I have listed a veritable shopping list of required societal changes and it is time for a reality check. Thus, this chapter was titled Tribute to Murphy. As most of you know, according to Murphy's Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. This is true about most human endeavors, including my efforts to help lead us to a better future through Destiny. "Muffy" suggested that I acquire a Kevlar(tm) vest, for to use her words, "You took no hostages, you got everyone!"

It is useful to recognize that we all start from different life experiences that lead in aggregation to our understanding of all that we encounter. Taking Murphy's approach, that means our lack of valid, complete and consistent life experiences virtually guarantees that we will be confused by anything substantive outside our direct experience, or which we did not think of ourselves. We will generally not be objective or thorough in our decision processes. Our frustration and eventual anger with ourselves and with others will get in the way of progress and enlightenment.

Learning does not come easily except for children, who tend to accept raw input because they lack experiences that would allow them to filter what they are told. People of adult age, however, are thoroughly insulated from serious growth and, as a rule, they summarily reject anything that does not support their life concept formation experiences. That this is so is not particularly important as a topic to argue, for our individual levels of open-mindedness and curiosity vary all over the map. What is important is to grasp the difficulty of overcoming, in the "adult" world, the mindsets and behaviors that will work against growth and application of knowledge. Murphy is with us.

There is a magical time between childhood and adulthood when we tend to question what we have been told by adults. Some of that behavior is our fundamental need to develop ourselves as individuals. Another part is that what we were taught in childhood typically does not fit with our experiences (idealism vs. cold reality), so we are forced to resolve the differences between what we were taught and the realities of life. Our individual success in that endeavor essentially determines whether we become reality-based for the remainder of our lives.

Ultimately, we become what is called "adult" simply by virtue of the aging process, and this state says absolutely nothing of consequence about our individual breadth and depth of understanding of life. What we can say is that having arrived at "adulthood" we are possessed of strong physical and emotional needs and the responsibility to provide for them for ourselves. This tends to be the death sign of broad intellectual growth for most people, as we find ourselves fully occupied with work, love relationships, children, etc. We sacrifice growth for short-term security. That which can go wrong with our continued personal development does go wrong.

You can readily see why our growth in terms of society and as a species is very slow, for those of us who vote are mired in stagnant thought, reflective of the time when we became an "adult." Murphy, if he noticed, would be thrilled to observe our struggle, for we validate Murphy's Law regularly. We assume knowledge and competence. We deflect problems as bad luck or someone else's bad behaviors. Alas, our difficulties have nothing to do with luck, which is irrational as a concept, but entirely because of our lemming-like confusion as to what we could and should be doing. What does the term adult mean to you, relative to knowledge, thinking and behaviors?

The above observations mean that realizing the goals of Destiny will be more than a challenge. You will recall my earlier statement about needing at least another 10,000 years to achieve Destiny. For example, the control of the size of world population mentioned in earlier chapters is obviously, absurdly difficult to accomplish, for we have the combined ignorance and politics of many large population cultures/nations to overcome. Unless, of course, we change the rules directly, through technology, such that no one can afford to remain ignorant. Consensus is the goal, but let us remember that most adult humans change because they have to, not because they want to.

One of my editors commented that the chapter about Expectations is too optimistic. He said that perhaps 100 to 150 years from now I will be thought of as an early visionary, but that I will not live long enough to see anything of note accomplished regarding Destiny. His point, while potentially accurate, is exactly the kind of temporal thinking that causes us to follow Murphy, ergo, if I can't enjoy the fruits of my labor now, why work? Am I to follow the idiocy of philosophical or religious leaders from our distant past and conjure up some fable to gain your willingness to work towards Destiny? Is my personal enjoyment the point?

We are also forced to deal with the profound, practical difference between purity of motivation and quality of results in all that we do. A rather foul old joke illustrates the point: A man with a wooden eye was socially backward due to his handicap and he lacked a love relationship. A male friend insisted on both of them going to a dance, so his wooden eye friend could meet a female. Reluctantly, the handicapped person realized that he would have to find someone as a dance partner if he was to overcome his feelings of isolation and loneliness. He observed a young lady sitting across the dance hall, and he noted that she had not yet danced. On closer observation, he saw that she was attractive, but that she had a harelip. Now he finally had a decent chance to feel okay about himself, so he approached her and asked her if she would like to dance. She was most pleased to be asked and she replied, enthusiastically, "Would I!" Well, you can guess what happened. "Wood-eye" misunderstood her remark and promptly defended himself by shouting "Harelip!" Of course, they did not dance. All was lost on a simple misunderstanding, underpinned by feelings of insecurity. Ah, Murphy!

Perhaps that insensitive old joke offended you. If so, that is too bad, for you are a part of the population that favors form over function, and for that, you are lost. Similarly, if any of us are too accepting of form, we forget function, or the original objective for having form in the first place. Recall that irony is frequently expressed in some form of humor. No, the "joke" really is not funny, but it is representative of our actual experiences. How many times have you "meant well," only to have your best intentions misinterpreted? Where does the real problem lie? Do you have any doubts about the primary reason for the difference between well-intentioned legislation and actual results?

Another aspect of human learning that reflects Murphy perfectly is found in what we learn one week, but forget shortly thereafter. The operative term for that situation is "evaporative knowledge." To point, we must reinforce whatever we learn multiple times by actually using the knowledge to accomplish something meaningful, external to the original learning experience, or most of us lose it. Moreover, that which is lost obviously cannot be used later in combination with other knowledge to create something altogether new. I find that a perfect argument for enhancing the human mind via genetic engineering. Our past and present limits are the fundamental reason why Murphy's Law was conceived.

Because of the fundamental truth of Murphy's Law, I will now debunk the notion that our lives are reliably getting better as we proceed into the future. Each generation has mistakenly prided itself as being more in control of life than previous generations, when in fact we cycle back and forth between enlightenment and ignorance, poverty and wealth, war and peace. In the largest sense, this prideful notion of progress cannot be true, not only because of demonstrated human failures across all of history, but particularly because each generation of new knowledge has "raised the bar" of required understanding to proceed intelligently.

The rules change, the demands increase, and lasting stability is a fanciful and backward notion. About the only areas of consistent progress are science and technology, and our history shows that even that progress is historically unpredictable and irregular. Finally, we tend to forget the one constant across all history, that of inherent, genetic human limitations. They crop up in every generation and in every society to blunt the usefulness of what some of us have learned. We get old and physically feeble, and lose our drive to produce. We die, and such wisdom as we have acquired is mostly lost. That means we must actually change humans if we are to overcome that negative constant.

The bald truth regarding our knowledge in most areas is that it is not absolute knowledge at all; merely current, comfortable assumptions based on some form of consensus. This truth applies even to our scientific endeavors. Do you recall ever hearing the arguments regarding particle and wave characteristics of light in the late 1800's? Our best scientists could not decide whether light was a particle with mass that had wave characteristics or just electromagnetic energy with wave characteristics that also acted as if it had mass. Of course, everyone in the scientific community at that time had a pet theory. At that time, as is always true, there was a frontier to our knowledge that could not be resolved by discourse among our scientists. We are continually at the boundary of our knowledge and are thus continuously ignorant, for as we slowly determine through experiments the truths of the physical world we inevitably bump up against a new frontier where we are again ignorant.

This problem has more pointed consequences outside of science. Simply consider the evolution of the medical profession regarding either surgery or alternate, non-surgical treatment of cancer. If this was 1930, do you think you could find a surgeon or oncologist who would admit that the medical profession was fundamentally ignorant and functionally incompetent regarding cancers most of the time due to that ignorance? Do our psychologists, or have they ever, even begun to have a clue about what really causes us to have "mental" problems? Do they know what is actually needed to cure or otherwise eliminate those problems permanently?

We proceed, of course, because the goals are important. We rightfully show gratitude to the various members of the medical community for helping us try to overcome the diseases that we cannot cure by ourselves. And slowly, we make progress. To apply the term "professional" competence in these areas in a given generation is rather a bad joke. If professional means knowing most of what is known, instead of knowing that which needs to be known, then the term professional doesn't mean much at all. Naturally, an honest assessment by any "practitioner" would be to state their current knowledge only in terms of the patient's ultimate goal. When was the last time your physician referred to his activities as "practicing" medicine? Have we not modified the meaning of the word practice to imply simply a small business structure related to the medical profession?

Our capacity for looking at problems from the wrong perspective does Murphy proud. Consider the prosecution remarks after O.J. Simpson's wrongful death civil suit, i.e. "the system works!" Is that not a foolish statement? The only way the "system" can be shown to work is when there are no longer reasons to have wrongful death trials. False pride in the workings of primitive systems that are nothing but signs of our failures is a fine example of looking at problems from the wrong perspective.

I find both irony and humor in our Murphy-like results. This means that I do not have any specific expectation of a timetable for realizing Destiny goals. Nor should you. Nor should you assume that your efforts are pointless. Manage your expectations, but get on with the job and expect regular visits from Murphy.

Let us now consider the impact of delays in achieving the goals identified in the Topics for Action chapter. First, there is the idea of serial interdependency. Some things cannot proceed unless other things occur first. We cannot, for example, derive the benefits of better education unless we first force improvements to education through our legislatures. Second, there is the probability that progress, if impeded in a straightforward direction, will occur "sideways." For example, our actual use of genetic engineering, if restrained in the USA, will become an economic or military advantage somewhere else. Third, there is a high likelihood of changing the course of history in an unintended direction if progress in our social development continues to lag behind our development of technical knowledge. Who wants to have cyber-human wars? Fourth, failure to implement technological improvements across the entire world can result in serious environmental problems in some places, while simultaneously eliminating those problems by practicing advanced ecological control via better energy sources and careful waste disposal in other places.

In short, delays in achieving pre-Destiny goals during the next 20 years will all have undesirable consequences, and the impact of those consequences cannot be known until they occur. Murphy awaits our decisions. Finally, let us be realistic. There are times when goal directed thinking will not save the day. Imagine Hitler's well deserved funk as he sat reflecting in his bunker near the end of the war in Europe in 1944. How did the captain of the Titanic respond to the ultimate bad news?

Let us resolve to put Murphy behind us. Let us eliminate the fundamental human reasons why Murphy's Law has been so unerringly true.