People ask why the Order runs on fifty First Principles instead of something short enough to fit on two stone tablets. It’s a fair question. Fifty is a lot to carry around.
The short answer is that a creed tells you what to believe, and a principle tells you what to do on a Tuesday afternoon when the fertilization contacts the ventilation, post haste.
The longer answer is printed at the top of the document itself, so I’m not smuggling anything past you:
I do not follow these principles because they guarantee success. I follow them because they safeguard against obvious failure.
For me, that’s the whole enchilada. The rest of this is chips and salsa.
A creed is cheap
A creed is a statement of what you believe, and it costs nothing to say. I can put it on a bumper sticker, nod when I see it and still drive like a jackass. full disclosure, sometimes I actually do. Hence my hesitation to put creeds on my truck. But I digress… Most outfits keep the creed out front where the guests can see it, and the actual operating beliefs out back in the midden, with everything else nobody wants inventoried.
A principle is checkable. “I will never be overheard complaining, not even to myself” is either true of me this week or it isn’t. The people in my house know the answer. So do I.
That isn’t a higher standard because we’re proud of ourselves. It’s a lower ceiling on self-deception.
Nobody fails in general
Look. You don’t wake up one morning and commit Vice. You fail specifically, in a named way, at 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon.
You take on an opinion you had no business having about a stranger’s business. That’s number seven.
You gave the best three hours of your day to something nobody asked for and nothing is different now. Number three, the one that just asks: is this essential?
You answered. Nobody needed you to answer. Number thirteen.
You lose a whole Tuesday to a catastrophe that never showed up. Number ten.
And then there’s the Tuesday when your life came totally unravelled. Or you’ve come to the conclusion that the disgusting thing in the mirror has your face and you can’t stand the sight of it. In that moment the poetic power of, “Manifest it and the universe will provide” does nothing. “I am stronger than my fears, or excuses or circumstances…” is hollow bullshit purchased at a Buc-ee’s just off I-10.
Fifty isn’t scope creep. Fifty is roughly the number of ditches I have personally driven into.
They don’t promise you a damned thing
I want to be plain about this, because the self-improvement racket will tell you otherwise and it’s selling something.
Keep every one of these perfectly and you can still get sick, lose the place, and be misunderstood by people you love. The Principles are the guardrail on a mountain road. A guardrail doesn’t drive. It doesn’t pick the destination, it doesn’t make the truck run, and on a good night you go the whole way down without once thinking about it.
It’s there for the night the road is wet.
Why this matters for the Order
Here’s the institutional part, briefly.
An organization built on revelation needs somebody to interpret the revelation. That’s a job, and it’s a job with enormous leverage over people who came in tender. History is not kind about how that tends to go. So we didn’t build that.
We published a list instead. It’s public, it’s plain, and it’s NOT written in a code that requires me to decode it for you. You can hold me to number twelve. You can hold me to number eighteen, the one about keeping myself to the highest standard while handing everybody else grace, and you’d be right to, because eighteen is the one I break most.
No priesthood required. The doctrine is the practice, the practice is posted, and the Founder gets measured with the same tape as everyone else. That’s the governance model. I’d rather have that than a building.
For the record
Before anybody gets the wrong idea about me.
There’s an old objection to the Stoics that runs like this: anybody short of the sage is equally vicious, so a man an inch under the water is drowning the same as the one at the bottom. Guilty as charged. I broke three of these before lunch. One of them was number twelve, and I broke it out loud.
I’m not at this because I expect to arrive. I’m at it because the alternative is drifting, and I’ve done that, and I didn’t care for the scenery.
Fence line
The fifty aren’t a ladder up to somewhere.
They’re a fence line. Somebody walked the property before me, found every place a man goes over, and put up wire. My whole job is to keep mending it.
Beau