Abstract

Most current crises facing the world center on war and climate change. Both lead to refugees, migration, poverty, famines, natural disasters, and globally spreading diseases. Also, both are fundamentally related to dominance thinking, that is, the understanding that there must always be a winner and loser, that one gets all and the other nothing, there is ultimately a zero-sum reality. This way of being in the world can be counteracted by actualizing interconnectedness both in thought and action, by changing the basic paradigms of thought toward a more holographic way of looking at things. In Western culture, this is most vividly expressed in environmental ethics, notably Deep Ecology as developed by the Norwegian thinker Arne Naess; in Daesoon Thought, it is noted in Sangje’s writings on wisdom; and in Daoism, it appears in the Daode jing and Zhuangzi as admonitions toward tolerance and respect as well as guidelines for non-interference and harmony. In all cases, the focus is on a system of environmental cooperation, biospherical egalitarianism, or organic holism. Daoists in particular integrate all natural features, plants and animals, in a comprehensive coexistentialism. They see everything as interconnected in a natural pattern of complementarity, described in terms of yin and yang, proposing a way of being that is at one with the flow of Dao, a return to organic harmony and a stable, homeostatic order.