Structure and Change

Sometimes, I have idly thought about what I would do if I were president. I think the last time I thought about this much, I decided I would run on a platform of keeping everything the same, except making high-expected-value changes aimed at a long-term payoff. For instance, investing in programs to seed civil society, or mental health education and training in public schools (and/or teaching young people how to deal with life and not just numbers and words), and probably other things I can't remember now.

Here we see a duality of "structure" and "change". The numerous possibly somewhat misguided or even maybe corrupt government tendencies and programs are the "structure" which keeps things the same and helps keep them from falling apart. Then, whatever creative things I want to do to make things better in the long-term, are the "change" that one would hope would make my hypothetical presidency worth it -- going beyond the mean.

I think about churches, and how sometimes they are good at finding people to fill the role of "structure", but in some cases, they don't find people who are oriented toward change. "Change" in a church is not just "congregational vision" where the church tries to do things that look kind of like when businesses or nations try to change, or what activists are going for when they protest, but rather also disciple-making -- encouraging, promoting, modeling-for-imitation, etc. holiness, -- which is change in the individual's life.

People in an individual's life can be structure, change, or perhaps a mixture of the two.

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There is a connection between creativity and "change", and between technical proficiency and "structure". You can be technically proficient and lack inspiration, and also you can work for structure without inspiration. But (generally, or even always) when you work for change and creativity, you need inspiration to be successful, or even to attempt to do anything. So it might be useful for those who pursue change to pursue creativity, so that through creativity, they can get connected to inspiration. Or, to ask God for a spirit, for the same purpose.

Legitimacy from Parenthood

In our modern, liberal, democratic society, we don't always think about how for many generations, and to some extent today still, legitimacy came from parenthood. A king is a large-scale chieftain, who is a large-scale patriarch, who is a large-scale father. Nations, a long time ago, derived from families that kept getting larger while retaining their unity. It's possible for a tribe or kingdom to be headed by the patrilineal descendant of its founder, although often that has not been the case. But the nation as family could adopt a man or woman to be its father or mother, to serve in that office. The process of adoption would itself have its own source of legitimacy (perhaps technocratic or democratic to some extent), but the legitimacy of the office would be analogous to the legitimacy of parents over children.

Even in liberal societies, we recognize the rights of authors and artists over their creations. They are parents of beings in the world of thought and imagination. Similarly to how kings and queens can be selected despite not inheriting the throne, authors or artists can assign some of those rights to others besides the author or artist, through a process which has its own legitimacy. An author might assign the intellectual property rights to another, or even the right to write books that are canon. The right to canonicity usually (always?) has to follow from the author, as the author's authorship (parenthood) is where canonicity comes from.

The God of MSLN is the original person, through whom all other persons descend, and so, if parenthood is a necessary criterion for absolute legitimacy, the God of MSLN qualifies on that count. (Likewise, as creator, God has whatever legitimacy we might say applies to an artist.)

Parenthood (or authorship/"creatorhood") is not an absolute criterion for legitimacy. A sufficiently abusive parent is not a legitimate parent.

Leading God's Perception

The true understanding of a simantic word is to understand it the way God does. Then your attribution of "good" to it or of any other meaning will be compatible with God's understanding of it, in line the most with how he speaks it to other people.

So we have a reason to be led by God's perception, into how we perceive things ourselves.

However, when we are creative, it is possible that we bring into existence, out of our own preferences, wills, and inner intentions, something which did not exist at all before. Then, God is led by us in his perceptions, taking into account what we have created as a new member of what is real. His opinion of this new thing may differ from ours -- it becomes his as soon as we make it. But we did lead him to some extent.