Seed Drills And Fate: Part 1

[Forgive me, for I am about to philosophize.]

“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

It’s a line from an old movie starring an Austrian bodybuilder posing as a death-robot sent from a post-apocalyptic dystopian future (a future scheduled six years from now). I could pick a similar line from Marcus Aelius but I’d probably mess up the Latin. Regardless, it’s true. Whenever I make my own fate, I’m happier. You are too.

There are things I control; such as certain financial decisions. I embrace these situations. Nobody’s perfect but an average, normal, reasonable adult is right most of the time.

There are things I don’t control; such as the overall economy. Notice the examples I gave are two sides of the came coin. I embrace personal financial decisions because I have some control but I can keep fretting over the overall economy to the minimum I can. I have no control over the overall economy (according to some theories, nobody does). As for who either controls the economy or thinks they do; I’ll quote George Carlin “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it“.

This means when things based on the overall economy interact with my life it sucks. (This is true even if I benefit.) The overall economy is inflicted upon me. To the degree I can’t adapt or evade I’m just cannon fodder. The overall economy is managed (or mismanaged) in ways that were never meant to fit my preferences. I get pissed off even by little stuff. I can’t buy incandescent light bulbs because someone I never met decided I can’t do it; meaning that there’s an official light bulb bureaucracy that’s more powerful than my lightbulb preference. As a practical matter, heroin and incandescent bulbs are equally banned (unless I’m in Oregon where heroin might be ok?). If a stupid thing like light bulbs annoy me, imagine how angry I get over big stuff like printing money until my savings and retirement plans are diminished by inflation.

Consider a personal financial decision over which I do have some control. Lets assume my car still runs and I could also finance a replacement. What’s my best choice? Do I finance a new car or keep the decaying vehicle I’ve got?

External forces have a preference; oh God do they have preferences! They’re not subtle about it either. I’ve been awash in marketing and propaganda since I was born. (One of the first “big words” I could spell was “Chevrolet”.) The cretins at the bank would happily strap my ass into horrific debt. The sales drones at the dealer make a living talking people into a “trade ins”. They all have the same preference. Spend, spend, spend! Several consecutive presidents have suggested it’s my patriotic duty to buy something from Detroit and if I were a true patriot it ought to be an EV.

I want a new car. But do I really want a new car? Maybe I’m just so badgered I assume so? When you make a choice, consider if you really made the choice at all. Internally oriented decisions don’t necessarily match society as a whole. If you make a decision that’s easy and supported by society, it was probably not created out of your own heart. It was an external locus of control. If one fish in a school of ten thousand makes the same move as 9,999 other fish… was it truly making the choice?

The world absolutely loves controlling you. Governments and organizations want to manage all of your decisions! Their decisions might make you miserable but that’s irrelevant. They don’t care about you. They can’t care about. It’s literally impossible to make blanket decisions for millions of people and still care about your preference.

Surprisingly, given that nobody can know you better than you, a lot of people let someone else take the wheel. Personal control is indeed hard work. So weak people fall to the temptation of avoiding self-reliance. They don’t want the responsibility of decisions so they turn to some external force. Whether it’s the Pope, a President, or Google whatever happens next is done in the service of external forces. A person’s path in life becomes what someone else did to them. Maybe it works out and maybe it doesn’t. What it certainly did, was erode their sense of self.

Once you’ve evaded a decision you’ve reduced your role in your own life. You’ve become domesticated. You’re someone’s pet or widget or piece on a playing board. The ultimate indignity is to become a unit on a vote farm. No matter how the chips fall, when you let someone else decide, you lose a measure of control over your own life.

That’s the source of the helplessness that infects our populace. Many people aren’t steering their own ship. They gave up and now hope and pray that someone is steering. At first they’re worried that someone is steering poorly. Later they fear nobody is steering at all. That’s why every election is “the most important election ever”. The more things the government controls, the more we sense it’s inflicting events on us. The more things inflicted upon us, the more random and illogical they seem. Citizens encounter events in a natural and understandable manner only when they themselves do the encountering.

That’s the drawback of “just going along”, the desire to shirk personal decisions creates an infantilized non-adult; a failed sad thing that’s hopeless and prone to depression. Taken to extremes it creates a zombie that’s long dead and just doesn’t know it yet.

We who are still self aware are surrounded by people and systems that don’t have our best interests at heart. We must protect ourselves against that by managing our own affairs.

When “they” steer the ship (whoever “they” are), “they” don’t steer to our desired port. Learning this is part of becoming an adult (and if one is pushed too far, a cynic).

I’ll elaborate in my next post.