Natural Vs Man-made

When the universe was stirring into its own back like 14 milliards ago, it was governed only by its own set of laws of natural evolution and formation. So too when the sun and earth came into being at about 4.6 billion years.

From the single-celled bacterium to a multi-celled organism right up through the various eras (Pre-cambrian till the Mesozoic), life on earth has only seen natural laws governing its species in survival, adaptation and changes.

When the dinosaurs died out, mammals took over and the most intelligent of this, the primates went from strength to strength, first as the smaller-brained hominids then as the big-brained bipedal homo-erectus.

The environment dictated the species' evolution for hunting, gathering and living. But there were also selective cultural pressures for evolution. There were physical terrestrial obstacles to surmount, natural cycles of climatic catastrophes and bigger and stronger prey to contend with.

This was the natural order of things back then.

In our new technologically advanced (this remains debatable in the light of archaeological finds of earlier and more sophisticated civilisations) society, however, many of our laws and living system are man-made.

Right from the governance at the top all the way to corporate and social demands at the microcosm.

Of course if the laws were made for good, civil ,savoir vivre reasons, I have no objections whatsoever.

But some of these man-made laws are as good as the natural ones of creating disasters, dysfunction and frustration. I mean these laws were absolutely not necessary in the first place.

Especially at the corporate and educational level, I think we have failed miserably. Nowhere have we seen ourselves imposed so much complexities and un-naturalness at the work place or in the school.

Someone (ok so it was Michel Foucault, the gay dude philosopher and not the scientific physicist, pendulum swinging one, Jean Foucault, but both are Frenchmen and you know what they say about the French - :) ) once commented on the remarkable uncanniness and similarities between three institutions of our time : the penitentiary , the hospital and the school. They were in many ways, centres for control hierarchy and experiments.

I am further supported by the advocates of the DaoDeJing by the proponents of the philosophy of Taoism who strongly believe in the natural as opposed to the artifical order of things.

Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi espouse the theory of non-competitiveness and harmonising with the natural order of things.

We may have freed ourselves from many chains of human bondage of long ago but we have however imposed a new set of equal if not greater chains of human misery and slavery.

It has become a maze of minefields and traps that only we as humans can do to unlock and unchain this again for ourselves and posterity.