There is an interesting story in one of Chinese classics - Zhuang zi, whose author influenced the Chinese intellectual’s way of thinking as much as Confucius did. A man had several monkeys at his home. He usually feed them four nuts at breakfast and three of them at dinner. However, one day he decided to have a change just for fun. He told those monkeys that instead of following the routine, he would give them three nuts in the morning and four at night. To his great surprise, all monkeys were very angry since they thought the owner did a trick on them and it was unfair. In our eyes, we human beings are much smarter than the monkeys to know that the total number of nuts is conserved. There is no point to argue against the change. However, we may be not that smart when we are dealing with much broader issues that this.

I have a good friend when I studied in the university. He is a voracious reader and would not be bothered to have alternative views. We usually debated a lot whether our society does make the progress with the development of the modern science and technology. He told me one of his stories when he was a teenager. Like the majority in his age then, he got addicted to some ‘happy’ drugs and spent every weekend in those disco bars for the whole night. You can not resist to it because it makes you feel so high. But the terrible thing is that afterwards you feel so exhausted but could not fell into sleep for a long time. It is simply unbearable pain. Finally he totally got rid of those drugs since he figured out a theory of it: the happiness is conserved. If you try to get more by using drugs, you have to pay back with enormous pains later.

In his view, the same tragedy is happening when we are claiming to make technical progress in our human civilization. We employ the powerful technology to exploit the resources on earth to satisfy our fanatical consumption according to the capitalism model. We keep our GDP growing each year. We keep on consuming more and more. People are asked to work harder and harder. Nobody stops and ask whether we are running into the right direction. The current financial crisis now is the bitter antidote for us. Maybe there is something conserved on earth and we should show some respect to the law of nature. We are not only consumers, but also the producers and contributors to the environment in which we are living. Everything will be changed if we could put it in a longer time scale.

This is what I am thinking after I read this story.