This Sunday’s article is a follow-up to last Sunday’s article. I wrote about the fact that no one can actually change the world unless they are the ruler of a country, and that people shouldn’t spend time stressing out about things they can’t change, and instead focus on things they can change. It was a version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen.
(Note: I am wholly opposed to Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a cult that destroys people’s lives. That’s an article for another Sunday. I also don’t support a lot of what Niebuhr, who was not a member of AA, believed. But this is a good prayer based solidly on Christian principles. I also do not intend to explicitly promote Stoicism or Transcendentalism, or any other philosophical framework that has established terminology.)
Several people responded by claiming that I was “preaching defeatism” by telling people they do not have the ability to change the policies of the US government. I want to be perfectly clear: if you have the ability to change the policies and behavior of the US government, you should definitely do that. It would be really great if someone would change the policies of the US government, so if you can, please do it.
Anyone with the power to change the behavior of the US government has an absolute moral responsibility to do so. Therefore, if you have that ability, you need to do it immediately. Everyone should do the right thing in their personal lives. Changing the government, if you have that ability, is the right thing to do.
However, the reality is that most of you do not have that ability. In fact, I don’t think any individual on earth has the ability to change the behavior of the US government. When Donald Trump was president, he couldn’t even give orders to his subordinates. If the US president is the most powerful individual on earth, as is claimed and is possibly in the range of the truth, then I suspect you, dear reader, do not have that ability either.
What I see in my role as host of a website that speaks of what is happening in the world is that people become obsessed with world events, that they lose their ability to properly function in their personal lives because of this obsession. This is a very bad thing. It’s bad for people on a personal level, it’s bad for the people around them, their family and friends, and further, it’s bad for the society at large. If people are going to change Western governments for the better, most of them are going to be well-adjusted individuals with functional personal lives.
I would never tell people to disregard what is happening in the world or to stop paying attention to it. My job is to tell people about what is going on, so obviously I think it’s important that you know. Knowing is, after all, half the battle. There may come a time when it is necessary to take action, together with others, to change the way things are going. I have no idea what that will look like, and I would certainly never endorse offensive violence of any kind. And it’s possible that this will not happen in your lifetime anyway. We don’t know what is going to happen. The best we can do is do our best.
If you wake up every morning and strive to do the right thing, there is no reason to be carrying around a burden of things you cannot control. This should simply be obvious, but I have seen so many people become obsessed, and it appears that there is some kind of psychological mechanism at work, whereby people feel that their own personal anguish is a form of resistance against the system. I was shocked by the number of replies I got to last Sunday’s article, claiming that I was “preaching defeatism.”
What I am preaching is that your life has meaning beyond what is happening in the world. You have a purpose in your life, a purpose laid out for you, a great man that you could become if you follow the correct path. Becoming obsessed with politics and things you have no ability to change only weakens your ability to focus on following the correct path and becoming the best man you can be.
Look at the situation in Springfield, Ohio. No one who lives there can do anything about it. People are doing the right thing, organizing and protesting the city, documenting what is happening, turning the town’s plight into a national cause for action. But that’s all they can do. They can’t start killing Haitians. If they did, they would go to prison, and then the media and the government would point at them and say that this is a reason for more immigrants. They would pass laws named after the Haitians that were killed, using it as a platform to bring in millions more Haitians and people from everywhere else. You all know that’s what they would do. We’ve seen it many times before. When Brenton Tarrant killed dozens of immigrants in Christchurch, New Zealand – all adult men who some might have considered to be enemy combatants and therefore valid military targets – the female prime minister of the country turned the killings into a major cause and used it to ban guns and bring in many more immigrants to “stop hate.”
Therefore, if you are in Springfield, and you’ve complained to the government, you’ve documented the Haitian behavior, you’ve organized protests, and nothing happens, you don’t even have the option of sacrificing yourself for the greater good and going out in a blaze of glory, because doing so would only empower the enemy. The only thing you can do in that situation is pack your things and move somewhere else where there aren’t Haitians. You take your family and you get out. You’re going to be in a better place to do that if instead of going around worrying about things you can’t control, you’ve focused on making money.
Some people hate hearing that they should run away from diversity. They will say that if everyone runs, eventually there will be nowhere left to run. This is a good philosophical argument, but it doesn’t actually speak to the reality of the world we live in. People will talk about “making a stand,” but as I just explained, even if you were willing to sacrifice your life and go kill a bunch of foreign invaders before the cops came to kill you in defense of the invaders, it would do nothing but make things worse. So what does “taking a stand” actually look like? Well, it is only possible if everyone else is doing it. If everyone was doing it, there wouldn’t be a need for violence (at least not illegal violence). But that time is not now and you can’t make it happen. You can’t force everyone to take a stand. The only thing you can actually do is protect yourself and your family. And the better off you are in your own head, the less you waste your personal soul energy on worrying about things you can’t control, the better off you are going to be when the time comes for a change.
Things have to change. That is just a fact. This system cannot go on forever. It is too unnatural, too evil, too entirely based on lies. The lies that serve as the basis for this system are not even good lies. They are stupid lies. It is unsustainable. Something is going to happen and this system is going to end as all systems inevitably do. You absolutely should do whatever is in your power to make that happen. But the reality is, very little of it is in your power. All you need to do is distinguish, in your own mind, the things that you have the ability to change from the things you have no ability to change, and your life will all of a sudden become a whole lot easier.
Furthermore, you should enjoy your life. King Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived, and after seeking enlightenment his whole life, he concluded that the best thing a man could do in this life is eat, drink, and be merry. When the real revolution finally comes, it is going to be fun. It is going to be a lot more fun than a bunch of people flipping out and getting angry on the internet, I can tell you that much.
Life is short. It is too short to be angry and stressed out all the time.
Please, just try to relax, and focus on the things you can control.
