HE'S CLOSE AND YET SO FAR AWAY.
There's no real management book - there's no document that shows you 'this is the optimal way to exist' and 'these are the pitfalls of existing other ways.'
Almighty God in heaven above right now:
You have these human reward systems built in and they can be hijacked by these various things and this is the way the human body and the human mind exist optimally.
Oh, so you mean we humans are designed in a certain way - almost as if we have a Designer - and that there are certain things we should do for our health and happiness but for some reason there's a bug in our systems that causes us to short-circuit and do bad things and fall into temptations and we don't know why?
For whatever reason, there's no real structure that people can follow that's universally agreed upon.
SOMEONE GET THIS MAN A COPY OF "MERE CHRISTIANITY" RIGHT NOW!
From CS Lewis before most of you were born:
Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to — whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
Back to Rogan:
Say if you're a mechanic, right, and you're working on an engine. Like, there's very clear documents that show you that these are the pistons and this is the spark plug and this is the carburetor, if it's not clean, it'll do this. This is the problem with the gas line and you have to fit it this way and that way, and you do it all right and 'VROOM' it starts it all up and it works. And you can fix things that way, and you can build things that way.
BACK TO LEWIS (PLEASE READ THIS, ROGAN):
...out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history — money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery — the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended — civilisations are built up — excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.
BACK TO ROGAN:
We don't really have that for the most complex thing that we're aware of, which is human existence.
Except we do, Joe.
Every religion attempts to answer the question of human fallibility, purpose, and relation to the divine. For most, those answers are as ambiguous as George Lucas's "Force" (even more so in the Disney-fied versions). Buddhism, Hinduism, traditional animism the world over, Taoism, Shintoism, Zoroastronism, and the weird Hollywood cults of LGBT Marxism, climate globalism, or Scientology all attempt a vague explanation of these things on various levels.
Those that are more concrete, like Islam or Mormonism, build off this other thing with some fancy little instructions and revelation of their own - that little thing being an old book some people used to read called "The Bible."
Then there are those that simply believe what the Bible says, or at least generally agree while debating some of the details. But regardless of denomination or off-shoot, this Bible continues to serve the overwhelming majority of the human race with a referent point on understanding the human machine.
This collection of 66 books, compiled and translated over thousands of years into hundreds of languages with stunning accuracy, details the specific origins of mankind, what went wrong, God's instructions for a good life, and God's loving plan to save us due to our complete inability to follow said instructions.
All of this follows the story of one man who became a nation, then follows the ups and down of that nation as a testimony to all the other nations of the world to demonstrate God's redeeming love over thousands of years of human history.
Then, as if the instructions and the historical metanarrative weren't enough, God decided to fulfill His plan by taking on human form, being born as a baby in the midst of a backwater stable in middle-of-nowhere Judea on the edges of Roman civilization as a nobody with nobody parents who were long-forgotten descendants of a bereft line of kings of a conquered nation in bondage to an emperor thousands of miles away.
This very same God spent time explaining His instruction manual, delivering sermons to thousands of people in that backwater desert that are still read in massive cathedrals around the world today.
Imagine how our relationships, investments, habits, health, families, and government would look if we still followed that instruction manual!
To cap it off, this God died for our wrongdoings so that we can have a new heart and a new nature with the promise of resurrection and eternity - an act of sacrifice that turned the Roman Empire upside down, built the West, and inspired the learning of science, exploration, and engineering that made the modern world.
To this day, two thousand years later, there are billions of people who profess that God as their God and would lay down their lives for Him - and even if only a tenth of those were truly sincere in their faith, it would mean an army hundreds of times bigger than what measly forces the United States could muster.
There's no real management book - there's no document that shows you 'this is the optimal way to exist' and 'these are the pitfalls of existing other ways.'
Really Joe?
Boy do I have good news for you!
You only have to be willing to listen.
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