Dear Friends,
It seems to me that a parasite that does it’s host harm cannot be successful. Take a parasite that kills it’s host after a short time.
This type must quickly produce prodigious young. They will escape the dieing host and try to infect some other hapless victim. Necessarily most will die. Some times only one in a million young will actually infect another host. The life of the lucky parasite of this kind will be short and uncomfortable as the life of it’s host.
Parasites that kill their hosts are vulnerable to being too successful. If they infect most of the hosts available to them the hosts may go extinct. If that happens the parasite must jump to another host else it goes extinct. So, no matter how effective a parasite is at infecting it’s hosts, if it kills it’s host, it must necessarily not be too successful.
Take another parasite, one that imparts some advantage to it’s host, (establishes a symbiotic relationship). They take nourishment from the host and give the host some advantage in return. Many types of stomach bacteria are of this type. In the aggregate, hosts that are infected with this type of parasite, live longer and/or have a better life. Parasites that live in this host will have long comfortable lives. They will have more opportunities to reproduce and infect other hosts.
There is no danger of being too successful and infecting too many hosts. Infection with this type of parasite benefits their hosts. There is no danger of the host going extinct because of infection with this type of parasite. In fact if a population of hosts become uniformly infected they are more likely to sustain a larger population and therefore have more hosts for their parasites. One even could argue that this type of parasite enjoys a better standard of living than the first type of parasite.
Of course the reality of parasite host relationships vary and change. Some being benign and going to virulent. Others being virulent and becoming benign. But the most successful of parasites are the ones that impart some benefit to their hosts and are beneficial. If any parasite becomes virulent and start killing their hosts they run the risk of extinction if they are too successful.
It is economics. If a business or firm benefit the economy and society it is like the beneficial parasite. It takes sustenance from the economy and it imparts some benefit to the economy. Overmatching that which it takes. A business or firm that ruins it’s markets, the environment, workers, etc… must go from market to market, (location to location, etc…) ahead of it’s ruination. (But not it’s reputation). The first can be said to be successful, the second, unsuccessful. The only thing the second can do, is survive, but the first can thrive.
The logic can be taken further. Life should try, in as much as it can, to benefit life. Take a person walking down the road. He notices a worm, not yet desiccated, on the sidewalk. He bends over, picks up the worm, and throws it into the grass and walks on. The man was not harmed in any way. His interests were not damaged in any way. But the worm’s interests were advanced.
Outside of any environmental argument, about invasive worm species and their impact to the local ecosystem, life is also benefited. Life wants more life. Life is, in many ways, wasteful. That is the nature of life. Millions of krill are born… only to feed whales. (on the surface of it). But in the end, life seeks more life, and to fill every niche it can. This is empirically true.
So our worm, that we have invested so much time and effort in, is now enjoying the lawn. It has some young and most of them are consumed by song birds. Now our effort has not only helped the worm population… song birds have benefited. Song birds in the aggregate are benefited so there are more of them for hawks to eat… The list of those helped goes on.
Capitalism is the same way. When we benefit someone else, in a productive way, (alms for example). The benefit is passed on and magnified in every transaction there after. Just like the virtuous act, in tossing a worm to the lawn, the good is not only for the one helped but to society.
Not to mention the good to the who tosses the worm… A good that outweighs all the other goods combined.
