On Failure II

 As the softlings say, if you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time in airports. To accomplish anything of true value requires open unmistakable failure. 

 Through Death, Life. The Romans were right: Pluto sat upon unimaginable wealth. Divine treasures beyond beauty and beyond counting. It is only in the underworld that any and every thing can be found.

If you already knew how to do it, you wouldn't prove anything by managing to do it. Plan to fail. The more you can plan to fail without quitting, the greater the scope of the final success. 

 The ideal man plans to fail eternally at the task with an infinitesimal chance of success; succeeding despite everything would have unlimited value. Yet, this can be burdensome, we must also choose the merely improbable, to sustain us along the way. 

 If your society quits in the face of failure, it cannot succeed. It can't even play the game.

 

 Most religions are not alive. They have Popes, yes, but the Popes are shadow Popes. They don't have a goal. They know not what they plan to do. Without a plan, a man is literally nothing. A fleshy breeze, nothing more than a cell of a weather system. 

 Ironically, America, of all places, once had a plan. A purpose. They were going to go to the moon. If they had actually gone there, it really would have been glorious and cool.
 I suspect they could not tolerate failure. They could not withstand finding themselves in a blind alley. They discovered some reason it was impossible...instead of being excited to challenge the impossible, they gave up. They faked it.

 Personnel is policy: Americans are quitters and failures, they couldn't possibly have a real goal. They discovered some reason it was impossible because, deep down, that was what they were truly journeying for the entire time. Physical reality had to converge on purposeless spiritual reality. "We went to the moon, we won, game over, everyone go home now. Nothing else to do here." The destination reached reveals the destination demanded; reveals the character of the journeyman. 

 

 To have a true society, you must exile the quitters. If they ridicule the losers, then they are garbage. Cowards go outside, in the dump. Honour the glorious prey, honour the glorious chase. Thank them for making it hard for you. Nothing that inhibits accepting impossible "failed" contests can be allowed.
 You can't allow the cowards to refuse to fight. Mercy is a sin. Fight them all the way out. Scream, with rage, with fear, with joy, scream and shatter their cowardly souls. Feels them until they ain't real. Let them experience apocalypse and revelation.

 A living society must have a goal. They must have a goalkeeper, who unlike the "sports"man doesn't prevent you from reaching the goal, but in fact spurs you toward it, but more importantly, when the goal is reached, they pick a new one. When the society stops failing at their goal, they need to look at what new failures have opened up to them, and pick one to go fail at. Perhaps call this keeper of goals the Pope. 

 The more worthy the goal, the more likely Reality will brutally inflict visions of impossibility. And praise be. Let black pills rain from the sky, let them grow from the ground, let them drown the ocean. Let the backlash be savage, the pushback ferocious. Show me despair! Show me armageddon itself! The society cannot fold. 

 Remember what 'agony' really means: an agon is a contest. Agony is simply Greek for contesting. Agonizing means to fight. Without fighting, you cannot win. If you cannot win, you cannot journey. If you cannot journey, you don't exist.

 For example, there is a correct goal for families in the present world. It is this: "Parenting reseach project." How do you raise the healthiest, the most powerful children, without spending so much the children have to pay for it? The purpose of each generation is not to parent as their parents did, but to parent better. The purpose of uncles and aunts is to A/B test.
 Contrast the degenerate goal of 'generational' wealth. Wealth to buy what? What is it for? Certainly generational wealth is not a bad means to pick, it certainly isn't a trivial ask, but...this is clearly a fake goal. Satanic. They want social status, not wealth. A petty relative goal, not an absolute physical or divine goal.
 Children of the parenting research project will eventually reach some best practices equilibrium. Imagine a school of expert parents, nice. Now we can ask: what kind of goal would the children of these families set? The purpose of this journey, of this destination, is to buy the right to set off on a better journey. One I myself cannot even imagine.