What should you do? Act upon the universe as it really is.

Got a taste for a mouthful of big words? My favorites are these: Ontologically-consonant teleology. What that means is conforming your moral philosophy to the true facts of reality.

In this week’s Church of Splendor video, reprised from June of 2012, we take up the idea of ontologically-consonant teleology by contrasting it, first, with the teleologically useless idea of determinism, then by exploring an article about pandemic cheating.

I mention in passing my post about the performances people enact in preference to living as authentic selves.

And all of this harkens back to my discussion about how you can make the changes you long for in your life.

This is how reality works: If you act upon your self, upon your life and your surroundings and upon the people you love as those things really are, you can attain your values. And if instead you insist that everything “must be” as you already know it is not, you will frustrate your goals now, and you will render yourself progressively less competent to achieve your values going forward.

This is the way your world really works, regardless of what you say about it, and whether you like it or not. It’s Splendor or Squalor – and everybody’s gotta take a side…