Not a bad analysis! So it seems we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. So I’m gonna just get drunk, read the Dao de Ching, play my guitar and bask in the nihilism! In my reckoning, I do see the whole artifice of human society as being just as much a flow and movement of the Dao as are ant hills, volcanoes, and oceans. There is nothing opposed, despite that we humans think we are opposed to nature. We and everything we make comes from this planet Earth, until we start asteroid mining. Even then, everything that makes this planet came from somewhere else, and it’s all part of the galactic and ultimately universal flow of things.

So humanists think they can contend with the entire universe? Maybe they can, but they will not be able to do it without being changed into something so fundamentally different that at some point their humanity will be unrecognizable. Thus is the way of the Dao, and the ever changing nature of things.