Comment:

This is something I think about a lot, as a creator. What's my legacy? How do I influence culture, how do I guide the next generation? If my words are misinterpreted, what happens? How is the world changed, if it turns out that I'm the next Jesus or Isaac Newton or Ayn Rand?

I make little board and card games sometimes, just to suss out a concept, and one that I played with a few years back was a series of little paper slips you could use to generate a whole life philosophy. (It never went anywhere, because while the paper slips generating a philosophy were interesting, I couldn't really work out a way to compel engaging gameplay with them.)

The system had a few starting points (like "Smart" - you inherently have Intelligence), a lot of intermediaries (like "Resourceful" - if you have Intelligence, you can get Wealth) and a few endpoints ("Legacy" - if you have Wealth, Popularity, Power, and Skill, you win at life). The idea being, of course, that you lay the slips out, one thing leading to another and another, until you have just a few starting points that lead to your endpoint, and that's the guiding ethos of your whole life. I found it amusing that you could create a whole movement - a realistic series of precepts by which a human being might choose to orient their life - essentially from chance.

What is your philosophy? If you had to write it out in two or three sentences, what would that look like? If you travelled forward in time and found a group of people living their lives based around those few sentences, would that be a good community? Would it be possible for a fanaticist to take those few sentences and conclude that they justify a campaign of torture, a la the Spanish Inquisition? What if you spilled grape juice on your philosophy, and a few key nouns got garbled - what might arise then?