Life occurs in three dimensions over time, and is an amorphous task which can be accomplished by many means; every action has multiple potential outcomes, but each outcome has a single cause. Via the successive operations of time that which has occurred already obviously had a single cause, but any action can go in several potential directions, and that action will not become a "cause" until its effect is seen. When we understand this principle of time guiding cause and effect, it becomes silly to try to make life (an action) correspond to a single effect (heaven, wealth, television).

Humans speak of the "linearity" of a system of measurement and intend by that to explain this paradox; life has many uses, but we try to assess it in terms of a single scale that goes from zero to infinity. We're trying to put experience into numbers, to classify lives by the accumulation of things, to rank each other by popular appeal. This linearity is handy for filing taxes or describing leadership in bureaucracies, but it does not represent life exactly enough, and therefore creates a "ghost image" by which we expect life to fit a certain perception and it does not, forcing us to fill in the blanks with conjecture. Both the ancients, from Krishna to Aristotle, and the postmodernists, from Joyce to DeLillo, warn us of this potentially misleading artifact: we sample the world and store it in memories composed of symbols, but when we reconstruct those memories, we project symbols onto the world and are confused when our external environment does not fit exactly into our internal quantifier.

The modern linear assessment is power through popularity; if many people want something, it is valuable; if many people vote for something, it is law; if many people expect something, it becomes culture. Because we feared that having strong leaders was too linear, we created an even more linear system in which money (consumerism), appearance (morality), and popularity (democracy) determine our future. By doing so, we not only create an illusory representation of reality that does not correspond exactly enough to predict or appreciate our external world, but we also replace the chance of strong leadership; how can a leader be popular and yet advocate the self-sacrifice and discipline necessary for the longterm health of our civilization? We have abandoned leadership for the linear scales of popularity and money, and the result is that we are pursuing pleasant illusion instead of reality; from this root all of our insanity, neurosis, and widespread but undiscussed failure originates.