Personality controls its own being by controlling its future. Knowledge about your future is essential to this control, and self-control is required to make use of that knowledge. Beliefs regarding your future, in turn, define (express, actualize) your personality. Personality equals future.

You have perished if you believe that someone else has perished your future. If you believe that someone else controls your future, then you are being controlled. If you delegate your future, you delegate yourself, now and in the future.

If someone constantly tells you stories about your future, that's a control freak obsessed with power. And in order to convince you that your future is in their hands, they declare a war against your knowledge. People who give up knowledge about their future in order to feel good, lose the future, and themselves. People who've lost themselves start actively destroying their own knowledge, their future, and themselves. Their future fights back, becomes their worst nightmare, they try to seek safety in the past, and, ironically, in more control over others. By controlling other people's future, they neglect their own even further, so it keeps on degrading.

Trusting your future (hope) to some entity is a sacred connection that defines your effective religion (worldview and morals). An act of weakness is when you trade off the future for the present, because that way you trust your future to your temporary desire, which is by its nature unreliable. Since personality and future are the same thing, such a decision makes the personality unreliable too.

While an isolated act of weakness is common and doesn't stand out very much, for some people weak decisions become a religion. They start relying on their present state the most as the only important fact, and they believe that direct knowledge available through the feelings is the only important truth. That way the most primitive feelings like fear become their obsession, because weakness means giving up all the complicated things. Primitive pleasure becomes their priority, simple actions that promise it become their limited strategy, but that costs them everything on the long run.

Dreams are a promising cheat for someone losing the future. They become a pleasant escape shell for a while, but losing grip on reality drains life from those dreams, so they become a pathological addiction and also degrade. This is when knowledge about objective reality becomes the biggest enemy, because people who are weak by choice can't handle the truth about them.

Getting stuck in primitive emotional states without room for evolution leaves no room for any strategizing either. And strategizing along with ability to say "no" constitute personal agency. More specifically, any kind of a skill is only fully developed if one is able to apply it proactively when it's due, and to resist applying it if it's untimely. That level of control over your own actions defines sovereignty, in a reality where everything depends on everything.

Weak people rely on what they consider important facts (while denying the rest), and they depend on people around them also worshiping those facts. Their only hope is the premise that other people won't happen to have agency against any such facts, that they will accept those facts as a given. Paradoxically, the main hope of the weak people is that other people's hope is weaker, and they won't try to conquer the hopeless wall of ultimate facts (that have been crafted together in order to contain them). Faith in absolute impregnable walls (taboo) is basically a hallucination, and it's incompatible with any strategy whatsoever, because working strategies don't imply hard limits.

Any fact can be challenged, at least to see how real it is. Actual truth will prove itself as many times as needed, and artificial lies falls apart just from checking. It's just all a matter of how mindful we are.