It is the Dawn of a New Year.  It is the time of year when people around me make all kinds of predictions and all kinds of “resolutions.”  Resolution is a funny word, when you think about it.  It also means the conclusion of something, to resolve a problem.  I think it is weird to describe goals and the beginning of a change in behavior with the word “resolution,” especially when the goals people choose don’t typically re-solve any problem they’ve got going on in their life.

The predictions people come out with tend to be unconnected with any of the changes in behavior they choose.  When one hangs out with doomers in online forums, you’ll find all kinds of outlandish predictions.  Is this the year when the shit hits the fan?  Is this the year that industrial civilization collapses?  Is this the year when the American Empire finally dies?  The answer to all of these questions is no.  Timescales for human predictions tend to be way off.  Computers, on the other hand, for the large scale events, tend to be pretty good.  Thus, I’d be pretty safe in predicting the overall quantity of war to slowly increase over this next year.  I’d also be pretty safe in predicting the public confidence in governance structures to slowly increase until about mid-year, and then fall after that.  I could make less safe predictions, and go more specific, and say the nominal stock market value will rise, the value of physical gold will rise, and the US dollar will strengthen and cause serious trade impacts, including the further decline of US housing prices overall.

None of these predictions are all that hard, and none of them help you one bit.  They don’t help you put food on your table or a roof over your head.  They don’t help you figure out where or how to obtain the medical care you need during an accident, and accidents happen.  They don’t help you figure out how to get your dream job that you are passionate about, nor do they help you raise your children to be hard working members of the greater community.  You almost need to use 15 year predictions instead of 1 year predictions in order to plot out how you intend to navigate the next month, week, or day.  Even then, even if you knew where the globe was going to go in the next 15 years, it is not nearly as helpful as knowing where a specific location is going to go in the next 15 years.  If I knew that, for example, the Arctic Ocean would be ice free within the next 5 years, it would not help me plot a path to live in the Pacific Northwestern Portion of the United States.  It wouldn’t tell me when to grow my vegetables in my garden, and it wouldn’t tell me whether the long cold snap will kill my fruit trees or not.

People tend to need actionable predictions, coupled with goals which are much broader in scope than the typical “lose 20 pounds by eating in a disordered pattern with self-denial and self-hatred.”  So, let’s work on those.  Oil production is going to drop over the next 30 years.  Ignore why, because that’s a whole ‘nother book series worthy topic we’re not really discussing right now.  More importantly, using the land-export model, your individual access to oil is going to drop over the next 30 years.  It won’t be a steady drop, and sudden lurches hit different locations at different times, which are not predictable in advance.  Furthermore, particular industries are more dependent upon oil than others.  Industrial Agriculture is dependent upon oil to a vast extent, from fertilizer, to pesticides, to the machines with plow and plant and harvest, to transportation, to processing, to mining the metals in the machine parts and the cans, to the plastic cartons and wraps.  The command and control model simply can not and will not cope with the complexity inherent in the system.  Your food, water, transportation, and communication systems are at risk of disruption, and the risk increases over time as components age.  Some of these things simply can not be replaced using other energy sources, or feedstocks, regardless of sustainability or environmental change.  All of these industries will change the way they do business radically, and will decentralize to better manage their risks over time.

Furthermore, the global financial system will experience a crisis sometime over the next 15 years.  The crisis is in confidence.  The sheer quantity of bad-debt out there which will never be repaid is going to cause systemic disruption.  There are entire books written on this subject as well.  The combination of financial crisis and oil availability reduction will bring government bloat to a head, and cause a crisis in confidence there as well, sometime on the sooner rather than later end of the next 15 years.

When you have predictions like these, you can start to make goals that make more sense.  So, I can start very simply.  The first goal for me, is to raise my children.  Everything else flows from there.  I see the broad outline of the future, and I must decentralize my food sources.  By that, I mean eat local instead of global.  You know what doesn’t grow anywhere near here?  Sugarcane, Cocoa Beans, or Coffee Beans.  You take the typical “lose 20 pounds” goal, and translate it into “be physically capable of handling hard labor.”  Suddenly, it looks different.  There are multiple ways of getting there from where you are.  Integrate it into the first goal, of raising my children to be able to survive, and it doesn’t look like you working out 2 hours a day in the gym for the rest of your life, does it?

It goes on from there, to your personal financial goals.  When you are raising children to manage risk, you get out of debt by any means necessary.  Debt is the thing that keeps you anchored in place, unable to move out of your underwater house, unable to pay for the car that gets you to work when Murphy decides to steal a working car part from you.  When you are out of debt, you have more options.  Teaching your children about making hard financial decisions and how to live on a shoestring is a big deal when the bank runs are coming or when Zimbabwe hyperinflation is coming, or even when Murphy’s medical or job loss black swan arrives.  My goal is to increase my financial flexibility and optionality.

Then we come to the increasing surveillance and police state presence, which brings up my social goals.  It will help my children survive to have a very local and offline social support network, so that’s something I’ll be working on this year.  Anything online is capable of being taken from you (yeah, digital currency, again, another topic worth a book).  Offline is more difficult to take away from you.  This year, I’m making friends.

Today’s topic comes from one of Gordon White’s posts on his runesoup blog.  He talks about maintaining emotional coherence in the face of, as he puts it, “where we are on the timeline.”  There is a significant amount of emotional manipulation out there, and not just on social media algorithms.  Take your basic mainstream media news website, and look at the top headlines.  A majority of the time, the majority of the top headlines are about, let’s see here, death, shooting, murder, rioting, war, threats of war, bankruptcy, violence, rape, and people not feeling safe.  Death, fear, anger, and outrage.  Now, I don’t know about you, but here in upper-middle-class suburbia in a deep blue county of the left coast of the United States, those are things which I don’t experience a lot of in person.  99.95% of the deaths I’ve experienced or witnessed in my lifetime have been on screens, through the news, through movies and tv shows, through social media stories.  This is one part of the emotional manipulation that surrounds me every day, which I must maintain emotional coherence against.  There’s a reason that Nassim Taleb mentions in his book, Antifragile, that consumption of the daily news is toxic.  Staring at it from a bird’s eye view, it is!

Today is a day where a bunch of my friends are planning to drink tons of alcohol.  They are unhappy about the election of Donald Trump in the United States.  I’ve got a couple better ways to handle my unhappiness over things outside my control than drowning my sorrows.  I have a need to maintain my ability to make good decisions, for my children’s sake, and for my own sanity.

What does emotional coherence look like?  It looks like Neville Longbottom, calmly refusing to perform the Cruciatus curse on first years when Snape is Headmaster of Hogwarts.  His Death-Eater Professor of Defense Against The Dark Arts demands it of him, but this is a line he will not cross, even under pain of torture.  Recall that Neville’s parents reside in St. Mungo’s hospital, driven insane by the Cruciatus curse.  He knows where that path leads, and he refuses to go further down it.  He stands there with his wand at his side, and says “no.”  If he were put in Milgram’s Experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment, he wouldn’t go along with authority past where he decided was his line in the sand.

It looks like calm courage.  When the Death-Eaters take over the Ministry of Magic, when your mudblood friends are rounded up and have their wands taken away, and dementors torment them, emotional coherence is a Patronus charm against the fear and despair.  Let me tell you, the Death-Eaters throughout history are always taking over the Ministry of Magic, cyclically.  At the risk of violating Godwin’s law, history is filled with Ivan the Terrible, with Rasputin, with slavemasters and religious leaders who purchase your children and force them to do terrible things in the name of empire, as much as it is filled with benevolent government types, at all scales, from world-dominating trade federations to tribes and families.  It is filled with psychopathic bosses who love to torture their employees because they seem to think that it gets them more power.  That’s just the way things work on Earth.  Good versus evil was never a monolithic fight.  Yet, history is also filled with people who stood up to the Death-Eaters and dementors, and said “no.”  History has people who didn’t believe what their psychopathic bosses told them they were, because they knew better, because they were rooted in something greater than their bodies.

One of the things that makes animism work better than the other options, is its ability to provide emotional coherence in ways that the other major options don’t.  After all, Nassim Taleb also liked judging worldviews based on whether they worked, not whether the theory was pretty and looked good in a philosophy textbook.  Strict Materialists tend to run into problems with being aware of mythological opportunities for ways to live which have worked for over 10,000 years.  Monotheists tend to run into problems with understanding that there are more than one right way to live, more than two sides to the War in Heaven, more than one spirit to talk to and gain insight from.  With animism, you can talk to your ancestors about your emotions.  You can talk to the deities, and give your idiotic and/or corrupt government officials to them to use as playthings as they see fit in propitiation.  You can talk to trickster spirits and make deals.  You can talk to the local river spirit and have them wash away your fear and anger.  It just works better, in my opinion.  However, I understand that people believe different things than I do.  That’s great, actually.  Diversity of belief within and between worldviews is a good thing.  You can take whatever methods work for you, and leave the rest for somebody else.

I’ve been trying to think of ways for people to remain emotionally calm in the midst of whenever life sends them pain and suffering, as it always does.  You have to be able to have a core of stillness so that you can make good and effective decisions.  If you’re swayed too much by the news, by the emotional manipulation surrounding you at all times, how can you make good decisions from a place of burning anger that blinds you to your opportunities?

The first method is simple.  Emotionally manipulate yourself back by using music.  When you have the time, create a playlist of songs that make you feel a certain way.  They can even be blatant propaganda stuff like Let It Go.  It’s your emotional response, so you can use it how you like.

From there, your options get a bit more complex.  Ian “Cat” Vincent mentioned the Litany Against Fear from Dune.  He also mentioned a method where you imagine a sphere of white energy inside of you that pushes all of the darkness and badness outside of it and expand it until it is outside of your skin.  I like this one, because it helps you remember that your core is a calm place, and the anger you show on the outside when you tell people or other entities to fuck off is not who you are.  Who you are and what you do are not the same thing.

Basic mindfulness meditation will work wonders.  Even if it is only a minute a day, making time to let your thought go do their thing while you watch them dispassionately will help a lot.  Too many people are afraid of self-reflection.  Yet, self-reflection is where you have to go to recognize when you are feeding your fears and anxiety instead of feeding your passion, pride, and acceptance.  Meditation is the space in which you get to choose your emotional state.  Choosing your emotional state takes practice.  When you’ve gotten sufficient practice in choosing your emotional state, you can start to look at some of your triggering memories, things that make you ashamed, things that make you hypervigilant even without any danger in the present.

Once you’ve figured out how to choose your emotional state, you can anchor that state to something.  Some people use candles, and carry around a picture of a candle to look at.  Some people use water.  Every time they touch or drink water, they go back to a state of calm determination or calm comfort without fear.  People have carried lucky stones around with them, or anchored there emotion in touching the ground with their feet.  The hippy version would be breathing in the calm grounding energy from the ground up through your feet and throughout your body, and then breathing the panicked frightened energy back down into the ground through your feet.  The Buddhist version is to anchor the state of calm with your breath.  That way your lucky stone will never leave you.  You can anchor it to tapping your fingers, touching wood, throwing salt over your shoulder, various chakras on your body, doesn’t matter.  Pick something that works for you.

You’ll always be a little bit afraid.  That’s a good thing.  Fear is a gift that should not be cut from you.  Good fishermen are always a little bit afraid of the ocean.  That’s how they’ve learned to respect her capricious whims and live.  You’ll always be outraged at the horrors that happen, when Ghengis Khan sweeps through your village and kills so many.  Yet, you don’t have to feed these the rest of the time.  Being overwhelmed with grief has its place, being hypervigilant has its place, being righteously anger has its place, or these things would not be in our ancient myths.  These things shouldn’t overwhelm you, and need not either.  Use all of your senses, write down stories that enhance your other emotions, the ones you want to focus on instead.  Sing silly songs that make you cry with joy.  Spend time with your friends doing stuff that makes you laugh.  These memories are the core of the Patronus charm, the thing that keeps you out of the pit of utter despair, that reminds you of just how courageous, kind, loving, honorable, wise, and cunning you are or can be when you choose to be.

In this week’s Archdruid report, Mr. Greer claims that the peak oil movement has failed.  My friends and I were discussing this, and we seem to be having a couple disagreements on the topic.  Some of them accept his assertion, that because the organized aspects of the movement, like The Oil Drum, and The Energy Report, and Matt Savinar’s news aggregation and forum are no longer with us as thriving and functional places to learn more about whatever it is peak oil forum members like to learn, that the movement has failed.  Some of my friends, however, dispute it.  Those of my friends who are Deep Green or other kinds of activists, have not failed, at least not on balance.  Standing Rock has not failed.  Remember POSIWID?  The Purpose of a System is What it Does?  If something has changed as a result of it, then it is not a failure, because it did something, regardless of whatever utopian ideals the founders may have started out with.

Right now, there are a bunch of people in the first world, in the technocrat class, who seem to believe that the purpose of humans is to shoot rockets with themselves off into space and colonize other planets.  They have the utter hubris to declare, that if humans never leave Earth and successfully colonize other planets, then our entire existence upon the Earth was for nothing.  That it was a waste, and worthless.  That the entire human history was a complete and utter failure.  That should really make you ponder a lot on what they value, and on what they think is real.

I, too, believed in it for a very short period of time.  It is a tempting notion, after all, to think that procreation, that drive to survive no matter what, is the thing that humans should value.  It is a driving myth in our culture, right up there with that urge to stick as many humans onto the planet as possible, because we’ve cheated death, or claimed victory over it, or some such nonsense.  If, however, you step just a little bit to the side, and look at the life after death studies, or the morphic resonance stuff, or the telepathic field studies, and hold the notion that humans are more than merely their bodies, and there are a lot of different ways you can expand upon that notion, then death of the species is not something to be afraid of, and is not a failure.

You see, if people have immortal souls, and only wear physical bodies for such a very short period of time, then continuation of this particular line of physical bodies just isn’t all that important.  If souls can incarnate into vast networks of fungi, hundreds of miles long, or trees with miles of intertwined roots, or bees, or mountains, or rivers, or planets, or suns, or entire galaxies, why would I be worried about the extinction of any one particular species?  The fungi have already hopped aboard the mars rover, in perfectly space-proof spores, and have spread their seeds across the surface of the moon, mars, and will make their way (again) to the stars.  When the fungi have need of us again, on the other planets, they’ll slowly evolve the soil and the bacteria and the atmosphere and the ecosystems to sustain hominid lifeforms again.  And even if they did not, do you really think that a whole bunch of immortal souls who had need of physical bodies for whatever their purposes were in having physical bodies, couldn’t create another planet or ever another Universe and start all over again if they needed to?

In that light, I can’t consider the Peak Oil Movement to be a failure.  It brought together a whole bunch of people who talked about choosing technologies, and better ways of doing things, and shared experiences of their failures with others so they would not have to also fail.  It made a lot of people question their news sources, way before today’s “fake news,” as some members could share their experiences in actual failed police states with government propaganda news as the only news allowed on the radio and on the television, and in the newspapers.  It didn’t fail.  It decentralized.  Which is what you should do too.  99% of the news these days just plain isn’t about you.  It doesn’t concern you.  It doesn’t affect you.  Fail to be informed about the stuff you can’t do anything about and doesn’t affect your life.  Seek multiple sources and deeper information about the stuff that does affect you, and you can do something about.

Ah, identity politics, combined with infantilization. Deadly combo. Let me explain a little bit: Identity politics is part of the divide and conquer game that is part of The Rescue Game. Here, we have The Previously Enslaved, and The Previous Enslavers. Oh wait! None of them were actually enslaved or owned slaves in their lifetime (corporate wage-slaves not included). So forcing one group of non-existent people to pay reparations by law to another group of non-existent people just isn’t the way you let go of the past and become friends, part of the global community.

Next, we’ll play The Marginalization Game. I’m part of a marginalized group. And so are you. And, oh gosh, so is that person. Hmm, wait, if I’m reading this correctly, every single one of your friends is part of a Marginalized Group, and should receive governmental help to reverse their Marginalization! Equality of Outcome is what we demand! Not equality of opportunity. Even though equality of outcome is not even marxist. As in, not even Marx was dumb enough to demand that. He only demanded that people’s needs get met, and meeting their needs doesn’t ever lead to an equality of outcome. It’s like the joke where No Child Left Behind becomes Every Child Left Behind. Equality of Outcome leads to the lowest common denominator. Which, as we know, is pretty darn low, and the 1% is always excluded.

Finally, we’ll play The Infantilization Game. Let’s talk about safety for a moment. Safe spaces are for babies. Safety pins are for babies. Warning labels on your hot coffee are for babies. Assumption of risk forms warning you that you might die on the Disneyland ride, yup, for babies. Wouldn’t it be a whole lot nicer if we had, you know, empowerment instead of safety? If we taught our kids critical thinking in schools instead of mindless memorization of facts and maths strategies? If we assumed that people took responsibility for themselves instead of needing 24/7 watching and coddling lest we hurt ourselves? Then, a 9 year old could be left at a park while the mom goes to a job interview. Then, a 9 year old can run their home business successfully. You, uh, do realize that there are 9 year olds who successfully own and run businesses out there, don’t you? So why can’t they be left home alone? If your daughter is openly carrying heat into the bathroom, why would it be a problem if a Congresscritter is in there with her? See what I mean about empowerment?

Death comes for us all. Let’s meet it as warriors, not as babies. Let’s meet death as a lady, with grace and dignity, not as a baby who can’t be trusted to make decisions or tell the truth.

We’re all special snowflakes. Made out of unobtainium, and capable of dampening any bad vibrations thrown at us. Just like Captain America’s shield.

Diversity is highly related to stability. If you have only one source for something, say, potatoes for food, then eventually you’re going to have a potato famine. If, on the other hand, you have diverse sources for food, then even if the potato blight takes all of your potatoes, then your chickens and dandelions and apples and hops and barley are still healthy, and therefore so are you. If you only have one source for electricity, then any interruption leads to instability. If, on the other hand, you have more than one source, then you are not completely destroyed when the main electrical grid goes offline for a week during the ice storm.  If you have only one source of friends, for example your job or your church, then when they fire you or shun you, you have no social network.  If, on the other hand, you have a wide variety of friend sources, who hold a wide diversity of political views, then should you be a part of a marginalized group, you’ll be protected from the worst of it.

Diversity is generally regarded to be one of those investment strategies that rich people use to hedge their bets.  Some people only invest in total stock market index funds.  Some people, on the other hand, use the barbell strategy to diversify their portfolio, with a good percentage in money market funds or treasury bonds, and a much smaller percentage in individual stocks.  Most people think it is a bad idea to only hold the stock of the corporation you work for and nothing else.

Diversity inside of a community is very important as well.  We can’t all be farmers.  We can’t all be breastfeeding mothers.  We can’t all be crotchety old geezers who tell the best moral hazard stories.  Some of us are always going to work harder than others.  In no way are we all supposed to be equal in status, equal in income, equal in work capacity, equal in tools we get to use, equal in access to the community funds, or equal in education.  Outcome based equality just isn’t something that works on a small community scale.  Equality of opportunity is better, but, still doesn’t fit the harmonious community model.  Not really.  Some people just can’t sing, and some people taught themselves to play an instrument at a young age.  There is quite the diversity of talents amongst any community.  Some people talk to the plants and get them to grow.  Some people are healers.  Some people are warriors.  A lot of people are all of these, if they chose to be, if that is what the community needed them to develop.  The community rarely needs uniformity, and it rarely needs strict conformity in language and behavior.  However, communities also need to not be completely chaotic.  The things communities don’t allow, usually come about through time and pressure.  Diversity between communities is also necessary, because climates and resources vary from place to place.

I live in deep blue State territory.  Most of my friends are city democrats, but not all of them.  My friends also include republicans, anarchists, libertarians, greens, and deep greens.  A bunch of the city democrats are very unhappy with Trump’s election win.  I would imagine that this is because they are convinced that women’s rights and other minority rights are going to go back to the dark ages, and that they are going to lose their medical insurance again.  There are, however, a lot deeper problems going on.  There are problems that have to do with environmental destruction, trade warfare, actual warfare, and financial shenanigans that make Bear Stearns and Enron look like a walk in the park.  What solutions do I propose, my friends ask?  Some of them are desperate, on the brink of medical bankruptcy.  Some of them have been harassed by racially profiling police officers since birth.  Some of them have watched their friends go from employed, to not employed, still searching for a job after 3 years.  Some of them have watched the local trees shrivel up and die and are concerned that the people will do the same.

Solutions depend on what the problems actually are.  Some of them are wicked problems, which have no solutions.  Some of them, on the other hand, do have totally accessible solutions.  As of 2013, there are just over 3000 counties in the United States. All of those counties have Sheriffs. Those sheriffs are the boots on the ground in enforcing, or Not Enforcing, as the case may be, the federal laws. It is the Sheriffs who confiscate or don’t confiscate guns, who prosecute or don’t prosecute hate crimes, and who have the boots on the ground capability to protect their local rivers from trespassing oil pipeline construction companies.

Furthermore it is the cities and counties who are leading the way in banning or calling moratoriums on fracking. It is on the local level that women take back the night. It is on the local level that protestors prevent nuclear power plants from being built on seashores and earthquake fault lines (or both, bless their hearts). It is on the local level that people protect their neighbors from harassment by those who think that Trump’s election allows them to harass and hate. It is on the local level that mosques and churches are protected from arson, that the hungry are fed, and the sick are healed, and the orphans find homes, and the widows find community and social support and jobs and childcare. It is on the local level that actual news can be shared, by people who don’t have agendas to knowingly lie to you by their editors. It is on the local level that direct action can be taken to protect your landbase, by people with skin in the game, people who have something to lose.

Empires rise and fall based on their resource base, and how much they can extract from their dependent nations.  When an empire’s capital maintenance costs exceed its income, then that is when catabolic collapse sets in.  Capital maintenance costs always get exceed income eventually.  When the landowning class becomes small, when the landowner has lots of employees/slaves, and does not oversee it himself, when the farmland is measured as an profitable investment instead of a relationship where the land owns you and tells you what it needs, then you’ll inevitably get a lack of long-term investment in the soil health, which will lead to a reduction in yield, and eventual abandonment.  Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but on the whole, that is what is happening with vast amounts of wealth inequality.

In essence, empires must be violent.  They must expand or die.  When there is no place left to expand, because either the return on investment of invasion is negative, or because a competing empire is rising along the periphery, then they also die.  That much concentration of wealth and people must have a steady income stream of replacement parts, of food and water, of soldiers who have not led a couch-jockey lifestyle, or the maintenance costs will overwhelm them, and they will fade away.  How quickly they fall, without their daily bread and circuses!

Under POSIWID, the purpose of an empire is to loot, pillage, and steal the wealth and resources of the many, and concentrate it into the hands of the few.  Oh, I know, they always have the usual propaganda.  Look, you’re better off now!  You have freedom, and free trade, and democracy, and women’s rights!  Look at how much better your education system is now!  Is it, though?  Are things actually better?  Is there not still xenophobia, oppression, theft, fraud, mass murder, despair and suicide?  If things are so much better, why is the antidepressant use so high?

Have we not woken up homeless in the very land our forefathers died in battle for?  Have we not become hungry for the truth instead of the fake news and the entertainment surrounding us on all sides?  Have we not started to grieve for the destruction of the productivity of so very much of the farmland which used to feed us from its bounty?  If not, you probably live in a major city, and your paycheck depends upon you supporting empire.  When people understand how narcodollar recycling works, yet depend on dollars to eat, to have a roof over their head, to have water pumped through their pipes and into their houses, they don’t want it to stop.  Even while empire drones to death children, bombs hospitals, cuts off water supplies to people who, 100 years ago lived peacefully as neighbors with the people who were turned against them.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Many empires have risen and fallen over the last 5000 years of written history, and much longer still.  The sun never sets on the American Empire.  The dark joke that goes with that, is that God doesn’t trust Americans not to kill and rape each other to death in the dark.  This is not a white skinned thing.  Take a good look at the history of non-white empires, of which there have been many.  This is not a Christian thing.  Take a good look at the history of non-Abrahamic empires, of which there have been many.  Who goes and steals cultural artifacts of the places they invade?  Empires do.  Not just Germany.  Not just the United States.  Not just the Vatican library.

This is the other side of the coin from the realization of self-determination.  I have the authority to decide what my actions are, to not mindlessly obey leaders.  Yet, some things in the world are inexorable, inevitable, and unchangeable by even the most potent hypersigil.  A great many things are not part of my story, yet are.  That the American Empire will fall is not something I can change.  How it falls may be.  Yet even there, the options are quite limited.  I don’t want nuclear war.  I don’t want sea level rise to melt down the understaffed ocean shoreline based nuclear reactors, when the jellyfish and plastic bags in the cooling intake valves aren’t enough.  I don’t want genome targeted virii to wipe out gobs of the population.  What I do want, I’ll have to wait to write more about, some other time.

In systems theory, there is a maxim that goes by the acronym of POSIWID.  It stands for “The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does.”  Over the last couple of years, I’ve found this method of analysis to be very useful.  It completely discounts any hand-waving and pontificating about whatever it is that people tend to say their motivations or purpose for doing something are, and simply relies upon the actual results.

I find that this method is great for cutting through political speeches.  Which US President, would you say, was the most xenophobic of them all?  Well, to answer the question, you simply go look up which one deported the most illegal immigrants.  You don’t comb through their campaign platforms, you don’t look at their speeches to the people, or to other governments.  You don’t look at what treaties were put forth or even signed, for we know that treaties are simply words or paper, much like the US Constitution is simply words on paper, unless it is actually enforced through real actions.  Would it surprise you to read that Barack Obama was the US President responsible for the deportation of more illegal immigrants than any other US President in history?  That is the power of the POSIWID analysis.  He has talked a lot about amnesty, but when the wheels hit the road, that’s not what he actually did.

POSIWID can be used very broadly.  What is the purpose of the US public school system?  Well, what are the results?  Are people who come out of the US public school system capable of reading critically?  Can they write with proper punctuation?  Can they read cursive?  Do they understand how compound interest works, or personal finance?  Can they even do the research required to answer these questions from their favorite search engine of choice?

What is the purpose of Facebook then?  Here, we come to understand that POSIWID has a multifaceted personality.  It isn’t just one purpose, because there is not just one result.  There are many results.  Facebook can connect people, yes, but it does other things as well.  It is a time compression algorithm.  It is a job search engine.  It is a recipe database.  It is a photo sharing engine.  It is a deep state data mining source.  It is a snitch that reports organized resistance activities.  It is a mood altering application, tending to increase depression because your friends went on vacation and you didn’t.  Facebook’s algorithms lead to echo chamber effects.  It also reduces the concentrated focus time of heavy users.

POSIWID doesn’t quite work in reverse.  You can’t discover why something happens the way it does, simply from the correlation of a thing.  Which religion’s adherents live the longest?  Oh, that’s an easy one to search, and somebody did their graduate thesis on it.  The answer is, the Jews have the longest life expectancy.  Okay, now you know that 70 years ago, the answer was not the same.  You could surmise all sorts of things about why that may be the case.  Maybe it is their diet.  Maybe it is the fact that they wash their hands multiple times a day and don’t touch the opposite sex outside of family, thus cutting down on the transmission of the flu and pneumonia in old age.  Maybe it is that they are a smaller group than other larger religions and genetically insular.  Or is it?  After all, the Gypsys, travelers, and tinkers are roughly the same, in terms of genetic and ritual cleansing insularity, yet they have a life expectancy 10 years less than the average population instead of 10 years more like the Jews.  Then you can think about wealth and education factors, and fall down the rabbit hole of why.

Correlation does not equal causation.  Maybe, we don’t need to know why.  Maybe, to make good enough decisions, we don’t need to be inundated with a lot of different theories, which change decade upon decade with more experience.  We just need to look at the actual reality in front of us, before looking for stuff that confirms our theories.  POSIWID can cut through a whole bunch of theories which don’t hold up over time.  For fun, you can apply POSIWID to vaccines.  Do they actually work?  Well, there are a couple million less people dying from the measles every year, because we have the measles vaccine.  That doesn’t mean that all vaccines work.  That doesn’t mean that all statins decrease the death rate of people who take them.  Ignoring the theories, and just looking at the death rate data is a good place to start looking at whether a particular pharmaceutical works or not.  Unfortunately, it isn’t enough.  If people who get flu shots have a lower car crash death rate in the following summer, you still have to run a reasonableness test.  Do you really think flu shots magically keep people from dying in car crashes?  Or maybe . . . there is an access to medical care issue that underlies both.

POSIWID is a great starting point though, especially when you’ve got way too much wild speculation about a topic.  What does the law enforcement system in the United States do?  It consistently arrests, locks up, and denies parole to racial minorities more than racial majorities.  It consistently protects the property of the rich from theft by the poor.  What do home owners’ associations do?  What does the local water board do?  What do the gangs do?  What does the local church actually do?  While POSIWID has its problems, it is a worthwhile way of looking at the world.

I was walking in a State Park with my children, when we came upon a pile of garbage.  Ironically, it was in the same clearing as a “No Dumping” sign.  I’ve come across garbage dumps in public spaces a lot.  It made me think about how things get cleaned up.

The County has a website full of information on how to report illegal dumping of solid or hazardous waste on the ground or in the water.  The website basically boils down to, you have to make a phone call.  Now, if the illegal garbage dump is in the biggest city in the County, you can actually report it on an online portal.  This isn’t the case if you happen to see the garbage dumped outside of that one big city.  I’m curious whether these garbage dumps ever get reported, and if they do, exactly how many years it takes before the County decides that it has enough funds or manpower to actually clean them up.

This line of thought usually leads down the road to my issues with authority.  Would it be better to have an open and transparent online list of illegal garbage dump sites, that interested parties, like Boy Scout troops, or churches, or motorcycle gangs, could go and pick up and haul to an actual garbage dump, paying the dump fees themselves?  Would the cloud of people in the community do better at cleaning their environment if given the opportunity?  Not if they think that the government must do it, or if they think that they must find the person to blame first.

The first issue is that the people who have skin in the game, who actually walk their dogs in the park and like to keep it clean, are not government bureaucrats who sit in offices all day.  Governments are not motivated to clean up garbage piles, unless there is a big public health problem involved, or unless it impacts their paycheck.  They don’t really have skin in the game.

The second issue, is the blame game.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we all knew who made the mess?  Still, even knowing who did it, this doesn’t mean that the person who made the mess has the power or motivation to clean it up.  As a parent, I cleaned up the bodily fluids and waste of newborn babies all the time, constantly, day and night.  I cleaned up vomit from the floor.  I am constantly cleaning up messes that I did not make, all the time, even while knowing exactly who made them.  Sometimes it is because babies can’t change their own diapers.  Sometimes, it is because the household runs well if somebody does all the dishes instead of everybody doing their own for every meal.  Sometimes, I will never know who made the mess.  I will never know which construction person built my front porch in a rainy climate out of non-treated wood, which rotted through.  Nevertheless, I have the skin in the game, so I clean up the messes that impact me the most.

Now, expand that example out further.  There are bigger messes out there in the world, which need cleaning up, besides your childhood bedroom.  Some of them are local, like all of those Halloween candy wrappers you find along sidewalks, or the edge of soccer fields, or in local parks which take almost no effort to bend down and pick up and dispose of properly.  Some of them, are a whole lot bigger, like the great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.  Sometimes, the person who made the mess is long dead, so beating their dead corpse just isn’t effective and getting the messes cleaned up, now is it?  Sometimes, the messes you need to clean up are not actually physical, but mental, or even metaphorical.  Sometimes it really is your parents’ fault that you feel the way you do about yourself and your potential.  Nonetheless, you are the one with skin in the game; you are the one with the power of your own two hands, and the vision of a better world than the messy one you see.  You are the one who, with the help of your friends, can clean up a mess that you stumble across today, no matter how small or large, and no matter who made it.  Even if you only make a tiny dent in it, you’ll feel just that little bit more powerful over your world.

In light of the recent US election results, and the emotional fallout of the election being experienced by many of my friends, some of my friends were discussing The Secret.  In case you don’t know what The Secret is, and I don’t myself, the very brief and therefore probably inaccurate summary is that you attract the energy of what happens to you by thinking about it.  Some of the atheists disparaged it, calling it magical thinking.  They don’t like the self-blame that is implied.  They don’t think that a 3 year old can be responsible for attracting leukemia.  They don’t like the implication that thinking leads to not taking action.  Yet, at the same time, there is something there.

“Claim victory in your heart, and the universe will follow.” – Teachings of the Minbari Priest Caste, Babylon 5. Yes, you can change a lot of things, simply by changing your expectations. What’s the closest I can come to that in a non-new-age context?

How about Derren Brown’s video on the Secret of Luck? The way I understood it, the people in a village were told that touching a statue would make them lucky people, and so they went out and were open to the opportunities which were always already there, but they just hadn’t been paying attention to before.  Did they attract the opportunities by believing they were lucky?  Or did they foresee greater immediately future opportunities, which allowed them to believe they were newly lucky?  (shrug)  I don’t know.  Maybe both.  The Universe does tend to work like that.  All that matters is that the change of belief worked.

There are limits, of course. You can’t expect to win the lottery without buying a lottery ticket, as Grant Morrison says. However, you can expect the dishes to get washed, and then wash them yourself, or suddenly your family actually washes them. No, 5 year olds don’t “attract” leukemia. Maybe their parents do? I really couldn’t say. It’s not like you therefore control everything that happens to you by changing your thoughts and storyline. At the same time, you know how music can change your attitude? Or listening to an old fairy tale/myth? Or reading a comic book where Superwoman kicks ass and you find yourself standing up against bullies with backbone you didn’t have before? There is a component to it that does actually work, even within a completely atheist context.  There are components to it that work even better in an animist context.

Which brings you to the self-blame part. Oh no! I am actually powerful over how I view myself and the stories I tell myself about who I am! That means that being a doormat and a victim is at least partly my fault. That means that being a terrible mommy is at least partly my fault. That really hurts. But. It also means that I can change those stories. I can be like my passionate friends, and grow a backbone, and figure out what it is that I really want. Maybe I don’t want to be really rich, really powerful, really famous/popular. Maybe I just want “enough.” So it doesn’t have to be about material success. Maybe you can attract friends who have your back instead of a very successful career. Maybe you can attract some helping land spirits. Maybe you’ve got things you’d like to banish/repel instead of attract, hmm? Maybe you just want to go through your day without experiencing harassment, belittlement, and bullying behavior. These are little things, and little things are much more likely to be able to be affected by any energy work within your influence than huge big things. That’s why people find pennies instead of a check for a million dollars when they wish for money. People actually notice the pennies on the ground in the parking lot when they’re open to opportunities like that.  That’s something you can try right away: A little thing, like wishing for an emotionally stable friend if you are feeling down.

The biggest trouble, is figuring out what the little thing is that you want to attract. That sort of thing leads to your deepest stories you tell yourself about who you are. Are you telling yourself that you are a warrior? Then there are consequences to that. Are you telling yourself that you are a priestess? Then there are consequences to that. Same with farmer and king and healer. All the little lies we tell ourselves about who we are, they cloud our sight at the opportunities to make the world a better place that are right there in front of us all the time.