Our only free choice is HOW we integrate with nature

An opinion from the Internet about human beings changing their behavior:

“You say that human beings will have to change their behavior according to nature’s laws. Still, I say that human nature doesn’t change. All those laws and morals don’t change anything. Cause they only serve as a deterrence and do NOT STOP us from doing harm. All I’m saying is that humans are not the only ones that have a systematic society like you claim they do.

You keep trying to differentiate humans from other animals when we’re not really that different from them. Our overpopulation, if it should lead us to a catastrophe, is no different from any other animal’s overpopulation. By your logic, we are no different from other animals. Yet, you keep saying that we are somehow different. You’re contradicting yourself.”

Ok, probably I did not express, explain myself properly.

There is no contradiction.

Both animals and humans have an inbuilt self-serving, survival mechanism, otherwise, we would not be able to survive. You are right, animals, especially developed primates also have almost human-like societies, hierarchy, they also kill each other, etc.

There is a big difference though.

Animals always remain within nature’s intricate “mutual guarantee” or “circle of life”. The whole system is blindly, instinctively integrated, the food chain is set. Animals do not consciously overpopulate, they do not consciously leave their natural habitat, they do not consume more than what they need.

If they do so it is due to the system being pushed out of balance either by natural catastrophes or by human intervention. Our biggest problem is that most of the time we are observing, judging nature already after the human interference with nature which has been enormous for centuries even millennia.

Humans consciously, “ignorantly” destroy nature and each other as we are born without the instinctive sense of nature’s mutual guarantee, “circle of life”, or even if we had such a sense back in the “hunter/gatherer” days, as the human ego grew and we kept wanting more, we left that integration and started acting like cancer.

So far we enjoyed mostly the benefits of the ever-growing human ego, the insatiable desire for more. This caused unprecedented human development compared to chimpanzees for example (we originate from the same, still unknown root with them) who remained basically unchanged for millions of years.

But now we have reached a point where we have created so much imbalance in nature that the system will reject us, reduce our “size” as it does with any other animals unless we change.

And here comes the other crucial difference between other animals and humans. We have a unique mind that is capable of critical self-assessment and initiating self-change. Thus we are capable of consciously, proactively change ourselves and find an integration into nature against and above our inherent nature which no other animal would be capable of.

So here starts our free choice. We can remain as we are, as you suggest, either incapable or unwilling to change. Then nature will force us to change through such suffering, destruction, pain that we will have no other choice.

And again, here I am not talking about “human laws or morals”, I keep talking about the strict, unchanging natural laws that sustain the fragile balance and homeostasis life depends on. They obligate us, not human laws. Human laws are weak and insufficient substitutes to try to compensate for our nature.

But as said above we can actually start changing ourselves without waiting for negative pressure, and achieve integration with each other and nature willingly, consciously, by our own efforts.

Of course, this will not happen in 8 billion people all at once, it is enough if there is a small, but critical “mass” that starts the process, and then they can pull the others after them when the deepening crisis, increasing helplessness, suffering will make more and more people desperate and thinking about what to do, what the purpose of life is.

And it will be then, that we truly differentiate ourselves from other animals, truly become Humans, a being that consciously changed itself to become similar to nature. This is our evolutionary human purpose.