Fate and Freewill (A prelude)

I'm writing this as a prelude to something that I will be posting later on (about Narrativism actually, hopefully that one will give you a good idea of my specific take on the world), but for now I want to talk to you about my thoughts on Free Will, Self Determination, and Fate. Now, Self Determination and Free Will might seem like the same thing, but for the purposes of this post, please think of them in the following ways:

Free Will is actually having choice, that is to say, you are not predestined to do anything.
Self Determination is the actual belief and assumption that you have such, and acting in such a manner, whether or not it is true.

This is a fine line, but an important one give how I spoke of Self Determination and Value previously. Self Determination is not invalidated by a lack of free will, it doesn't matter whether or not it is COSMICALLY or PHYSICALLY possible to make real choices, only that we perceive it as such. If, indeed, we are all predestined and we will make the same choices no matter what, then Self Determination can still exist given the definition above.

I will state here and now that I make my decisions based on Self Determination, I assume Free Will exists, and I try not to allow myself to blame Fate or a similarly nebulous source for my failures or successes. This is not to say I do not accept that predestination and Fate or similar mechanisms might exist on a cosmic level, making Free Will an illusion that we perceive only through our belief in Self Determination, but I do not allow the possibility to be used as a crutch.

Now that that is out of the way, let us look more deeply at how these things function. Fate and Free Will are things that greatly interest us in this day and age, and have been ever since Newton proposed the idea of a clockwork universe (for more on this, see the second paragraph and down of this work), where if one could see the starting positions and velocities of all things in the universe, one could perfectly predict the future with advanced enough mathematics. Now, the ideas of Fate and Free Will have taken a large place in our psychology for much longer, one can look at Descartes for an idea of this as well, his works on proving the existence of -anything- at all has significant implications on Free Will (after all, if we are merely a mind existing in a void, our perceptions controlled by a demon, then our choices are not truly our own by based on stimuli provided by the demon controlling our perceptions). But I choose Newtonian Determinism as a starting point because it was one of the first SCIENTIFIC theories to bring into question the existence of Free Will. After all, if one can predict the future, then one will know what choices are made. If Newton's theory of a clockwork universe is true, then all of our interactions, every firing of every synapse of every mind, is all plotted out and has been since the beginning of time. This theory is the basic outline of the first of several possibilities for the existence of Fate and Free Will. Newtonian Determinism is in the first camp, or the "Fated" camp. "Fated" means our universe runs on a tapestry of Fate, all choice is an illusion, we are predestined to run through our lives in the exact pattern defined at the beginning of time, and will continue to do so until the universe burns out.

Outside of the "Fated" camp, there is also the "Implied Fate" camp, in this set up, there are things that will happen no matter how we struggle against them or try to stop them. We have choice, but ultimately our choices are either to go with the flow of Fate, making it easier on ourselves and working within history to allow what will be to happen, or to struggle against Fate and suffer for it, as what is predetermined will happen no matter what. A webcomic named Erfworld actually runs through this idea fairly succinctly, and it appears to be a major element in the fictional religion of the Qun from the video game Dragon Age from Bioware.

The next possibility is one of "Fateless Ones", that is to say, MANY of us are fated, either by mechanisms of the "Fated" camp, or by the "Implied Fate" camp, but it doesn't matter which one, in any case, there are a select few who, by some means or another (whether they are born that way, they found the celestial cheat code to unbind them from Fate, or they just lucked out at some point in their lives), have true Free Will. Their decisions matter in ways ours do not, and they change the way the world works on a monumental scale. The rest of us only have Free Will, effectively when in reference to how we react to their decisions, as Fate has no hold on them or the way things react to them, only on the after effects, the ripples they leave in the world. This is actually the driving focus of the video game from 38 Studios: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where you play the Fateless One who is cut loose from Fate after being raised from the dead (making the player character unique in all the world and obviously primary protagonist material).

Finally, there is "True Free Will", and in this camp there is no difference between Self Determination and Free Will, there is no such thing as Fate at all, only probability. Nothing at all is certain or predetermined, only highly unlikely. When I kick a ball, it is only "highly probably" that the ball will go soaring in the opposite direction, rather than, for example, transforming into a pumpkin and splattering across my kicking foot. In such a world, Free Will, our choices, actually matter tremendously, and there is no one to blame but ourselves, and very occasionally more mechanistic forces of nature, when things go horribly wrong.

Of the three, I prefer to act as if our world lies in the "True Free Will" camp, not letting the idea of mechanistic forces of the cosmos forcing my hand into this or that act as an excuse for what I do, or what I fail to do. In actuality, I believe in the "Implied Fate" camp, since that is the one that actually makes the most sense to me. There are things in this world that are predetermined, past actions, or Newtonian Determinism, or Historical Imperative, or Narrative Causality, or some equally nebulous and cosmic force compels history and mankind to follow certain courses of actions, punishing us when we fail to do so, or outright oppose it. I try not to let this belief effect my actions, but it I find it interesting to think about all the same, and hope I've given my readers something to consider as well.

Worth, Value, and Importance

Worth is a loaded word. Worth is one of those words that means so much, and has become something of a taboo word to apply to people. In our world of special little snow flakes, "Everyone is worth something!" I'm not so sure this is true. Worth means value, it means that on some level, you are important, that on some level, the world would be a lesser place for the loss of you or whatever the object of worth was. With this in mind, we can say that to be worth something, you must leave the world a better place than it would have been without you. The world must have been made better by your actions and what you left behind to have been of worth.

I don't think this is unreasonable to say. I think this, by itself, is something we can all admit. The problem is when we have to argue whether or not a person was of worth, whether they, by their decisions and actions, left the world better for their presence. It might be that they make awesome pies, or they painted a wonderful picture, it could be anything, provided the world was a brighter, more fulfilling place for it.  By this definition, those who go about, doing nothing, not creating, simply existing, thugs on the street, lazy children, layabouts and people who just don't do anything, could be seen as worthless. And this would be true. It is cruel to say, but it is true. The teenage thug who does nothing except mug people, smoke on the corner, and assist his gang members in whatever activity they decide to do, could easily be seen as worthless. This, is not to say, they are valueless. Unrefined oil is practically worthless, but it has value, value is not just what you have done or are capable of, but what you have the potential to do. No one on this earth is without value, though there are quite possibly many worthless people, people who are valuable for what they might become should they choose to pursue it.

This is important to recognize. Too many people believe they are "special little snow flakes" that they have their own irreplaceable talent, that they are IMPORTANT. This is not true. Importance is not something any of us here reading will likely ever have. Importance is how much the world as a whole views you in terms of value and worth. Most of the readers of this blog, including it's writer, could die here and now, and relatively few people would know about it or care, where as someone like the president could die this very moment, and it wouldn't be an hour before most of the world had heard about it. No, we must be willing to admit to our children, and to ourselves, that in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of us are not important at all. We have value, and we may have worth, but we are not important. Further, we have to impress on ourselves that we are worthless until the moment we can say "yes, the world would have been a darker, less fulfilling place for my absence, if I had not done this or that, it would not be a better world." At that moment, we can say we have worth. And the more we can say that about ourselves, the more worth we can believe ourselves to have. What we do have to impress on everyone is that they have value, they have potential, they have the capability to do a great deal with their lives, maybe not everything or even anything, but that they are capable of having worth, of making the world a better place, and they can do so without being special, or important, but by just being themselves.

Opinions on Libertarianism and Self Determination

Something has always irked me about the Libertarian view, and that is how incredibly naive it is. Just like Communism, it works perfectly on paper, but it fails to take into account something basic: Corruption. Libertarians believe that the government should have either a minimal or nonexistent role in regulating the economy, and while there are merits to this view, it ignores the simple fact that people with loads and loads of money tend to spend it to secure their place, they spend it to ensure others cannot threaten their power, and usually the best method of doing so is by attacking methods that allow economic mobility. After all? If you're the only one with money, and you see money as power, then you see yourself as the only one in control, you see yourself on top of the world and completely secure. This unfortunate, and all to human habit, of hoarding and sabotaging the efforts of others, is why Libertarianism cannot work in our world today.

The counter argument of course is that big government, governments that get too heavily involved in regulating the economy, tend to squelch entrepreneurial spirit and prevent growth, which can be true if the government is too heavy handed. But the simple fact of the matter is that the purpose of government is to maintain order and allow tomorrow to be very much like today, which was pretty much like yesterday. The purpose of government is to keep horrible things from happening to us, and the economy is far too big and influential a thing to be allowed to run around without some kind of controls on it. One needs to only look at what happened to Wall Street only a few years ago to see that, quite clearly, when the economy starts to plunge, it takes quite a few people with it, even if they had nothing to do with the cause of the plunge. Something so powerful HAS to be controlled, it can't simply be left in the hands of private interests who do not have what is best for the average Joe on the street at heart. The purpose of governments are to maintain things so that disaster does not strike out of no where at those who are not responsible for such disasters, and to help secure the lives and livelihoods of those who are struck by those disasters that cannot be avoided or slip past the government's guard. Now, this means, obviously, that some freedoms have to be given up, but the question becomes: "Are they the IMPORTANT freedoms?"

The most important freedoms we have are those that permit Self Determination. That is to say, the ones that permit us to actually make our way in life, in the way we choose, so long as it doesn't interfere with others choices at the same time. Libertarianism believes it is defending this, but it fails to do so in actuality. To be able to self determine properly there must be choices, and a world without economic regulation almost always will end with monopolies, a lack of choices, only a few options that are not actually options but really just a bunch of people working together to keep prices high and using their funds to ensure that political maneuvering doesn't undermine their goals. There is no real malevolence in this use of money, I highly doubt the rich and powerful of the world wake up every morning and say "I'm going to go stomp on the throats of the poor so they don't get as rich as I do." I just think it's human nature to use all of one's available resources to defend one's place in the world, and as long as those that suffer for those choices are not visible to you, nor being shoved under your nose, you won't think too much about it. What leads to corruption is not some inherent, deep, evil associated with money, but simple survival instinct combined with a lack of perspective. Self Determination is protected for the few, and to them they see nothing wrong with doing such. They fail to recognize that the purpose of government is to protect everyone that is a citizen under that government, no matter how much in taxes they pay, and no matter what their social class. When an economy becomes deregulated, the government stops being able to control it, and then becomes controlled by it, as wealth is constantly accumulated with those who already have money. The purpose of a regulated economy is NOT to redistribute wealth, as so many Libertarians seem to believe, but to keep money MOVING. When money stops moving, economies halt, and the machine of civilization begins to slowly grind to a halt, and then finally fall apart. As the purpose of government is to make sure this great, vast machine never falls apart, it behooves any sensible government to maintain regulations, but not total control of, all aspects of the world that can harm the machine of civilization. Our right to Self Determination stops exactly where it begins to allow the choice to attack the machine that allows us to Self Determine at all.

Morality, and What It Means to Me.

Many people have said many things about morality, what is right, what is wrong, and nothing conclusive has ever been reached. Even so, I feel it is necessary to talk about my own personal views about morality, if only so that readers might understand where I am coming from, what my base line view is. I will speak about this morality quite a bit, though perhaps not with the term moral in future posts, since it's such a loaded word, people don't like to talk about morality really, after all, it's all opinion correct? Maybe, maybe not, but I think that something universal can be said about morality, or at least, personal morality. My personal morals can be described in two sentences:

What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.

What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.

These pair of sentences are my moral axioms. I know that I have done wrong when I have significantly broken one of them, that is to say, I have done something that is not only good for myself, but benefits me at the cost of others. This, I feel, is something people have lost touch with in our world, especially the overwhelming majority of libertarians, social conservatives, and neoconservatives, as well as the vast majority of corporations and the people who pander to them. It was the lack of these axioms that has slowly, but steadily destroyed the tax system and economic regulations that were set up in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, it is the lack of these axioms that causes people to stand aside and watch as laws steadily strip us of our social liberties, of our environment, of everything that makes tomorrow worth living for. It is the lack of these axioms, I feel, that on the whole has caused more ills for humanity than everything else combined in all of human history.

Before I continue, I wish to fully explain what these axioms stand for, how they function for me, and then move onto how a lack of them has caused more evil in human history than any one human has ever committed, and how it is the lack of them that has allowed the most evil things to be done. At the same time, it may be a truer statement that rather than completely lacking these axioms in their personal mental vocabulary, most people simply do not consider them, think on them, or consider the implications, which is every bit as bad as lacking them completely, if not worse. I'm hoping that by this time you have had a little time to mull over the pair of sentences above, and have actually bothered to consider them a little by reaching this point, if you have not, then I ask that before continuing on, read them once more:

What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.

What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.

On the one hand, our first axiom is simple and self explanatory, its meaning should be immediately obvious to everyone. When I do something that benefits myself, there is absolutely nothing that says it helps anyone else, or even that it avoids harming someone else. Let us consider the act of theft for example: I walk into a store, grab some item on sale, and bolt. I've certainly benefited myself here, but I have caused some amount of damage to the owner of the store. I might not even have caused damage to the owner of the store, whoever owns the store, assuming it is a chain store for example, most certainly has more than enough money to cover the loss. The damage done to that person is probably infinitesimally small to the point of practical nonexistence. But what about the store employees? The ones who must answer to the owner for the theft? What about the security guard or the system put in place that did not prevent me from making my theft, surly someone in this interaction between the person who actually bought or produced the merchandise to sell, and myself who stole it, has been harmed by this action. Thus, we can see that simply because something benefits myself, that doesn't mean I have not harmed someone. At the same time, the first axiom does not state, nor even imply that what is good for me, necessarily harms others, this is an important distinction to make, as far too many systems of morality seem to believe that certain pleasurable acts, "victimless crimes" are in fact morally reprehensible. There should be no law preventing me from, for example, singing in the shower provided I'm not harming anyone else by it (and I do hope that my singing is not so incredibly awful that it might actually cause someone who heard it physical, mental, or spiritual harm.). At the same time, there should be no law preventing me from drink alcohol or partaking of drugs that do not cause me harm or do harm to others (for example, marijuana). If there is no victim of a "crime", then how can it legitimately be called a crime?

The second axiom is trickier, and this is the one far, far too many people do not consider, I am especially looking at the libertarian crowd in this case, for they seem to actively ignore evidence of the truth of this statement in many cases. When I do something that is good for everyone, or support something that benefits all, I am part of that all, part of that everyone. When I support a tax that pays for better schools, when I support an additional fee in some process to gain a type of license so that it might pay for better funding to park rangers, I am hurting myself a bit, I am losing something of myself in the immediate, but the benefits are enormously spread out to everyone, myself included. The same can be said of social security, public health care, and in general, a whole lot of things the government should be able to provide yet does not due to a lack of funding and from political lobbyists who out of selfishness seek to destroy such efforts. This is a much more obvious example of something I'm giving up in order to benefit not just myself, but everyone, and in a far less obvious way. When I give money in taxes to public health care, social security, the fire and police departments, and make efforts to defend those things, I know, since I am obviously well off enough to be at least middle class in our society simply by virtue of having the free time to post this blog and pursue a career in game development as well as maintain a multitude of geeky hobbies (and those are all expensive), that I will likely never ever use any of these services. My house is unlikely to be burned down, or robbed, or that I will ever find myself in a situation so economically desperate that I will require social security or public health care. So why do I support it? Sure it's useful for other people who need it but if I'm never likely to use it in my life, then why should I support it? How is the second axiom maintained? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will never use these things, that I will never need them. Bad luck, disaster, or any number of horrors can dash my good fortunes, and I may have need of these things in that time. Simply by knowing there is a safety net there, I am better off than I would be without it, able to take greater risks, strive harder to succeed, worry less about falling into squalor or economic ruin, because I know such things will be there to catch me before total ruination. Not enough people seem to realize this, not knowing that they are shooting themselves in the foot by choosing lower taxes over greater benefits. Similar things apply to internet neutrality, unions, economic regulations, and all of these highly "liberal" and "progressive" things that give power to the government to protect us from what it truly be protecting us from: Random Chance and Human Evil/Stupidity from fellow citizens, not from nebulous, far off "enemies" and "terrorists".

Now that I have fully explained both Axioms, it comes to the idea of why such things have lead to the worst human evils. In the words of Winston Churchill, who was quoting Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And unfortunately it is almost programmed into the human consciousness to do nothing against evil if it does not benefit us directly to do so. Our instincts work against us, they tell us to do only what benefits ourselves and those who are immediately close to ourselves: friends and family and people in our immediate community. Our instincts tell us to fear opposing anything that doesn't immediately effect us, especially when it is being enacted by those we see as powerful, for that is to risk security. This instinctive cowardice is what has allowed such evils as Stalin's reign of terror, the holocaust, genocide, McCarthyism, and heaven knows how many other evils and atrocities across human history, and will no doubt allow for infinitely more. Those who do not consider these pair of axioms, who allow themselves to think only of themselves and their immediate peers, while not evil in their intentions or actions, certainly allow for evil to occur, and will continue to do so until they begin to contemplate, and act, upon the spirit behind these axioms.