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The druid said: “The end adjusts the means”
“The
end adjusts the means,” is
not ethical advice but a procedural law describing how real systems persist
in unpredictable environments. All emergents—organisms,
minds, cultures—operate amid random inputs and shifting constraints. Because
outcomes cannot be known in advance, means cannot be fixed beforehand.
Instead, systems survive by feedback: actions occur, results are registered,
internal parameters shift, and subsequent actions change. What continues
retroactively selects the methods that worked. Ends are not targets declared
in advance; they are diagnosed as the temporary fact of non-failure. This
logic eliminates universal purpose. Each emergent inhabits a unique context
with unique collisions and histories, so each converges on a formally
different end. To say an emergent is “God in its space” is not theology but
local absoluteness: there is no higher controller available to correct it. It
must complete itself—or collapse. The
human predicament sharpens the problem. Humans inherit a mammalian end—DNA
transmission—that reliably produces a sense of “rightness,” but this
completes only the animal layer. Reflective awareness creates surplus freedom
and dangerous indecision in a competitive world. To function, the human must invent a second, local end: a
contingent goal that closes the system. This goal may be a craft, a work, a
cause, a child, or a discipline. Its content is irrelevant; its closure
properties are decisive. Once adopted, constraints become explicit, feedback
legible, energy coherent. Perfection
becomes procedurally achievable, and
the system experiences clarity, peace, and truth. Crucially,
both ends—the biological invariant and the invented local goal—produce the
same phenomenology of “being in truth.” The nervous system reports closure,
not metaphysics. Hence the confusion of sex, salvation, work, and
transcendence. Because
environments change and ends are discovered only as survival traces, means
must remain fluid. Sacralised methods fossilize and fail. Reality performs no
moral audit; it removes malfunction. Thus the law stands: the end adjusts the means—impersonally,
locally, moment by moment. “The
end adjusts the means” adv. The Modern Druid's Post-Spiritual Naturalism |
