. When such limits are exceeded, it will return to the opposite. Therefore, Chinese wisdom values balance more than anything. To reach this balance, we must know what the upper and lower limits are, or to know who we are in relation to everything higher and lower to us.

Chinese medicine is the best expression of such understanding. While Western medicine tries to "tame" illnesses, Chinese medicine seek to understand the balances between the forces that govern our physical health and to restore it. Illness is not external, it is a loss of internal balance. When the balance is restored, the body is capable of fighting external threats because the body too is a product of the greater balance of nature. In evolutionary terms. we survive because we are fit. Let's not forget, we have survived millions of years before the advent of medicine.

Whenever something tries to be something else, or exceeds its original limits, it simply will not last. That is our calamity. We do not understand our relationships with Nature and one other. We are using Nature to serve our ego, thinking we can somehow get over it. We even fool ourselves into the belief that we could actually move to Mars when Earth is toasted.

We ARE a product of Earth, we are doomed outside of it. To really remove our curses, we must respect the dominance of Nature over us. Nature does not punishes us for being richer. It is our blind lust for wealth that backfires on us.

We need a new projection. "Everything for money" must go. "Money for something" should be in.

What should that "something" be? That is THE question.

Even a child dreams to be a fireman or something. What about us? To be richer? For what? It is a question we need to ask ourselves, as an individual as well as a species.

Expect to die of obesity if taste becomes everything in eating.