What ought one do?
What ought a citizen do when their government spends billions on bombs that are used to incinerate children?
If I listen to social media, I’m suppose to post “I condemn the killing of children.” To say “Stop the genocide.” And that if I don’t periodically share stories of children bleeding, convulsing, and dead to ‘bring awareness;' I am complicit in their murders. I am a part of the genocide.
If this is your worldview, the casino has you. The casino is in your pocket. Your infinite scrolling feed is the casino's slot machine you brought home. The casino flips your addictions for advertisers.
When we forget what the phone is, we become the casino's trick.
If the totality of your activism begins and ends with checking your phone hundreds of times a day, and scanning for the most threatening and disturbing images and videos you can find to share; the casino has moved from your pocket to your brain stem.
For the last 6 years, one of the central questions of my life has been:
"What must one become to contend with the people at the tables that decide when bombs kill children?"
I've got a mind-map on my computer that is the result of over 100 hours of borderline manic obsession on this question.
To begin to answer the question of what ought a citizen do in times of war, genocide, and corruption, a John Adam quote does best:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, and architecture.”
If you really want to do something about the state of the world, you gotta accept some brutal facts.
Life's a game, and there are levels.
The levels are separated by skill.
The level that drops bombs does not give a fuck about our instagram posts.
If you want to contend with the higher levels; you will have to improve your skills.
The Reality Stone: Coordination & Competence
I can say God without flinching, pray without embarrassment, and consider plants to be medicine; but if the house in on fire, I call a fireman, not a shaman; if the bridge breaks, I get the engineer, not the Pleiadian, and if I get sick, I'm fasting, not channeling.
This life is a game and there are levels.
The different levels in the game of life are measured by the differences in coordination + competence.
Improving your coordination & competence will allow you to play better games.
Coordination is communication capable of synchronizing complex systems in spacetime.
Planning a vacation with 5 friends is a coordination game. You all begin communicating and planning. If you do it well, you all meet at the airport with your luggage 6 months from now.
Scale up the difficulty 100,000 times and you have the storming of Normandy beach. That too is a coordination game, but orders of magnitude more difficult than the vacation.
Note: it is worth writing down your top 5 coordination games you’ve accomplished in your life. How many people were involved? How long did it take? What were the risks? How did you handle the stress and expectation?
Competence is the ability to transform reality to match your expectation.
Putting a basketball through a hoop or manifesting a song you hear in your head into reality is a competence game.
Scale this up 100,000 times, and you have the mathematicians who wrote the proofs that produced GPS, wifi, and the internet.
Excelling at golf or tennis or wrestling are high competence, low coordination games. Most individual sports are like this.
Executing good team defense in the NBA finals is a high coordination + high competence game.
The United States dropping bunker busting bombs into Iran’s soil is an act of such staggering coordination & competence that most of us go numb as we try to comprehend it.
Imagine the game of life is like a skyscraper.
The higher the floor, the higher the difficulty of coordination + competence games being played.
The levels are separated by degrees of coordination + competence.
The more C&C one has, the higher the levels they can reach.
And you and I, and almost everyone we know, are standing on the ground floor, trying to see the top of a skyscraper that disappears above the clouds.
Theres a place for prayer and poems, posts and stories, but if that is the extent of your coordination & competence, you might be ignoring the call to enter the building and rise through the levels.
Our culture has an aristocracy and they aren’t reading our instagram stories.
The highest level of the game are played through egregores.
Egregores are collective thought forms that are capable of massive coordination + competence..
Corporations, nations, and legal codes are egregores.
If the state of the world hurts your heart, and you want to do something meaningful, cultivate your coordination + competence at raising and riding egreogres.
Cathedral Consciousness
Remember Adam's opening quote:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, and architecture.”
Growing egregores capable of coordination & competence that can contend with atrocities that happen on the world stage is a generational game.
The average European cathedral took 400 years to build.
If you're sincere about helping build the future, you'll have to learn to dream in generations.
It'll take generations because most of us are starting from the dirt and the slums.
For example, the most complex act of coordination I saw in childhood was my mom and dad planning a roadtrip from Wisconsin to Texas.
However, I got a crash course in coordination & competence games once I decided to be an entrepreneur.
It was such a foreign idea, that I was allowed to create things and sell them for money, that I had to read Tim Ferriss’s ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’ three separate times to understand that anyone can just decide to start playing the entrepreneur game.
I remember the day I connected my email to my 1st website, so people could sign up to my newsletter. It was 2012, no ChatGPT, and youtube wasn't what it is today. It took me 7 hours to figure out how to do.
And when I finished, and it worked, I felt more accomplished than anything I had done in college.
It was the most complex coordination/competence game I had played to date.
Through the next 10 years, the entrepreneur game brought me inside what it takes to gather hundreds, sometimes thousands of people in the same place at the same time, and then give them an experience they are grateful to have spent thousands to receive.
I've learned what it takes to manage large teams, pivot million dollar events at the last moment, and what happens when money runs out and people you care about are still on the payroll.
For most of us who are starting at the bottom of the competence + coordination game; the best way to cultivate your skill is to start to play the entrepreneur game.
I truly don't know of a better game one can play to improve their skills at competence and coordination than entrepreneurship.
The renaissance became the renaissance because the richest of that age sponsored the artists.
I don't know about you, but I don't trust our generations richest.
I think we're going to have to learn how to fund ourselves.
Washing The Feet of Capitalism
I think Capitalism suffers from the same problem as Christianity.
Both are egregores; thought forms that require human attention to live, and who provide behavioral rituals for millions to find refuge in.
And both egregores are stained with the blood of millions of deaths and atrocities that have been committed in their name.
And both have a golden gem at their core, if one is patient enough to wash away the blood and the sin.
Christianity's golden gem is the mythos of the Christos.
Capitalism's golden gem is symbolizing reciprocity.
It is possible to love everyone and treat them as you would wish to be treated.
It is also possible to exchange a symbol that represents your gratitude for another's service.
In the same way it is possible to be a student of Christ without carrying the bigotry of the Church, it is possible to play the game of capitalism without carrying the psychopathic greed of broken billionaires.
If we sincerely desire a future where children are not incinerated by bombs, we will need to rescue Christos from the Church, and regenerative entrepreneurship from cancerous capitalism.
If you don't agree, tell me another way (but acknowledge that you type your answer from a phone or a computer created by capitalism, that you are using an internet connection, wearing clothes, and citing ideas you got from books, videos, or podcasts, all brought to you by the technology only made possible by capitalism).
And for those who see was I see, thank you for joining the game.
It'll take collectives and generations, but the future has always been, and will only ever be, created by optimists who are competent and can coordinate.
Video I'm Enjoying:
Toni Morrison - Evil is Silly
Song I'm Listening on Repeat
Quote I'm Enjoying
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
-John Adams
Get em’ 🍯
Brilliant. As always. Hope all is good with you Erick.