The age produces instruments of great power. Technology, organizational methods, forms of communication, systems of mobility and of information. The differentiated individual does not approach these instruments with the naive enthusiasm of the progressive or with the wholesale refusal of the reactionary. He examines each according to whether it can serve a higher orientation without dissolving the center that uses it.
Mastery of an instrument requires interior freedom from it. The man who is defined by the tools he employs has already been absorbed. The man who employs them while remaining the measure of their use retains the possibility of riding the tiger. The distinction is practical and continuous. It appears in the way he handles money, time, machines, and the demands of modern work.
Many young men either flee into a romantic rejection of the modern environment or throw themselves into it without reserve. Both paths leave them vulnerable. The first leaves them without the practical capacities the age requires for survival and for limited action. The second leaves them without the distance that preserves the higher type. The correct path is selective mastery under a permanent standard.
This selectivity is itself a discipline. It forces the man to decide, case by case, what he will take up and what he will leave. The decision is referred to the center. Over time the practice forms a style of engagement with the age that is neither isolation nor immersion. That style is one of the concrete expressions of the capacity to ride the tiger.