The Feedback Loop

I’ve written a post every Sunday morning since June of 2017. Not one missed. That’s a covenant, not a habit, and I don’t take it lightly.

Before I was any of the other things I am, I was a control systems engineer. Strip a control system down to its studs, and you get three parts: an input, an equation, and an output. You measure the output against what you actually wanted. If it’s off, you don’t throw the system away. You feed the error back into the input and run it again, this time correcting for what you got wrong. That’s it. That’s the whole discipline. A system that refuses feedback drifts. A system that receives it and adjusts converges on the truth.

Life is a control system with closed-loop feedback. Every one of us runs our own equation, and every one of us has a feedback loop, whether we tend it or ignore it. So do families. So do nations. The philosopher George Santayana put it best in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I’ve always heard that as Scripture in disguise. It’s just a properly tuned control system, described in plain English, a system that learns, corrects, and produces a good output instead of oscillating forever between the same mistakes.

I watched Episode 6 of Matt Walsh’s Real History series this week, his history of the Russian Revolution, the century-old story of radicals seizing an empire and killing millions to keep it. Walsh made it for two reasons: human nature doesn’t change, and the far left’s playbook for seizing power doesn’t change either. Radicalized students. Idle, resentful workers. Intellectuals convinced they’ve found the final answer. A distracted, passive public. An opposition too soft or too slow to name what’s happening. Lenin’s Russia and today’s America rhyme in ways that should unsettle anyone paying attention. If we don’t feed that history back into how we read the present, we are choosing to repeat it. That’s not fatalism. That’s just what an untuned system does.

Moreover, we are not short on present-day signals demanding correction. Brian T. Kennedy, who chairs the Committee on the Present Danger: China, gave a talk in 2023 at Hillsdale College that I keep coming back to. His broader warning is this: the Chinese Communist Party has, in its own official media, described its posture toward the United States in the language of warfare. In 2019, as trade tensions escalated, Xinhua and People’s Daily ran editorials explicitly invoking a “people’s war” against American pressure. Kennedy also points to a 1999 book by two People’s Liberation Army colonels called Unrestricted Warfare, which argues that economic pressure, cyber intrusion, information manipulation, and political influence are legitimate theaters of conflict, not supplements to war, but war itself, waged without ever firing a shot. Also, he points to something quieter and, in some ways, more alarming: how much of America’s pharmaceutical supply chain, including the active ingredients in the medicines we depend on, has quietly moved to Chinese manufacturing, largely untracked by our own government until only a few years ago.

I believe him, but I want to ask a question he did not ask.

What does an unresponsive system look like in the human heart?

Because that’s the deeper pattern here, and it’s the one I actually have authority to speak to. Paul warned the church at Corinth about false teachers who looked righteous but weren’t (2 Corinthians 11:13-15). He said Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, so it’s no surprise his servants do the same. The most dangerous drift isn’t always the loud kind. It’s the quiet kind, a heart that stops correcting, a conscience that goes numb to its own error signal, a nation that stops asking whether it’s still measuring against the truth at all.

Martin Luther knew this drift personally. For the first half of his life, by his own account, he lived afraid of God and dismayed by life, a man whose system had no working feedback loop, just fear circling on itself. What broke the loop open wasn’t more effort. It was grace. Once Luther understood what God had actually done for him, his fear gave way to a confidence that would go on to reshape a continent. He later wrote that the enemy’s whole strategy is to make the heart timid and frightened, because a frightened heart stops correcting toward truth and starts spiraling on its own fear instead.

That’s the choice in front of every one of us today, and it’s the same choice in front of this country. Feed the wolf of fear, resentment, and disengagement, and the loop never closes. You just oscillate, generation after generation, repeating what you refused to learn. Alternatively, feed the Good Wolf and let the Word of God be the reference input you measure your life against, correct when you’re off, and trust the Spirit to do what no amount of willpower ever could.

The charge is simple. Fifteen minutes a day in the Word. That’s the feedback loop that actually holds. If you don’t have a way in yet, I’d be honored to send you The Family Wins Devotional, free, no strings attached, my gift to you and your family, an expression of Luke 6:38: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

To get your gift, visit The Family Wins Devotional – MindWolves.

God first. Others second. Myself third. That’s the order that keeps the loop closed and pointed at truth.

Feed the Good Wolf.