The Mahablog: Grasping

"All compounded things will decay." -- the Buddha (last words)

All physical entities are finite. No material thing is immutable. Whatever is, is subject to destruction. It can be used up, worn out, broken, corrupted, or otherwise bleeped. Even if you take extraordinary care of a thing, eventually it will disintigrate. Mountains erode away; oceans dry up. And whatever goes up will come down, somewhere.

One of the fundamental distinctions of the rightie mind is that righties can't grasp this. They may say they do; but the only way to invest the rightie world view with any internal logic is to assume that things, or at least some things, don't change.

Rightie environmental policy is an obvious example. Although righties may say they understand that resources are finite, their policies seem to be based on a belief that resources are infinite. There will always be forests, and air, and water. Right? And if science says otherwise, we'll just rewrite the science.