Making The Choice Not to Sink With the Ship, or the Problem of OPS

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a magic puppy hug from little Snowy.

We’ve been discussing a new paradigm for life, strategy, business, and more, in an age of collapse. Some of the principles we’ve touched on are Not Sinking With the Ship, reorienting yourself from a reactive mindset to an anticipative one, becoming kinetic and synthetic, and more.

Today we’re going to talk about how to focus and intensify all this. How do you not Sink With the Ship? How do you have the fortitude, the power, to shape and reshape your life, business, approach, etcetera, in an age as troubled as this one? Should you just go on being a passive victim of all this? Not for one second longer, if you ask me.

But beginning, taking that first step, is hard, daunting, and bewildering. So today we’re going to talk about that beginning.

What Everyone’s Terrified Of, and How it Drove the World Crazy

What’s going on in the world today is very simple. And cutting to the heart of it is going to help you take the first steps you need to take now if you don’t want to Sink With the Ship.

People are terrified about money. Above all, number one, money.

That is why they’ve turned to lunatics, crackpots, and fanatics. 

Without money, nothing is possible, at least not in our capitalist civilization.

So people are terrified of not having enough.

To the point that, for example, the CEO of a healthcare company was just gunned down in public. And many people sort of celebrated. This is how angry and terrified people are. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just observing the obvious.

Let me say it again. All of this is about money. Our institutions have gone haywire, and exploit people to the brink. This is true across the globe, from America to China and beyond.

To the brink of a kind of madness. Because of course it’s existential. Not having enough money in our capitalist civilization means you die. So yes, it’s about money, but in a primordial way.

And so what are people doing response? They are making stupid decisions. Catastrophically stupid ones. They are terrified out of their minds now. 

Who’s going to pay the price for the tariffs and whatnot to hit economies soon? The very people who are the most terrified about money. 

They have made stupid choices. This is what primordial fear does.

The Biggest Problem in Your Life (and Our World) Now is OPS

Now. Why am I telling you this? To warn you? No, the time for warnings is over. So that you understand the Biggest Problem you face now.

That we all face.

It’s not climate change or politics or any of the rest of it at this point.

It’s OPS. That’s shorthand for Other People’s Stupidity.

Other People’s Stupidity is now laying absolute waste to the world around us. I don’t have to go on giving you examples. You’re probably already chuckling and nodding.

The point is that you can no longer let it wreck your life.

Your life.

You cannot go on paying the price for Other People’s Stupidity.

When I say “price,” I don’t mean it metaphorically.

Let’s do a simple example, the textbook one, which is Brexit. Brits destroyed their society. To an unbelievable degree. It’s now a poor country where nothing works, not healthcare, barely even the water system. But more than that Brits are now paying the Stupidity Tax.

Every single one of them is now paying a higher mortgage or rental rate. Their savings have been shattered. Prices have risen even beyond what they have in other places. Salaries are shockingly low—it’s uncommon to make more than $50K in Britain now.

That’s paying the Stupidity Tax. 

Literally. None of what I mean is some kind of allegory or metaphorical. The price we’re talking about is real.

And of course, it has many components. There’s a financial price, which is the stupidity part writ large, because of course, as in the example of Brexit, the motivation was for people to have more money. But the stupidity was that of course they would only get poorer, fast, hard. 

Yet there’s also the social and cultural price. Britain’s a mean, ugly place now. There’s the political price—it will never really have functioning politics again, at least not in our lifetimes. And there’s the human price—living standards have plummeted in startling ways, like kids literally getting shorter.

The Stupidity Tax, or Sinking With the Ship

So. The price of Other People’s Stupidity is real.

If you want to not Sink With the Ship, you cannot go on paying it.

OK? I put a lot of that in italics because we sort of dance around this issue today. If you crack open the papers or whatnot, there’s all kinds of “opinions,” but this is the elephant in the room.

And in this sense, the biggest problem you face now is Other People’s Stupidity.

It is now absolutely wrecking your life, and the question before you is this: how much longer are you going to let this go on?

Now. Remember the principles we’ve been talking about? One was: Minimize Risk, and Maximize Agency. What are we really talking about when I say that you now have to think long and hard about OPS, Other People’s Stupidity? You will never reclaim your agency if you now go on being a victim of Other People’s Stupidity. And you will just take on more and more risk by the day, hour, second.

To make that concrete, what’s about to unfold across much of the world will be like what Brexit did. To the very people who wanted it. The price is going to be real, and it’s not about culture wars or a level of petty nonsense, really, its about what everyone’s terrified of, which is money. Survival. Existence. And its effects, which are deprivation, despair, rage, and violence, in that order. 

A lot of people don’t know it, but they want to Sink With the Ship, and we’ll talk about that another time. That’s one definition of OPS, if you like.

Let me pause there before I tell you how to reclaim your agency, life, chances, power from Other People’s Stupidity.

The Future is Made of Self-Destruction. But is Yours?

This is an age now where OPS defines everything. Everything. We have let the stupidest people in society dictate the choices and decisions the rest of us can make. As a consequence, everything we now think of as civilized, from vaccines to basic systems for healthcare and water and what have you right down to banks and financial markets being next are on the list, not to mention modernity itself.

Where do ages like that end, though?

They end in catastrophe. They culminate and climax. OPS is like a wave, a social tide, or maybe an infection. People do it to each other. They make each other stupider. A lack of money, which means survival, terrifies them, and people need reassurance from one another, but in times like this, that dynamic goes toxic. They tell each other crackpot notions and teach each other conspiracy theories. They posit to one another that wrecking this or destroying that is the key to having more money, more plenitude, more abundance.

That is how self-destruction takes hold.

But self-destruction doesn’t just stop. It reaches a climax. That climax is usually the sequence of crash, crisis, depression, war. We’ve seen it before, over and over again in history, from Rome to the 1930s.

This is where we are now.

I’m not saying all that will happen tomorrow. I’m saying it’s already happening.

The Containment Principle

That brings me to the point. You know that, but you’re not doing much about it, certainly not enough, which is why so many people are panicked these days. Remember the principle of listening to your panic? How its message is change? 

Now you’re getting the point. 

The message in your panic is this.

You can no longer go on paying the price of Other People’s Stupidity. Because that price is real. It’s not just moral or psychological or metaphysical. Now it’s hitting you where it counts, which is in the bank account, possibilities, prosperity, plenitude.

You can’t pay that price. You shouldn’t pay that price. 

So what do you do about it?

Think about what your gut’s already made you do.

Like me, you read the news a lot less. It just doesn’t matter that much now, does it? This crackpot headed to high office is terrible in this way, that one’s a lunatic, this policy’s going to wreck this part of the economy, this one’s going to savage that one. This guy wants to declare on this country, that guy wants to invade that one. On and on it goes.

Now it doesn’t matter.

Because your gut knows that in the end, all this stuff just means: you’re going to pay the price.

Your gut is begging you to make a plan. Turn that set of plans into a strategy. And act on that strategy. So that you stop paying the price for OPS. All of that’s the art of Kinesis.

Your gut is very, very intelligent, smarter than your mind. See what it’s already doing?

It’s creating boundaries.

It is telling you: the problem before you isn’t analyzing the price to be paid, how high it’s going to be, what it’s going to cost.

The problem is figuring out how not to pay it.

You begin to do that in just the way your gut is already guiding you. 

By creating boundaries.

Between you and a collapsing world.

That’s a new principle. Let’s call it containment.

I don’t mean that in the simplistic way you might think, so let me explain it a little. It means that you must contain the collapse of the world away from you, so that you have a container for your agency to be maximized.

Does that make sense? It’s a little abstract, so let me make it concrete.

What happens if you read the news too much? It’s more or less pointless at this juncture, because the point is just: shit, I’m going to have the pay the price of OPS. 

So if you consume too much of it, you end up drained. Less capable of thinking clearly. And then acting decisively.

That is much of what’s in it is a pointless, fake debate. Before Brexit, too, there was a fake debate about if there was going to be a price to be paid. For a country that’s a net importer on a massive scale, breaking up with its largest trading partners? LOL. Doesn’t take a genius, does it?

But engaging in this sort of denialism and pedantry clouds your thinking. It muddies the clear waters of your mind.

Other People’s Stupidity is infectious, remember? The more you engage with it, the Stupider You Get.

That is why your gut is begging you, don’t read the news, don’t go online, just forget it, it doesn’t matter, let’s make a plan, let’s create a strategy from those plans, let’s act, let’s get kinetic.

Your gut knows that OPS is infectious, and the more you engage with it, the cloudier your mind gets, and the weaker you grow.

Intellectually, morally, effectually.

Imbibe too much of it, which isn’t very much these days, a few hours online, or reading the paper, and so forth, and what happens? Maybe you feel a little relieved. Because you have found some kind of intellectual game to play. But tomorrow the panic returns, harder. And you grow less and less capable of acting.

So now you have to create boundaries. And enforce them, ruthlessly.

Creating Boundaries To Protect Yourself Against OPS

I’ve given you one example, which is the sort of media we consume. But that’s a small one, in truth. There are also the people in your life.

Too many of the people in our lives these days are Growing Stupid. I don’t mean that in a mean way, I mean it in a protect yourself one. There is no point, none, trying to convince friends, neighbors, whomever, of the effects of their own stupidity. They haven’t listened yet, have they? It’s sad, it’s weird, but most of all, it’s all too real.

That’s because they’re not thinking at all.

Remember what we began by talking about? Everyone’s terrified existentially right now. That is what “money” means in our capitalist civilization, survival. But the terror of not having enough to even survive on has driven people out of their minds, which is why they are making such foolish decision.

If their minds aren’t working, how are you going to convince them? Reach them? You can’t.

It’s not just a waste of time. It will drain you, and again, leave you less capable of ever acting.

So with people, too, you must create firm boundaries. That doesn’t mean you have to sort of cut them off, but it does mean recognizing that they are way, way past the point of being able to think clearly, if at all, because their minds aren’t working in the rational sense anymore, and the more time and effort you spend on them, the more you will begin to shut down, too.

That’s not about left or right, by the way—think of how Kamala’s foolish advisors and pundits etcetera are in exactly the place above, after losing so badly. So none of this is about politics, it’s about your life.

This is the Containment Principle. You must think of your little world as a container now. It must be able to contain your agency. And for you to have any agency at all, in times like these, you cannot go on having the same relationship with the world you did before, which is treating people, ideas, things, relationships, money, anything, in the “normal” way. 

Now you must at all times protect yourself against Other People’s Stupidity. That’s not nice, I understand. It’s nicer to live in a civilized way, where you don’t have to do that. And by doing that, I don’t mean that you turn nasty, or be on guard all the time—I just mean…

Focus On What You Can Do, Not What Other People Can’t

You focus on what you can do, instead of what other people can’t.

Right now? Other people can’t do any of the following things.

—Make wise choices

—About anything from money to leaders

—See more than a few weeks into their own futures

—Understand the consequences of their own decisions

—Take responsibility for their mistakes

The longer you focus on other people not being able to do these things, and I know it’s maddening, because these are basic, defining adult behaviors, but still—the longer and harder you focus on what other people can’t do, the less you will ever be able to focus on what you can do.

What you can do.

Learning and Growing in Ages Like These

People have to learn the hardest way in ages like these.

They learn, if at all, after they’ve paid not just the price, but the highest version of the price.

Then they sort of come back to their senses, a little bit, and are shocked that they made such mistakes.

People didn’t learn in the 1930s when they began to pay the prices for nationalism and tariffs and so forth. They didn’t even learn when there was a Great Depression. They learned after there was a World War.

People need to learn the hardest way in times like these, precisely because they have lost their thinking minds. A culminating event needs to be had to shock them back into reality.

This is why we are on the path we’re on, where nothing seems to get better. Because people themselves won’t allow it to get better. They may be guided in the wrong ways by cynical elites, true, but see the point of what I’m teaching you. It’s not just that people don’t think clearly, but that they act self-destructively, lashing out in existential terror. How will I survive? I must destroy something to have even the pieces of something.

And so in ages like these, people don’t come back to their senses easily, not at least until there’s a climax. 

Havens, Culminations, Agency, and Boundaries

I’m teaching you that so you stop engaging in denial, and get serious about fixing your life and not Sinking With the Ship. If you understand that, then you should also get: Other People’s Stupidity isn’t going to get better. It’s going to get worse.

So how are you going to protect your money from it? Your assets? Your career? Which relationships are still worth having, and which ones are just sort of vampiric exercises? Where will you live, and in what way? What businesses and livelihoods work?

In all these ways, you are challenged now to create boundaries. To create a container in which you can still live a civilized, peaceful, happy, and prosperous life. That brings us back to Havens.

You need to find your Havens, now. Or at least begin now. At the very least, Havens are spaces where you’re protected from OPS. The troubles we face now will only grow worse. You do not want to be in the position many will be in in a few short months or years, which is paying a price that is so steep, their lives are effectively limited, diminished, withered, over, in the ways of living civilized ones full of possibility and richness.

They have to learn the hardest way. You don’t. You must build containers now, made of boundaries, which protect you from the Big Lesson they will learn the hard way, which is that they will pay the price. They will pay the price. This is what stupidity is, after all. Whether it’s economic, financial, political, social, doesn’t matter—foolish choices wreak havoc, and the price must be paid.

This is how you begin to focus. Your life. Take those first steps, and forge a new relationship with the world, in an age like this. No more being a passive victim. No more sitting there, trapped in the reaction-bewilderment-panic spiral that millions upon millions are in. How you move towards kinesis, action. You now must firmly set yourself apart from Other People’s Stupidity, really understand it, see it for what it is, think clearly, and make the choice now to transcend it.

We’ll discuss that more next time.

Lots of love from me and Snowy.

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