The best approach during times of volatility is to build yourself a kind of fortress. If the financial markets are unsettling you, invest in real estate and gold. If your family life is falling apart, make strong alliances with family members who see your point of view.
Any fortress you build should have 4 qualities: (i) It should be something you can abandon at a moment’s notice without significant cost; (ii) It should be expandable in new directions that you pursue as you see it working; (iii) It should sustain itself without your input for brief periods of time; (iv) It should link with other fortresses, both inner and outer.
Let’s look at the 4 points separately.
Point I.
You don’t want to commit to anything that’s going to suck your resources away. That includes your emotional resources. Anything that’s too taxing has to be thrown by the wayside, where someone else can pick it up.
Take owning a home in a deteriorating neighborhood. You can plow money into your showcase home, with new eaves, alarm system and furniture. Or you can get the hell out while the getting’s good. If your fortress is in untenable circumstances you’ll want to reconsider your investment portfolio for the near and far future.
Point II.
But suppose it’s working out well, your fortress. Let’s consider the example of a destructive, psychotic member of the family who wants to ruin you. Let’s say that most of the extended family sees her craziness and senses her true, erratic motives and sides with you. If more people are willing to come on board with you in this time of need, you should be ready to welcome them with open arms. It’s smart to have contingency plans dealing with new arrivals in your camp. Plan how you’re going to welcome them, how you’re going to butter them up, how you’re going to repay their kind thoughts & actions. Execute on your plan forthwith.
Point III.
You need to rest. Sometimes you have side projects to attend to. If it happens that you’re away, your fortress must not fall apart in 24 hours.
If, for example, you work for a major corporation and have been building alliances steadily for over a year, the office friendships ideally should be durable enough to withstand your absence for several weeks or even months. People should remember your face and message. It’s times like this you want to be memorable, to stand out in the fading wreck of fallible human memory. Don’t be a Clonelike Charlie, be a Maverick Mike.
Before you depart for absences, make stands in the office that make you popular, without alienating top management. Push for rewards that make sense to everyone, high and low. Without bragging, let it be known that you were responsible for the changes. Continue your activity at a lower level with continued emails and voice messages to select people as your time allows while your fortress is on hiatus.
Point IV.
If you choose to ally with others, that’s one fortress interlacing with another. There’s great strength in uniting walls of defense, rampart against rampart, stonework against stone. The best outer-fortress to link with is that of friends, next best is work mates. Consider your unity carefully before surrendering your freedom of action.
Conclusion:
A time of troubles calls for a fortress. Start building yours before the environmental pressures hit. Think proactively.
It’s possible to guess where troubles are going to come from, and act decisively to negate them. Your guesstimations are invaluable work put into blocking disaster.
When you look at the people who have thrived in life, they’ve usually got a shelter from the storm. With these legal, interpersonal, or just plain dollars-and-sense-wise workings, you don’t get bombed if you’re dug into the mountain. Make sure your tunnel runs low enough into the mountainside to take a nuke.
colonization supreme
When the Europeans set out to colonize the New World, they brought their physical techniques and their mind games with them.
This worked wonders against more primitive natives, who had no idea about eclipses (a trick Columbus played against Caribbean native islanders), steel, or political outmaneuverings (such as was used by the Spaniard Cortes in Mexico against the dominant Aztec power).
Europe won the world because it was cutthroat and immoral. It nearly squandered it 500 years later when leftist politics acted like a termite infestation on the nice, with-a-view wooden deck the prior generations of Euros had built.
Dark Sport 
Interesting how your “fortress” has to be both strong and disposable, like a bunker built not to protect life, but to retreat from it. There’s a kind of logic there that already assumes the world is lost, unworthy of any real commitment.
You mention how Europe “won” by being immoral and cutthroat. Sure. That seems to be right. But if that’s what winning looks like, I wonder what exactly was lost in the process. Maybe something irretrievable, like the capacity to be human rather than strategic.
When survival becomes the only value, it tends to turn people into systems: efficient, hard, and ultimately empty. And history has shown us where that path leads when taken to its extreme.
What if the real strength isn’t in the fortress, but in staying open even when everything tempts you to shut down? What if the real courage lies not in building bunkers, but in building bridges?
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I have to chew on this one. I don’t think Europeans when they sought out to conquer the world were being cut throat and immoral. They were doing what humans do. Expanding their control and advancing their power.
The side effects of that advancement is that foreigners are seeking to rule over their descendants. This is the side effects of when a fortress is built to large. When it falls it takes out the children born in the environment.
A lot of good points though.
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