Ecology is one of the four requirements for well-formed goals. It means that if you think of a goal that you ought to check whether this goal is good for you, your loved ones, your colleagues, society and the planet. Ecology is overused in NLP most of the time. It is only a requirement of goals, not a requirement of every step you take. Besides, the further away from the person you get the less weight you ought to give to ecology issues. First of all, no-one can predict the future. One cannot know what will happen if a certain action is taken. There is no cause and effect, so how can one determine the consequences of certain steps ecologically? The best you can do, is make your estimation and when necessary take into account what happens to others.
In society today there’s a great deal of considerateness, of tact and forbearance, of good-natured pause before the rights of others, even before the claims of others; more than that, there’s a certain benevolent instinct of human value in general, which reveals itself in trust and credit of every kind; respect for men, and by no means just for the virtuous ones – is perhaps the element which separates us most sharply from a Christian valuation. We feel a good measure of irony if we so much as hear morality being preached nowadays; preaching morality lowers a man in our eyes and makes him comical. This moralist liberality is among the best signs of our era. If we find cases where it’s clearly lacking, this strikes us as a sickness (the case of Carlyle in England, of Ibsen in Norway, of Schopenhauerian pessimism throughout Europe). If anything reconciles us to our era, then the large amount of immorality it permits itself without therefore thinking less of itself. On the contrary! – So what constitutes the superiority of culture over unculture? of, e.g., the Renaissance over the Middle Ages? – Always one thing alone: the large amount of admitted immorality. It follows from this, necessarily, how all the heights of human development must appear to the eye of the moral fanatic: as the non plus ultra of corruption (-think of Plato’s judgement of Periclean Athens, Savonarola’s judgement of Florence, Luther’s judgement of Rome, Rousseau’s judgement of Voltaire’s society, the judgement of the Germans against Goethe).
Notebook 10, autumn 1887 paragraph 176