The residual possibility includes the recognition that some currents of the age are too large and too pervasive for direct opposition to be effective. Technology, economic processes, and the general dissolution of forms move according to their own momentum. The man who exhausts himself in frontal resistance against these forces often ends by being shaped by the very struggle he undertakes. His measure becomes reactive rather than sovereign.
Riding the tiger is the alternative. It means moving with the surface forces of the age while remaining interiorly free of their direction. The differentiated individual uses what the age provides when it serves the permanent measure. He refuses to let the age determine the ends for which those instruments are employed. The distinction is decisive. Without it the man is either dissolved by the current or broken by the attempt to stop it.
Young men frequently mistake intensity of opposition for fidelity to a higher standard. The intensity can be real. The fidelity is not. True fidelity is measured by the continuity of the interior axis under conditions that offer no external victory. The man who maintains that continuity is already beyond the reach of the forces he does not directly oppose. He has refused to make their power the measure of his own orientation.
Observe the currents that move through the ordinary day. Identify those that can be used without being internalized. Identify those that must simply be endured without reaction. The capacity to make these distinctions is part of the residual clarity that remains open. Practice it without the need for public demonstration.