Outliers, 5 – Choices

The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

– Malcolm Gladwell

… the man [woman] of firm decisions fashions the universe.

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life puts no greater burden upon a man [woman] than the necessity of making decisions.

Frank Yerby

Choose today whom you are going to serve; if Adonai (the One Creator-God) is God, serve Him. Or if the gods of your ancestors from centuries past are gods, or the idols of the people among whom you live today are gods, serve them. But as for me and mine, we will serve Adonai. –

Y’hoshua/Joshua – Book of Joshua in the Bible, chapter 24: 15,16 (my partial paraphrase)

You gotta serve somebody.

– Bob Dylan

(Photo credit FUMC Allen)

From infancy to the grave, life is choice. Almost everything we do and experience involves choice in one form or another.

There are a few exceptions: we don’t get to choose our parents; or our siblings; or when and where we are born. We don’t get to design our basic anatomical specifications, or even many of the details such as hair and eye and skin colour, or how tall we can grow. And as young children, we don’t get any (direct) say in major decisions within our families, or much of our early life. Our parents or some other adult authorities make those choices.

The question of choice always raises the issue of predestination, determinism, fate, heredity versus nurture, etc., versus freedom. Perhaps freedom is mostly an illusion, but I doubt that my choice to wear blue socks today has been predestined in any meaningful way, and will likely have no significant effect on the course of my or anyone else’s existence. The Big Bang 14 billion years ago did not ordain me to wear blue socks on a particular day in May 2022.

Did God? Setting aside the most abstruse, obscure, divisive, and ultimately sterile kind of theological debate about God’s interventions (if any) in time and space, let alone my or anyone’s private affairs, the practical answer remains, “No! God does not weigh the fate of the universe, or even my personal well-being or that of anyone else, on my choice of which socks to wear on a particular day.” Does this exclude the possibility that God may choose to intervene directly on rare occasions in the realm of time-space? As the Creator, that is His/Her prerogative and He/She is answerable to no one else for such sovereign action. Your liking or disliking the Creator’s decision to change the course of an event every so often will have no bearing on His/Her action or inaction. Your disbelief in His/Her existence affects nothing as to its reality, it simply blinds you from seeing what is sometimes staring you in the face!

Our wise opening commentators concur with this. We have to choose day by day in big and small things, philosophy and theology aside. Believe what you want about God’s final sovereignty and predestination, but you must still live day by day as if you have real choices to make with real consequences ensuing – from blue socks to “popping the Question” to the love of your life. And in answer, she/he will also have to make a real choice with lifelong consequences.

Choice is real for other sentient life-forms as well. Instinct does not govern every decision your dog or cat or horse, or the wild creature nearby, makes. A little aside: in French you “take”, not “make” a decision – an interesting little twist in cultural perspective among different peoples.

Some decisions, like the question of wearing socks, are frivolous. Some, like choosing a mate, a fraught with serious repercussions. All are made with both micro and macro contexts leading us to them – hence the argument about ultimate predestination or determinism. After all is said and done, could we make any other choices than the ones we make? But we return once more to the practicality of our lives. No psychological analysis can “deterministically” tell me if I was compelled to marry this one person and no other.

When we look at choosing to believe in a personal Creator, we face the same questions. Theology is of little real help even here. Whether God “sovereignly chooses and draws to Him-Her-self whom He/She will” or not, doesn’t release me from, to all appearances and in personal application, making/taking the Yes-No choice. What is for certain is that your answer to this central question will have a profound impact on the rest of your life-journey.

Which brings us back to Dylan’s famous and excellent song, “Gotta Serve Somebody”. This “gotta” is one more for our list of things we don’t get to choose. You get to choose whom you will serve, but not whether you have to choose. The choice of words is not that we ultimately get to choose “what” we will serve – regardless of making a commitment to some noble or ignoble cause, some selfless or quite selfish goal and ambition, — but, ultimately, that we “gotta”, HAVE TO, serve somebody, a personal being.

This is the point at which most of we Westerners consciously tune out. Serving the Creator-God is not very much on the radar for a huge majority of 21^st-Century Westerners. Let alone the idea that if we don’t choose the Creator, we are actually choosing to serve another personal being in place of Him/Her.

Why does Dylan use this language; is it all poetic license? He is saying something profound, as any great artist does at her/his best. The universe is not dead. It is not an impersonal, accidental kaleidoscope which has totally improbably emerged from nothing into the big Something. It has come from the choice of SomeOne! The Ultimate Someone. The Alpha and Omega Someone. The Beginner and Final Destination of all beings and things that ever have been and can be and will be.

Only the blind, whether from ignorance or from willful, deliberate decision, can fail to see that the choice not to serve the SOMEONE is a choice to serve someone else – not something else, but someone else. For when we get deep down inside it all, at its most profound depth, beyond all possible sub-atomic particles, whether known or not-yet-known, beyond great galaxies dancing with one another in almost infinite space, the signature of THE PERSON is everywhere, in and on everything and everyone and every possible thing and being.

We are all in the dance, and we must all choose a partner. If I will not choose THE PARTNER, I still cannot avoid the dance. I must dance. If not with HIM/HER, then with another I put in HIS/HER place, even if it is, to my mind, a choice to dance alone to my own tune according to my own rules – or what I believe to be my own rules.

But, underneath that chimera, my rules, or those of anyone else than THE ONE’s rules, do not exist except in my arrogant hubris substitute for the real thing. Thus, in the final analysis, I can do the dance (Evan Almighty anyone?) with the ONE AND ONLY PARTNER Who matters, or as a shadow-dance, or with a substitute other partner (shudder at what some of those choices can be and have been in history) I set in the ONE’s place.

By this point, the reader may be wondering what this rabbit-trail has to do with the whole subject of “Outliers”. Simply that to choose to dance with the ONE as your partner in life, will make you an Outlier, especially now in the West in 2022 and henceforward. And, whether you think so or not, your choice about partnership with the ONE, matters even more than the one who has answered or will answer “Yes” to “the Question” and with whom you will also dance for a long time.

Therefore, be warned before you say that even bigger “Yes” to Adonai, the One Creator. A yes to Him/Her is an eternal decision. He/She does not take it lightly, nor will He/She ever let you take it lightly from this day forward, or from whatever other day it was or will be when you answer Y’hoshua’s momentous question, “Choose today whom you will serve – Adonai, the idols of your ancestors, or the idols of the world you live in now.”

Among the idols of today, put yourself. For, believe it or not, a refusal to serve any of the three choices Y’hoshua laid out is the choice to be my own sovereign god.

NEXT TIME: CONSEQUENCES