Can You Hear Your Better Angels?

Where to listen and what they say.

Tim Conway

Country is a family of common interest, progress and legacy. A shared investment to point our children toward prosperity. Our better angels help us remember that, but they won’t do the hard work for us.

Sometimes in the rise of scientific enterprise the conversations we exchange scale into unmanageable noise. It becomes difficult for regular people to keep up and still focus on the job at hand. Services can help but extract value and when it comes to ones private enterprise the more we can do in-house or with local resources the better.

Just as there are stars in the sky to guide the sailor home we’ve discovered other creative sources of quality information. This is where we need angels the most. Taking whatever form they can to encourage our use of same-cycle information. Philosophical Science. Mind meets data. We have allies. We can hold back the primitivism of ideological decay and the hell its advocates endorse in all their varied incarnations. See demons.

The angels whisper in the quiet places of the world. They don’t use words. Won’t directly say things like “family is everything” but they would if they could. They’d remind us financial choices that don’t grow ones family are almost certainly hurting someone else’s as well. That we are all capable of adding something wonderful to the world, even after so much waste.

When all conversation with the rest of the world has been placed beyond the present moment. When we have time to pay attention to the pattern of our behaviour they’ll make their presence known. The impact of their guidance is evident in all our productive success. The paradox of less producing more is their domain.

They’re a personification of familiar encouragement in all we do. A construct of our imagination’s desire to see us prosper as our ancestors have without undermining the critical necessity of building that prosperity for ourselves. The legacy of all that successful evolution which has gotten us this far. A natural guidance toward opportunity by embracing new information distilled from qualified facts.

To capitalize is to gain by turning something to advantage. The best social means ever discovered so far is private capacity to leverage natural opportunities to produce the goods and services we use to operate stable countries. The Animal Kingdom is the primitive version of this process. No laws. No countries. No civilization. No freedom. Driven entirely by inherited traits and fundamentally restricted from using historical information to judge the future beyond their flawed instinct.

We leverage the human novelty of remembering useful information over time. Stop glorifying the “mix of debt and equity” cynically preferred by the financial services industry. Resist the fraud of exploiting easy marks which eventually consumes the whole to serve the one and then ultimately consume the one, too.

The ideological approach is obsolete and harmful to operating the enterprise of our global society. The industrial revolution has become a sophisticated technological ecosystem and there’s no going back.

Better angels appear when needed because regular people always have the capacity to recognize the good of the world at some level. No matter how connected or complicated it might appear. It’s always been connected; always complicated. Even when towers of techno-babble obscure the view, there’s time for thoughtfulness.

There’s always a place where the world is quiet, even when the tractor is loud…that’s when you’ll hear them. They sing when you feel like quitting. Drawing your attention from one blessing to the next. Your aching muscles which no longer represent pain, but instead food on your table. Or on countless mornings when sleeping through work promised comfortable distraction.

Even those who produce alone sleep well upon a bed of relevance and accomplishment knowing the cycle of life they’re an active part of.

Pioneers built countries with hard work, bravery, and love. So isn’t it wonderful that when the poisonous voices of those who would use us are far away…and we’re confronted with the real world we’ve built around ourselves…the cool air still blows across our porch. The fire still warms our toes as we smoke our pipes.

We can look out at all that we’ve done and made; the smiles…the laughs and know that the angels will remember and guide others of good conscience toward a promised land. Angels don’t take credit because they don’t exist. They don’t have to. They occupy the space between space. Something less and more than the pixels on this screen.

Somewhere between the real world of potential not yet realized and the imagination that drives what might be… is the realm of our better angels and they sing for us.