There’s a famous quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”
True.
But here’s the part no one says out loud:
Every meal given to a hungry child is a bullet that wasn’t manufactured.
The two truths are bound together. Every act of care diverts resources away from harm. Every act of harm diverts resources away from care. There is no clean separation.
And moments of violence in our political world, where years of antagonism finally erupt into a fatal spark, remind us how quickly resources shift from possibility to destruction, from meals to bullets. Some celebrate. Others plan reprisals. The cycle feeds itself.
Why Build at All?
One of the stranger shows on television right now is Apple’s Foundation. It takes loose inspiration from Asimov’s books, centering on a mathematician who claims he can predict the broad arcs of civilization. The specifics are often clumsy, but the core idea resonates: when you zoom out far enough, collapse itself can be modeled. Not prevented. Modeled.
That framing matters, because once you accept collapse as a predictable force, like gravity or entropy, the question shifts. The right response isn’t to “stop” it. The right response is to redirect it. To give people something to build instead of something to burn.
This is why Hari Seldon makes sense to me, even if the show doesn’t always know what it’s saying. His plan was never utopia. It was triage. He tried to channel energy away from destruction and toward construction, even if imperfectly.
In our own timeline, sparks of violence are the crises in the model. They knock over dominoes, one after the next. To view them psychohistorically is to see them not as victories or defeats, but as cues to divert: away from tanks in the streets, toward something that survives.
That’s the best possible play. Not victory. Not consensus. Just something less harmful.
The Oppenfolio Parallel
Oppenfolio isn’t about “winning.”
It isn’t about persuading a side to be better, or believing that rational actors will suddenly emerge. They won’t.
It’s a response to selfish actors acting selfishly. It’s a system that takes chaos, processes it through math, and spits out survival. Nothing mystical, just disciplined engineering.
It’s not immune to failure. Neither was Seldon’s plan. But it’s an act of diversion: resources flowing toward survival and possibility instead of being consumed in the fire, whether that fire is market volatility, societal unrest, or the cycles of retaliation that follow every spark.
Between Society and Nihilism
It’s tempting to give up, to say none of it matters.
That’s the easy slope into nihilism.
But the opposite temptation, believing society will suddenly align on a shared definition of “better”, is just as false. There is no UN summit where everyone agrees on the new rules of the game. There is only the game itself, played by people who often enjoy the cruelty as much as the play.
Dehumanization begets violence, which begets pretexts for more, a loop that traps us all.
The only workable position is in between: to accept collapse as the baseline, while still building something that bends a fraction of reality toward care instead of bullets.
Closing
Every portfolio, every project, every meal, every act of building is a bullet not fired. That’s enough reason to keep building, even when the board flips, especially after sparks of violence, when celebration on one side only blinds us to the tanks rolling in from the other.
Because collapse isn’t the end of the story.
It’s the start of whatever survives.
You can always reach The Architect at [email protected] if you want to go deeper.
Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and reflects personal opinions, not financial advice. Oppenfolio is not an investment advisory service. See site disclaimer for full details.