I threw the I Ching for America the other day.

This is a good spiritual practice when you come to a moment in your life when things are changing fast and you want to get a grip on what’s happening. My own version of this ancient Chinese tradition is quite simple: you go somewhere quiet to solemnly ponder a difficult question, and then you throw three coins twice and write down the result.

The pattern that results – the cosmic answer to your question – will be one of 64 hexagrams which can be interpreted for various kinds of meaning, according to charts easily found online (like the one above with AI-generated art, showing hexagrams 28, 29 and 30).

An atheist might object that meaning cannot be derived from a random coin toss. But it seems to me that this randomness itself drives home an urgent truth: whatever any of us do, whenever we try our hardest to do a good thing, when we exert our power to improve the world, the outcome is unlikely to be what we expect. For every action, one of 64 wildly varying outcomes may result. And only some of them mark success.

This is the human condition: we never stop trying and doing things, though we are met with shattering failure, or incomprehensible cruelty, or mind-numbing irony. A lot of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist or Confucian philosophy is about discovering humility, and the fact that every action we take faces dire odds of victory must be humbling to anyone who stops long enough to think about it. So who says the I Ching doesn’t deliver true meaning?

Change is the topic of the latest World BEYOND War podcast episode. I am a big believer in change. Professionally I’m a technologist, a coder, and I’ve participated in the birth of the world wide web and the invention of online advertising and pre-Facebook social media. I have been an assembly developer, a C++ developer, a SQL expert, a Perl coder and PHP coder and a Java coder and a C# coder, unfortunately, and now I’m thrilled to be devoutly a Javascript developer (or Typescript if that’s what you insist). What this all means is that my career path has been an exciting roller coaster of change. I’ve learned to be a big believer in the power of sudden, unexpected positive change, like, say, the invention of Node.js, or WordPress, or the web standard itself.

The reason I’m good at being a techie is that I love change. I studied philosophy in college, and in philosophical terms, I’m a happy existentialist. There are other names for my conditions. I enjoy marriage as long as it doesn’t last too long. The therapist I stopped seeing a few years ago has diagnosed me with adult ADHD, and I believe she is correct. I’m not ashamed to believe that sudden positive change can end all war, and that’s what I talk about on this podcast. Please listen, or read the transcript in full on the World BEYOND War website.

So I threw the I Ching for America.

I would usually do this for myself or a close friend or family member. I threw it for my so-called country because my own life and family is doing great lately, but I’m worried about this so-called nation that I feel no patriotism towards, these Divided States of America, or United Suppliers of Armaments (there are a lot of good names we could come up with).

This broken nation is about to hand reins of power over from the dangerously incompetent and clueless Joe Biden to the blatantly corrupt and fascist and white supremacist and misogynist Donald Trump, with his creepy sidekick JD Vance, a sinister women-hating character left over from Peter Thiel’s throwaway business plans.

I recently subjected myself to the mind-twisting experience of listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast with the Internet entrepreneur and Democrat turned Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, because I wanted to understand the mindset of a smart Democrat who becomes a gushingly enthusiastic Trump supporter.

I’m not a Joe Rogan listener. I’m also not a Democrat. And I sure as fuck am not a Trump supporter. But I did once admire Marc Andreessen for his significant work as an open source developer and inventor.

This is an irony I also face with Elon Musk, who appears sociopathic and who I do not trust anywhere near government because of the sociopathic and transphobic and imperialist things he has said. At the same time, I do recognize the brilliant ingenuity of Musk’s early work with Tesla and Space-X, and it happens that like Elon Musk I also don’t trust any other part of the US government – in fact as I speak about in the podcast I believe we could live better lives without a US federal government at all, and please listen to the podcast to hear more about this. What I share in common with the ideals of the so-called DOGE project is that I’ve had my own experience with the ridiculous waste and nepotism and fecklessness of the Washington DC federal government workplace (I did a podcast about that earlier this year).

When I listen to the Joe Rogan/Marc Andreessen podcast above, I sense that Joe Rogan isn’t even convinced by the rosy picture Andreessen paints of good things the Trump administration will do. We’ve been talking about this at World BEYOND War, where our new social media #DearElon campaign has been calling attention to the fact that the branch of the US federal government most rotten and in need of vast cutting is the so-called Defense Department, aka the Pentagon. Please help us spread the word about this.

The people who live on the land between so-called Canada and so-called Mexico need to take a deep breath and forget about American patriotism a little bit and instead think about worldwide humanity, and about the fact that the entire world needs to find a way to get along and share together. We need to talk about the fact that, whether or not Joe Biden or Donald Trump is the puppet, right now capitalism isn’t helping. The control over our politicians of both parties by fossil fuels, weapons, finance and big tech is pushing us towards world war and civil war at the same time.

This is why I have no confidence in Trump, who only knows his own mafia-cosplay form of capitalism. I also have zero confidence in the confused but angry ideologue JD Vance, our new Inspector Jarvet or so-called Vice President, who looks to me like a cartoon character of a helicopter with a missing wing whenever I watch him talk.

I really think the human beings who live between New York and California and Mexico and Canada deserve better than the so-called leadership of Donald Trump and JD Vance.

The hexagram I threw for America turned out to be #29 – “The Abyss”, or “Pitfalls: Peril”.

One fun thing about I Ching is that you can read a bunch of different guides and they’ll all give different ideas or images for hexagram 29, the Abyss, Peril.

That’s what I Ching has for us here on Litkicks this month, and what I got for all of you out there is this new podcast episode, where I really did pour my heart out. I’d love to talk about some of the ideas I bring up here, so after you listen to this episode (or even if you don’t listen) please post a comment and let me know what you think. This is probably the last blog post of 2024, but we’re planning exciting stuff for the year to come.