Way Calm is a practice for making reasoned choices that promote calm. This overview page contains basic assertions justifying and outlining the practice, which also includes dogma (assumptions and imperatives) and doctrine (methods and precedents), which elaborate on one vague imperative: Behave yourself.
- CHILD OF DUST AND FIRE, AGED BY ICE, DOOMED TO FIRE THEN DUST. Earth is a slowly cooling medium-large rocky planet halfway done orbiting a slowly warming little yellow star which will balloon into a red giant just shy of enveloping our orbit, blasting off our crust and probably most of our mantle to produce a dense ferric planet with no significant atmosphere. Earth formed just after Sol did about 5Ba, and Sol's transformation is about five billion years in the future. The slow decline of Earth's planetary enthalpy is not clearly reflected on earth's surface, which regularly fluctuates from warm phases with no perennial ice (comprising about 4 billion of Earth's 5 billion years) to ice ages with climates ranging from interglacial (all perennial ice at high latitudes and or altitudes, temperate, ITCZ near equator) to mid-latitude glaciation (ice sheets extending from a pole at least halfway to the equator, cold dry climate, ITCZ inactive or at the equator) global glaciation (pole-to-pole ice sheets kilometers thick, with a cold, dense, unlit subglacial ocean). Weathering of exposed minerals and subsequent sequestration takes oxygen and carbon out of circulation.
- GOD EAT DOG WORLD (DOMINATE, COLLABORATE, CELEBRATE). Every living thing requires resources (i.e., other things) to support metabolic activity. Some things scavenge the rotted and the shed, but most animals and fungi eat recent kills, whether plants or other animals. A rare few species' metabolisms have completely remolded the oceans and the atmosphere, killing off vast swathes of living things. But ever since cells started hosting organelles, most successful resource security strategies are cooperative: groups produce and secure resources for members to share. Bees get nutrients and flowering plants get fertilized; bees mortally wound themselves stinging a forager and the hive keeps its honey.
- STRESS REINFORCES. Changes that can increase resilience persist, and unlock new behavior. As long as stress is temporary, intermittent, and resistible such change can occur. Stressful messages therefore receive high-priority perception, cogitation, and interpretation. But ubiquitous, unrelenting stress eventually overwhelms: dazzled, disoriented, exhausted, paralyzed - helplessness is the typical result.
- TO RUN THE SHOW, OWN THE STORY AND MAKE IT GORY. Culture corrals stress via appeal to the current social order. The incipient global culture has sponsors. Myths and legends, heroes and villains - these aren't primarily transmitted locally by diffusion, they arrive via EM waves across an array of media of various distinguishing characteristics but one in common: each message has a media cost. This cost is incurred by the publisher, who typically recoups it and then some by either selling access to the media, or providing free access but selling advertisement space embedded in the message delivery. This revenue is therefore either proportional to its power to draw and retain new subscribers, or to the volume of message deliveries, using page views or similar metrics.
- SENSATIONALISM SELLS MORE. Publishers of all political persuasions face a choice: favor stories that will alarm, shock, titillate or otherwise excite potential message recipients; or cultivate an audience valuing calm and find a way to pay for it.