No, you won't be President one day (part. 2)

This is a continuation from the first part which you can find here

Take another important area of your life: relationships. Sure, you can choose between all the people you meet - but what about the millions upon millions that you'll never meet? There might be someone perfect for you out there, who happens to live on the other side of the world in a place you'll never visit. Or maybe that someone lives in the nearest town, but you'll never meet them anyway.

And please, for God's sake, don't insult both Him and common sense by saying that He'll make sure you meet the person you're "meant to be with." We all know that most people never find their soul mates (so consider yourself ridiculously lucky if you have met a person like that).

Yes, our lives often depend upon the choices we make, but the trouble is that we can rarely make a good informed choice. Most of the time we simply don't have enough information, and our choices are based more on guesswork than anything else.

In matters of education (which become matters of job and career later on), there's no way to tell in advance where a certain path will take you. How did you choose your college? Did you know in advance everything that you were signing up for when you picked it? At the beginning of your first year, could you have known with any degree of precision where you would end up - and what kind of person you would be - 4 years later? Do you have any idea what might have happened - what courses you would have taken, what major you would have chosen, what different friends you would have made - had you gone to a different college? Probably not. Your choice of college was, at best, an educated guess. And this educated guess will very likely define the course of your entire life.

In matters of relationships, again, we usually choose between mystery boxes, and only after we've chosen a box do we get to open it and see what's inside. Yes, yes, we always like to tell ourselves that we can guess the content in advance, but the truth is we can't. Going on a few dates will rarely give you a good preview of what it's like to live in the same house with a person. And it's not as if we can simply erase bad relationships from history and start fresh. Every experience, every second that goes by changes you in subtle ways and helps define the future course of your life.

So, your choices are limited, and when you do choose you usually can't tell in advance what you will get. Reality is a far cry from the liberal fantasy of a world in which anyone can choose anything and actually get it if they only try hard enough.

This, by the way, is not an apology for fatalism or resignation in the face of some kind of "destiny" ordained entirely and completely by forces outside your control. You are not powerless; you do have control over your life - I am only reminding you that this control is severely limited, and that your choices will always have unforseen consequences.

Yes, you have enough control over your own destiny to be able to choose to work in politics, for example. But no, that control is not enough to allow you to become President (or anything else) through sheer force of will. You can choose your direction, but not your destination.

And what applies to you also applies in equal measure to all other people. Do not be too proud of your achievements - most of them were only possible because you were in the right place at the right time. And do not be too critical of others' failures - most of them are due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But please, do be critical of those arrogant fools who believe that humans are gods, blessed with the power to bend reality to their will; and who believe that poverty and suffering are due mostly to a failure on the part of the poor to be sufficiently godlike. In fact, don't just be critical - shoot down their megalomania whenever you encounter it.

Come to think of it, it's really quite amazing liberals haven't yet converted en masse to Scientology.