Yesterday was a long day.  I drove my girls to summer camp, and it took about an hour and forty five minutes to get there.  The way back home took four hours and ten minutes.  On the way to the girls’ summer camp, I noticed that traffic was stop and go for over 25 miles going the other way.  I had advance knowledge of what I was getting myself into, so I strategically placed food and water and a cell phone within my reach.  That was the first time I’ve texted from behind the wheel, which is what you do when your vehicle isn’t moving for over 5 minutes and the cars in front of you have already done the slow sauntering Chinese firedrill and gotten a couple items from out of their trunk.

Meanwhile, a bunch of friends are commenting on the six planets that went retrograde, and how their lives have been impacted by the kinds of obstacles you’d expect.  These things happen.  Astrology is a funny thing.  People who only see their own lives are understandably underwhelmed.  Nurses in ERs, on the other hand, have long since stopped thinking it strange when a string of October birthdays present to the ER with head or heart injuries in one night.  Proper risk management strategies should have you acting as if the planets actually do affect your life, so that you can prepare for it.

What would you do if your car broke down?  What would you do if your car ran out of gas while parked on the interstate highway?  What would you do if your child got sick?  What would you do if you got sick?  Everybody gets sick eventually.  One can only hope that it was a nasty cold instead of a heart attack or cancer.  Yet cancer happens to somewhere between one third and one half of all people, so you need to be prepared for it.  Venus goes retrograde too, and one half of all marriages end in divorce, so you need to be prepared for that too.  Everybody experiences struggles in their relationships.  How do you give your spouse or other significant relationships space to work through their difficulties?

There are also bigger risks at play.  What if your country launches a nuclear missile at another one?  What would you do?  What is the nearest fallout shelter, even if it is the local bank vault?  What if climate change is accelerates a lot, and the sea levels rise 100 feet, and the major coastal cities get flooded?  Do you still live in a place which is lower than 100 feet in elevation?  Do you still live in a place where too much of the critical infrastructure is located lower than 100 feet in elevation even if you live at 500 feet above sea level?  What about major Earthquakes or Tsunamis or Volcanoes?  What’s your plan?  Yes, I have thought through all of these and have made plans.

What do you do if there’s a major epidemic of communicable illness?  I had friends who were exposed to SARS, and quarantined in their house for a week or two.  They were prepared for it, and had enough supplies.  What do you do if there’s a major stock market crash?  What do you do if there’s a major stock market moon shot while the housing prices all get cut in half and mortgage rates triple?  What do you do if the major breadwinner in your family gets disabled and loses their job and their health insurance?  What do you do if YOU get disabled, if your driver’s license gets taken away wrongly, if you get sued for something you didn’t do, if your identity gets stolen?

What do you do if you get really sad or scared?  Everybody gets sad or scared in their lives.  Why would you be any different?  How do you draw purpose and meaning from the pain that presents itself to you, from the risks you succumb to?  Everybody loses their identity at some point in their life, forgetting the very essence of who they’ve chosen to be.  Are you going to remember what it was, or maybe forge a new one made out of stronger yet more flexible stuff?  Being prepared for what life will inevitably throw at you makes it less shocking when it inevitably happens.

There’s a part in the middle of The Princess Bride movie, where The Dread Pirate Roberts does a battle of wits with Vizzini.  He supposedly puts iocaine powder in one of the two goblets of wine, and then Vizzini tries to get Wesley to give a clue which goblet it is by talking loudly about it and watching his body language.  Of course, Wesley has the perfect poker face, because he poisoned both.

There are plenty of poisoned choices in the world.  Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.  Presidential elections certainly comes to mind.  There are also plenty of educational and healthcare decisions that also fall into this category.  That’s the way life goes sometimes.  The Giant’s Drink (Ender’s Game) comes up a lot, and sometimes the only way to win is, as W.O.P.R. discovered (WarGames), not to play.

The current game going around my failbook friends right now is accuse the POTUS of treason.  I’m aghast.  I’ve got enough of a chess player’s cold-hearted logical sense of things to know when I’m being played.  See, I know full well that Russia funded Clinton’s campaign.  So did Saudi Arabia for that matter.  So if you accuse Trump of treason, then you must accuse Clinton of treason as well.  See?  This is a poisoned choice, and on multiple levels.

As time goes on, I come to respect Trump’s decisions more and more.  When you are a business man, you talk with your enemies, you do business with them, just like the second Seldon Crisis in Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation Series of books.  I’ve read enough history and science fiction to know that his choices are constrained, and he’s making really good choices between the poisoned ones he’s been given.  He has skin in the game, so why wouldn’t he?

Yet, his choices mean little in the grand scheme of things.  Isaac Asimov’s concept of Psycho-History is a good one.  Individuals are not very predictable, groups are somewhat predictable, nations are plenty predictable, and the entire globe?  Very predictable.  You can write a computer program to crunch the statistical numbers and see where things are going.  I know of at least two people who actually did just that, and have seen fantastic predictive results.

The thing is, though, if a computer program can predict the outcome of a very large group of people all making individual decisions, can see when a monetary paradigm will collapse, can see when a people lose faith in its government, can see when real estate prices will rise and fall, when the sunspot cycle will cause crop failures, if it can do that, then any one human’s chance of changing the outcome of the trajectory of civilization is so close to nil that it is almost completely impossible.

I have no more control over the trajectory of this civilization than I do over how many oil wells get drilled this year. I’m young enough to still feel the desire to control everything centrally and fix the evils of this world. Yet, how can I, when I don’t even control my own emotions and actions all that well? And if I can’t do it, then what hope has a group of doing it? Much less a nation?

Of course, it never was about self-control. Control is the wrong paradigm. A better way to see things is as an invitation. Instead of ordering people to stop doing death culture stuff, the only thing to do is to invite them to do something better, something more connected, more rooted. That’s a difficult thing, though, to invite the pain back into my life, and to be willing to live with it as part of my essence, of who I am, along with the joy. I don’t have anything better to do.  Yet, is this also a poisoned choice?  To avoid pleasure and to seek pain?  To decentralize and to stop planning a better order out of chaos world?  Perhaps there is a third way, that is neither the death of too much order nor the death of too much chaos.

Gordon Underscore White (is that the correct spelling?) contends that materialism as a worldview gets broken by desire.  He’s probably right.  Straight up materialism leads one to only do things which are good for the procreation of your species.  Under strict materialism, everybody should make babies, and furthermore, monogamy reduces the available genetic diversity, so that shouldn’t work either.  We know very well that reproduction is not all that humans are, that there must be more.

Here we have the monks and nuns, who don’t have sex, and don’t bear children.  Well, of course there are those stories of the nuns in the convents being raped repeatedly by the monks and throwing their hidden newborns into the trash heap.  Power corrupts, after all, especially hidden away like a harem behind walls.  Still, there are ascetic practices which do not concord with the evolutionary materialist worldview of everybody humping and procreating with reckless abandon, unable to stop themselves.

We know that fasting is a thing that people do, right up there with infanticide and abortion-promoting plants getting eradicated from the Roman hillsides through overuse.  We know that people can in fact not have sex.  See the herbivores in Japan, or the MGTOW movement.  We know, also, that the vast majority of sex that occurs is NOT for the purpose of procreation.  See period sex.

With this introduction, I can ask a complicated question: What do you want?

Oh you think you know what you want.  To be rich, powerful, popular, skinny, healthy, strong, part of a community of smart and hard-working people who teach you and are taught by you, always learning something new.  Is that true?  Or do you want sex?  Or do you want to be safe?  Maybe you want your progeny to be safe enough to grow up and have their own progeny, not as slaves.  Maybe you secretly want your progeny to all die so you can be free to do the things you could do if you weren’t tied down to a house providing for their upbringing.  Do you want to eat delicious food?  Do you want all the pleasure and none of the pain?  Do you want to play Halo or watch the entirety of the Game of Thrones or Doctor Who collection back to back to back?  Do you want to acquire some donkeys and chickens and pigs and turkeys and dogs and cats and grow a farm because it tugs at your soul to dig your fingers into the dirt and bring it to life?  Do you desire to kill a bunch of lousy people who have wronged you and yours?

What kind of capricious god would you be if you got all that you desired?  Would that be boring?  How would you learn to be benevolent, yet ruthless when necessary?  How would you ever face your fears if you got everything you wanted?

One of the tenants of Tae Kwon Do is self-control.  Self-control is not eating the entire bag of chocolate.  Deeper, self-control is being able to step outside of your fear, your anger, your shame, and feel the calm center of yourself more than those transient emotions, and to be able to make wise decisions from that calm place.  Deeper still, self control is also deciding which path to set your feet upon, which desire that you want to desire, which dreams to pursue even through the teeth of Poseidon himself, and which dreams to be cast off as not really yours anymore.

Is there a molecule which causes you to dream of your ancestors, or other living people and have deep meaningful conversations with them?  Is there a physical reason why people living on opposite sides of the world resonate with the same ideas at the same time, following the same philosophical paths?  It’s not enough to point to the dopamine and the serotonin.  Desire and fear are so much more than these molecules.

Why do so many people wish to break the world?  Why do so many people fear human extinction?  That’s the Wizard’s First Rule.  People believe that which they desire the most, or that which they fear the most.  This is the reason why people must fully understand, acknowledge, and embrace their shadow side.  The Litany Against Fear isn’t just for fear.  It also works with desire.  “Claim victory in your heart, and the Universe will follow.” – Babylon 5

This is why activism starts with meditation.  Ora est labora.