Hungry Tigers on the Outside and Sicknesses on the Inside
Hungry Tigers on the Outside and Sicknesses on the Inside
Ultimately a clear case of self-abuse and self-predation
Tian Kaizhi said, “In Lu there was Shan Bao — he lived among the cliffs, drank only water, and didn’t go after gain like other people. He went along like that for seventy years and still had the complexion of a little child. Unfortunately, he met a hungry tiger who killed him and ate him up. Then there was Zhang Yi — there wasn’t one of the great families and fancy mansions that he didn’t rush off to visit. He went along like that for forty years, and then he developed an internal fever, fell ill, and died. Shan Bao looked after what was on the inside and the tiger ate up his outside. Zhang Yi looked after what was on the outside and the sickness attacked him from the inside. Both these men failed to give a lash to the stragglers.”
- Chuang Tzu ~500BC
Introduction
As all sane humans realize by the time they’ve started walking, there are always many things to attend to, but some are much more pressing than others and therefore need to be gotten around to first. In order of increasing precedence, this is my perception of those most pressing things facing us humans generally.
The Hungry Tiger on the Outside
Before I hit my unfortunate 50s, I spent a couple of years formally learning the rudiments of economics in a mineral economics graduate school. My thesis problem was measuring just how dependent the metals mining industry is on fossil fuels. Results were that the industry’s metals output was found to be entirely dependent on only two inputs: 1) the quality[1] of the ore being mined, and 2) the amount of fossil fuels used to mine and process that ore. Advances in mining technology and the use of electrical energy for fossil energy were determined to not function as substitute input factors for either fossil fuels or high quality ore. (Note that the first factor points to the importance of successful mineral exploration work, especially that of the greenfields variety.)
This modern human dependence on rich natural resources, and the fossil energy needed to employ those resources, extends throughout modern human economies with no exceptions. It is because of this situation that what happens to the various fossil fuel production industries directly and unavoidably determines what happens – for good or ill -- to the majority of modern humans.
No one knows with any degree of certainty when fossil fuels will become so scarce that they will become impossible to produce for human use. However, because the earth is – for all practical human purposes -- a closed, limited system, these fuels stand as the permanent limiting factor to the continuity and welfare of the modern cultural version of the species. The eventual scarcity of fossil fuels is then the hungry tiger on the outside of humanity, a threat that needs to be dealt with as its increasing natural scarcity begins more noticeably pressing down on us.
Unfortunately, our native human ability to think realistically and work together to solve such big permanent problems -- like eventually running out of fossil fuels -- has become notably and increasingly crippled over the last 50 to 100 years.
That Most Serious Sickness on the Inside
As a species, humans owe their currently comfortable state-of-being not only to their natural environment, but also their ability to use their senses and their brains to observe and figure out how to solve problems -- and then use the natural environment and these same tools to cooperate with other humans to put those solutions into effective action. For a short reminder of how complicated and cooperative this process has long been and is, read “I, pencil.”
For many major reasons, some of them described on this and other Substacks, this human ability is somewhat broken down and decayed within large numbers of members of the human species, as has – consequently -- the species’ overall ability to cooperate and act in a manner beneficial to itself.
Fortunately, this internal problem is not irreversible, being evidently entirely caused by self-abuse (e.g., indulging in fantasies) and self-predation, but it is extremely complex and consequently quite a difficult knot to untangle. Alexander’s supposedly ‘genius’ solution of cutting this knot rather than painstakingly untying it isn’t a reasonable option inasmuch as the human species is itself the knot.
[1] Ore quality, for those unfamiliar with mining, in turn consists of two different but complementary factors – amenability to processing and richness of the ore (its grade or tenor).