Things are Always Exactly the Way They are Supposed to Be

I was writing a post in my Patterns and Predictions blog about the Dying Hegemonies of Access. In this particular post, I was using journalism as an example. Access to news has changed dramatically from the old days of daily newspapers and evening news shows to our current access to blogs, forums, online videos and social media. As I was writing the post I found myself tempted, at several points, to evaluate the change. There were good and bad things about the old way and good and bad things about the new way. Ultimately, I avoided the issue by saying "it will all work itself out over time". As I wrote that, something that I used to say came back to me. And that is "Things are Always Exactly the Way They are Supposed to Be" I didn't want to get into that in the other post as the point was to provide an example of a Dying Hegemony of Access. But, I thought it might be fun to explain it here.

First, I need to make a distinction between the natural and the artificial. This distinction is not nearly as clear as I am going to make it. But, consider the following. A band of early humans go out for a hunt and bring back some prey for food. That is natural. They are following their instincts for survival. Then, say, they capture some animals, put them in a pen, breed them, and use that as a source of food. That is artificial. When we take the world as it is, that natural. When we modify the world to suit our needs, that is artificial.

When a natural disaster occurs, we may be very upset that it occurred, but we accept it because it is natural.  So, when a hurricane wipes out a coastal town we are upset. But, since it was an act of nature we are inclined to accept it as just the way things are.When an artificial disaster occurs, such as an airplane crash or an explosion at a chemical factory, we are much less likely to just accept it.

When artificial things are not to our liking we tend to stress about them and feel like something should be done. And it may be true that something should be done. But, it is not true that we should stress about it. Does anyone stress about the fact that water flows downhill? Of course not. That would be silly. Does anyone stress about the fact that a mountain range prevents rain in a valley? No. They may look for ways to get rain. But we don't have the added stress of feeling that things are somehow wrong.

The point of all this is to so that it is natural for people to create things that are artificial. Sometimes, when we do, it works out great. Sometimes it doesn't. But, it is part of our natural to tinker. Hence, even our artifacts are natural. And we shouldn't stress about the things we do. If they are not to our liking we can try to change them. But, if you step back a bit and see our attempts to modify our environment it is not different than a beaver building a dam or bees building a hive. Some times it works out and some times it doesn't. No need to stress about it. Everything is always exactly the way it should be. If it doesn't suit our needs we can try to change it. But, it is just our human values that make it wrong. The word wrong simply does not apply to nature.