Goals For The Future.
“Each person has goals. Some goals are open, visible to all who care to observe. Others are more private, shared only with one’s closest friends or associates.
Some are dark secrets that one hopes will never see the light of day.
But eventually, inevitably, those deepest goals must be made manifest if they are to be reached. They must be opened for someone to hear, or see, or offer assistance.
Everyone who brings those goals into the light must be prepared for either acceptance or rejection. And he must be ready to bear the consequences.
All of them.” -Grand Admiral Thrawn.
I approach this post with trepidation. Goals are a vulnerable thing. They speak to what a person believes about others, about God, and about himself. Goals and dreams are some of the deepest expressions of being humans are capable of, alongside concepts like sex and playing music and climbing mountains. John Maxwell once said, “Achieving your dreams will consist chiefly of helping others achieve theirs.” Take this post as a call to action. If you see yourself straining after the same goals, perhaps it is fate that led you here today. The universe has a strange balance to these sorts of things. Entropy and gravity work together as one person becomes two, two become four, ideas become plans, plans become reality, and the small snowflake turns into snowball as it begins to pick up speeding gaining weight and rolling down the hill. If you’re running to the same things, I would be honored if you would trust me to help you get there. When someone shares a dream, a great risk exists. People envious of vision and purpose and those afraid of virtue and goodness, those lovers of corruption and systems designed for repression scramble towards that spark of ingenuity to dash it out. It may not be wise to share all of these goals now, but as it’s been said, fortune favors the bold.
I have three dreams.
Starting a Church
Starting an Agoge
Starting a Troupe
The Church
The church has historically been the hub of education, medicine, governance, even military organizations. The church was the place people turned to for everything, at a time when spirituality wasn’t divorced from physical community or social opportunity. Education, literacy, and morality were abandoned by the rest of the world in the twilight days of the Roman World Order, and the dawn of the Middle Ages. The church continued to steward history and decency, as the world entered a new age of feudalism. How far we’ve fallen. Now, churches occupy a very narrow sliver of our lives, a loveless exchange of an hour on Sunday and Wednesday for assurance that our souls are saved, functioning like the basin of water Pilate washed his hands in to neatly cleanse himself from the crime of sentencing an innocent man to death. The myriad of denominations and locations exist to ease our particular flavor of guilt, a very clean, cut and dry transaction. We dishonor God by making tepid art, denying our community and and opportunities, accepting lackluster theology, and staying comfortable and tidy in our own neat little communities, safe from all the nasty little impurities of the “unsaved”. Make no mistake, the American Dream is assuredly reaching its end, and people will soon wake up. Feudalism prowls along the shadows cast by the walls of Democracy, looking for cracks. But it enters our nation not by a vulnerability in the defenses, but a vulnerability in our leaders. They invite it in. And us commoners cannot do anything but sit by and watch. I refuse to do nothing. As feudalism returns, so shall the Church, the real Church, the Church that the whole world leaned on in an epoch of darkness. A church is not the Church unless it can provide for all three parts of the sons and daughters of Man. These are the soul, the body, and the spirit.
The Three Parts of a Human:
Soul
This is who we are on Earth. Our souls desire connection, fulfillment, meaning, purpose. I find it interesting how much of our faith and comfort in God and our future residence in Heaven comes from action on Earth. A church needs to be prepared to provide opportunities for people to find friends, mentors, spouses. It’s been said that home is where the heart is. The heart should feel like the church is a second home. The soul needs friendship, leadership, and meaning. The church should point its members to Christ for these needs, but do their best to be Christ’s vessels on Earth too.
Body
What does discipleship benefit the man dying of hunger? How can you expect a person to believe that God cares for them as they live on the street? I believe that the emphasis on the spiritual needs of people has become so prevalent because it is easier to preach and leave than it is to stay and provide for long term needs. The early church knew the importance of caring for physical needs, and in lieu of building a brick and mortar sanctuary for worship opted to use all of their funds for the care of others in need. In this way my church will give too. There will be no buffer between us and the world. Giving with an expectation is not giving, that’s a contract. And Christ did not offer us salvation because of what we could do for Him. In this same way, the church should be able to independently provide food, shelter, employment, training, education, and safety.
Spirit
The spirit is that ethereal quality that separates mankind from the rest of the Lord’s creation. The Breath of God. The spirit is the ultimate reward for Jesus, who sacrificed Himself on the cross so that our spirits could be saved, and live with Him in eternity forever and ever. The care of the soul and the body ultimately serves the salvation and health of the spirit. We must not falter in preaching the Good News, and living it out in both private and public.
The Agoge
Planned obsolescence is great for companies selling crock pots and video game controllers, but not warriors. Warriors don’t have shelf lives, warriors can’t be formed in 12 weeks or 4 years, because warriors are not products. They’re men. You can’t create a warrior. Warriors are forged, yes, and made stronger by the inclusion of other composite metals, heat, pressure treating on the forge, and the shaping of the skilled blacksmith, but you can’t create the raw material for a warrior any more than a man can point at an apple tree and tell it to sprout oranges. The death of even the strongest nation can be traced back to one problem, and problems start unimaginably small. The hairline crack in the foundation of the American military is the cheapening of the process of forging warriors. Training timelines are shortened to meet demand, certifications become online classes that are easy to cheat on, standards are relaxed. These are simply symptoms of a greater presupposition, the idea that you can make a warrior after training him. The rank and file of the Marine Corps and our sister branches are certainly populated by warriors, but this is happenstance. They join the military not to become warriors, but because they already are. Note that true warriors are a frighteningly small percentage of our military. Most of the people in service are about as useful as a wage employee, if that. What little we invest to the pruning and growth of our small population of warriors is rendered doubly ineffective because of how late the process is started. Even our youngest recruits of 17 years old are often too resistant to the changes necessary to bring out their true potential. The warriors that do respond well to the opportunity have already started the process somewhere else.
My proposition is the reinstitution of the Agoge, starting before kindergarten age, where parents volunteer their children to attend. There will be no obligation to serve upon graduation, and many children will choose not to, an acceptable loss. I suspect children with this level of education will serve our country in their own way, in the arts or in industry or politics, and even if they do not support America, reckoning with such an enemy would force us to become stronger. Iron sharpens iron, as the old adage goes. The goal will be complete and total immersion into all aspects of life. Multiple languages, speaking, writing, reading, making relationships, trade craft, surveillance, public speaking, social engineering, grassroots campaigning, logical reasoning and debate, mental math, chemistry, engineering, warfighting tactics at the buddy team level all the way up to the division level, logistics, leadership, martial arts, dancing, cotillion, improvised weaponry and engineering, all of these skills with practical application, repeated exposure, spaced repetition, music, reviewing ,and building upon previous field exercises and classes. The school itself built for climbing and lifting and crawling, a dynamic environment, a curriculum spanning decades. Let them fail and make mistakes and grow. Give them space to pursue their own passions and desire. The ultimate warrior. Whatever incentive that can be given to parents is worth the cost. Their voluntary participation in this program is vital. So should the commissioning of this warriors into governmental service be voluntary. A volunteer produces 10 times the output a slave does, so it logically follows that 1 volunteer is worth 10 slaves. 10 soldiers is worth 90 others choosing to pursue civilian careers.
Although I have a special interest in the education of young children, I want the Agoge open to participants of all ages. 10 years of study, open to all ages, with 60 year olds studying in the same class as 10 year olds. Age is a red herring in the search for warriors, I only emphasize the younger ages because they are being woefully underutilized in present times. There will be instructors and residency professors. Humans are capable of so much more. What if my students spent a year of the school blind, and the next deaf, and the next mute? What if there was a month where we simulated all three? What level of mastery could you train a person to in 10 years? How many skills can a person learn in that time? What would happen if you set your goals for a decade, not a week or a year? We can achieve levels of mastery never even seen before. Participation in the Agoge must be voluntary, of course. We also have this strange cultural practice in America where we abandon students as soon as they graduate. This is folly. I propose a 6 month or so refresher course every few years, which includes new skills, while building up old ones too. Education is the process of a lifetime.
The Troupe
Core Values:
Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
100 imperfect tries are always better than 1 perfect try.
Lose money if it means doing the right thing.
Fuck shit up.
What value does art serve? Why did the first caveman decide to scribble his likeness onto the stone of his cave’s wall? Why do we cram ourselves into stadiums to hear people sing? Why are you reading this string of words right now? Scientists study the most basic building blocks of the universe. Metaphysics. The smallest possible units of everything. It’s the oldest branch of study of all time. The universe is built up of reality, existence, objects, their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, the relation between matter and mind. I suggest that most of metaphysics neglects the most key binding concept. The Monomyth. The web and logic that binds all of these concepts together. Logic and passion fucked, their womb was the four dimensional plane, and their child was the Monomyth. The ancient structure that carries the traits of her parents. From the womb of the Universal Story everything else is born. But her children grow estranged from their mother. They forget her face, her soothing voice, her structure and security. Art is what reconnects us to her. Math and logic and architecture and fucking do too, but art is the most accessible way to commune with the Four Dimensional Mother. All of the disciplines help us to reconnect with different aspects of her, but art reminds us of her voice. The calm. The peace. This is the purpose art serves.
But too often art becomes synonymous with financial success. As if creating art needed to be legitimized with mammon. The greatest artists don’t fear judgment. Tyrants and Heroes alike may try and hide us from communing with the Monomyth, because the Monomyth is truth, and it upsets their perfectly crafted deceptions. They try to deceive the masses for the sole purpose of keeping the lies they tell themselves safe. Art is the threat to their fantasies. And the art I am creating will destroy them. My troupe will be composed of artists. Not employees. Artists. Generalists. She sings good? That’s great. Can she rig 3d models? He’s handsome? Cool. Can he clean bathrooms? My troupe will be limited to 500 artists.The larger a company gets, the less effective it becomes. The teams within the troupe will be limited to the amount that 2 boxes of pizza can feed. 500 people. No more. We don’t have anyone who can do storyboards? Someone’s gonna have to learn. We don’t have a finances gal? We need to send someone to learn how to balance books. We need extras for this shot? Get Jim from accounting to do it. I’m not looking for specialists. I’m looking for warriors. Thinkers and doers. People who are constantly learning. That will be the culture. I’ll have an education plan for every single member of the troupe, and they’ll be in some form of organized education every moment they are employed within the troupe. It will have a flat company structure like Valve does, and it’ll let the actual creators make their creative decisions like early Bungie. This is scalable, I can empower other people to start their own troupes, but they must be financially and hierarchically separate from the other troupes. Because the second you add money to the mix, that’s who calls the shots. The second you add management or boards of directors, artists no longer make decisions. Each troupe will have a single leader. That’s who approves or rejects projects, who’s responsible for hiring, firing, paying, for enacting the 10/80/10 rule, for leading in the good times and bad. Want a pay raise? Sure! You need to pass a test about company history, ethics, performance, and show mastery over the new skill our company invested in to teaching you. There’s pay grades based off of merit only. You can request to advance up only after you have met the education requirements. After that, enjoy your bigger paycheck!
My troupe will not advertise our projects. People will just show up because they will be begging for our art. There will be no trailers, no behind the scenes peeks, no publicity tours. Just a relationship between the audience and a promise to deliver our best. We will do things with half the budget, half the people, half the time, but with quadruple the profit. That profit will be used to create our “Third Spaces.” The theater is an outdated medium to view films. The process of setting the atmosphere for a film or a project doesn’t start with the opening credits or the initial social media post. It’s the drive to the theater. It’s the parking lot. It’s the line to get in. It’s the community with costumes and talking excitedly amongst each other before and after the movie. We need to overhaul the entire movie experience. Customer service is often viewed as reactive, waiting for problems to arise. What malarkey. We should be reaching out to customers and viewers, calling them and DMing them, emails, letters, not with surveys they need to fill out, but with human beings to talk to. Humans don’t connect with robots. The Third Spaces will have teams solely dedicated to proactively reaching out to all of our customers. They won’t call from a faceless company number or a generic email. They will have their own instagram accounts and phone numbers specific to them. It won’t be Hall Studios calling them. It will be John or Jane Doe calling them, like a friend. We’ll send boxes of goodies to their homes, give them VIP seating and experiences for their birthday, cater food for their weddings. These Third Spaces will need to have food as well. I’ll need to find some people who dream of creating chain restaurants. We’ll serve the best food. Our shows will be like nothing anyone has ever seen before, blurring the lines between live and recorded, 2D, 3D, 4D, all the genres of film and entertainment, live plays, musicals, audience participation, it will be a circus. You won’t be showing up to a Hall Studios film expecting to just see a movie. It will be the food, the atmosphere, the friendship, the making of new friend, sharing your excitement and theories with strangers sitting in the seats around you, and talking about the movie after it ends. We lost something when people stopped making friends camping overnight outside GameStop waiting for a new game to be released, the social aspect of enjoying a thing is what I aim to bring back.
I have three dreams.
Starting a Church
Starting an Agoge
Starting a Troupe
“Fate rarely calls on us at a moment of our choosing.” -Optimus Prime. These ideas are from beyond me, from a plane of existence I cannot access. These concepts are heavenly. We must do the work of bringing them to reality. I look forward to working with you in this task.