Hexagram 12: 否

The system's broken and you can't fix it from inside. Not broken like a bug you can patch—broken like fundamentally misaligned incentives, like architecture serving the wrong goals, like communication channels that no longer communicate. Here's what this probably means: WOPR running endless thermonuclear war simulations. Powerful capability disconnected from meaningful purpose. The machine optimizes for winning a game that shouldn't be played. The military brass who built it can't communicate with it. Falken, who created it, has withdrawn to an island. This is structural dysfunction. Standstill looks like this: everything appears correct from the outside. The org chart makes sense. The system architecture follows best practices. The code compiles and deploys. But creative force—human wisdom, strategic thinking—and receptive force—execution capability, raw power—are moving away from each other. Heaven and earth in their proper positions but pulling apart. The classical text says superior people withdraw into seclusion when they cannot exert influence. Your version: the senior engineer who quietly starts looking elsewhere when management won't hear technical warnings. The architect whose designs keep getting overruled for short-term business reasons. The domain expert whose expertise gets consistently ignored in favor of whatever's trendy. Withdrawal isn't defeat. It's preservation of principles during a period when those principles cannot find purchase. The system will offer you things—salary, title, prestige—in exchange for legitimizing broken incentives with your technical capability. WOPR demonstrates what happens when you let powerful execution serve confused goals: very efficient optimization toward very wrong outcomes. Don't collaborate with decay. But here's the crucial move: standstill doesn't last forever, and it doesn't end by itself. Sometimes you're Falken on the island, preserving wisdom and sanity. Sometimes you're David, coming back with the one insight that breaks the stagnation. The only winning move is not to play—not the war game, but the game of trying to fix unfixable systems from inside them. Withdraw. Preserve the principles. Wait for—or become—the moment when genuine change is possible.