Our lives are fundamentally unmanageable. We discern the elemental truth of it in the character and profile of dozens of events both serious and trivial on a daily basis. Every conflict, disappointment, irritant, obstruction, and failure is evidence of this simple and undeniable fact. We do everything in our power to deny the obvious and blinding necessity of accepting the truth of which it speaks and acknowledging the fallacy and denial which it identifies; that we are powerless in the world.

If we were to accept this as being true then our whole understanding of who we are and the nature of the world that we live in and interact with would be undermined. The terrible truth is that we are engaged in a constant, complex interaction with a world that be cannot be controlled or managed, striving to bend it to our will and preference, and opinionating and suffering for our powerlessness. We can imagine no recourse or see any alternative. Nothing would sustain and protect us, and no higher power could save us, for this is a god-less world in which we do not allow him to exist.