A particularly heated thread at IshCon has recently laid bear my fundamental disagreement with Matthew Kabwe, a.k.a. “Ghost.” It essentially comes down to one of the oldest philosophical questions humanity has ever considered: do we have free will, or is our fate predetermined? Matt cannot accept the inevitability of collapse, because that would entail, in his words, “an absolutist deterministic fatalistic binary zero-sum game with no room for the core of my faith, the third option, which is that walking away is possible and even a good idea.” This objection is sufficiently common to warrant a full explanation.

It is my belief that individual human beings have free will. I have no proof of this; free will can never be proven, and so, rejecting a solid hypothesis simply because it contradicts an unproven (but comforting) conjecture is illogical. But, since it is so comforting, few are willing to do that, so let’s begin with the premise that individual human beings do have free will.

If humans have free will, then individual actions are completely unpredictable. That said, it is certainly true that some actions are more probable than others. More people are more likely to walk down the street, than to sautee a laptop, for example. So, for enough individuals, a bell curve begins to develop. Each individual is entirely capable of arbitrarily deciding where in that bell curve his or her individual actions will land, but as the population grows, the distribution more perfectly resembles a bell curve.

Thus, groups are not simply the sum of their parts. Besides the fact that herd effects, mob mentalities and other phenomena change the way people behave as part of a group, there is also the fact that for every choice you freely make, another will choose the opposite. Therefore, what sets the mean and standard deviation–in other words, what defines the size and shape of the bell curve–are the incentives and disincentives a given society provides, materially. As I commented on a different thread at IshCon recently:

We throw the term “meme” around, but we abuse it as much as anyone. It’s not just a synonym for “idea,” it’s an idea that’s adaptive and subject to natural selection.

Any meme that leads to less intensive investments in complexity–even incrementally–is an incremental disadvantage compared to those who hold the meme to invest as much as they can in complexity. It’s as self-eliminating as the celibacy cults of the 1800s.

The only time that a meme of lower complexity is adaptive, is in the context of collapse. Then, those who refuse to invest in complexity survive, and others do not.

At every other point in the marginal returns curve of complexity, any meme that leads any arbitrary level of society–from the individual, to whole cultures, nation-states or bioregions–to invest less intensively in complexity, puts themselves at a distinct disadvantage to be outcompeted by those who do otherwise.

If the meme leads to incrementally less investment, then they will be incrementally outcompeted, and thus the meme will only be extinguished over a longer timeline. But it is self-defeating in that context.

In other words, any kind of mind change is only a viable strategy if civilization is collapsing. Otherwise, it is self-defeating.

As Victor Hugo famously opined, “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” The inverse is also true: no idea can ever take root, unless its time has come. Of course, individuals–with free will–can believe any crazy thing they like. But memes spread–ideas become widespread–only when “their time has come,” that is, when there’s an incentive to believe them.

We’ve discussed the self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop of intensifying complexity recently, so it is easy to see how societies follow a very deterministic course. It can be easy to focus on that and lose hope, and to lose faith in our own free will. But that would be wrong, as well.

Societies are deterministic; people have free will. We cannot stop collapse; but we can choose our reaction to it. We can choose to survive it, or we can choose to die in it. We can choose to stay in our culture to the bitter end, or we can choose to invent a new one. We can choose to give up hope because collapse is so terrible, or we can choose to find hope in the promise of what lies beyond.

I am an optimist. I choose to survive, and to thrive. I choose to find in the coming collapse not the end of civilization, but the rebirth of humanity. I choose to find hope in it–not the false hope that the deterministic fate of a doomed civilization can be altered, but the very real hope that humanity will endure, and though the cost of our sins will be terrible, once this long, dark night of our race has passed, the sun will shine on Eden all the brighter, when we’re finally allowed to come back home.