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.