Anarchy and Responsibility After Free Will
We do not have control over what we do. So why should anybody else?
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Getting Free Will Out of the Way
In 2017, celebrity Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky published Behave, an attempt to describe, through multiple scientific disciplines, what causes us to do what we do.
He provided a huge wealth of answers: the dopaminergic system, the interplay between the emotional and rational pre-frontal cortices, the anterior cingulate cortex, the amygdala, the influence of hormones, culture, evolution and a whole lot besides.
What doesn’t appear among all these causes for behavior? Free, conscious choice. In other words, us. We do not, anywhere in any part of the brain, find anything that looks remotely like the commonly held concept of free will.
Sapolsky stresses this point and offers a critical description of the typical view of free will. By this I mean the idea that we could do something other than what we did in the past if we were to rewind the clock to the moment before we did it, all other things being equal. We have choice, independent of all the mechanistic processes of our neurobiology. In other words, what you, as a modern person, probably believe to one degree or another:
There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book.
And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck.
And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock.
There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot.
But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science.
In other words, an absurdity. In reality, we find nothing that isn’t the result of deterministic processes, nothing that you caused, unless the cause was a decision you made which was itself the outcome of deterministic processes.
What if it’s not deterministic; what if there’s randomness? Fine. Where does that get you?
What if it’s not your mind, but your immortal soul? Okay. Where does that get you?
Follow yourself all the way down, and you will not find yourself, at least not what you imagine yourself to be. You find a complex system doing all sorts of things, but every one of those things is an explicable product of something else outside your control. All those causes have only one inevitable outcome—the thing you thought or did in the moment you thought or did it.
The point of this essay is not to refute free will. That debate has already been won, over and over again, by people far better equipped than I to make the argument. So for the sake of brevity, if you’re not sold, I’ll use the demonstration Sam Harris uses, which I found to be the most convincing.
Tell yourself what to think. Whatever it is. Now look at your thought and the process that led to it. Explain to yourself where the decision came from.
Analyze that thought. How did you choose to make it? For it to be freely made, you must have decided to make it. To make a decision, you have to have multiple options you look at, deliberate over for some given length of time, and once you reach a decision between them, a decision can be said to have been made.
Did you do that with the thought that popped into your head? Or was it foisted on you by your mind, the outcome of electrical signals firing their way across your neurons, carried across your synapses by neurotransmitters through the massive information network of your brain until one was big enough to produce a conscious thought? Well, of course it was. We know that for a fact. After all, to make a choice about what to think, you would have had to think the thought before you thought it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that makes no fucking sense.
This doesn’t just describe conscious thoughts in your mind, but actions too. Well verified research has demonstrated that your brain makes a decision several hundred milliseconds before you consciously felt that you made it. But your conscious mind, the part of you which you feel is making decisions, and the part of me that feels like it’s writing this essay, the part of you you most identify as being you? It’s just along for the ride.
Dieting? You might decide to eat the brownies, or not to eat them. You were no more in control of the decision to restrain yourself as the decision to indulge. You could not have done anything other than what you did, given the sum total of causes which led your brain to do one thing and not another, which your consciousness imagined to be a voluntary decision.
This is an enormously painful thing for many people to accept, and understandably so. I’ve talked to virtually no one who hasn’t been viscerally angry, saddened and frustrated by what I’m proposing here. It feels to many as if they’re being robbed of their freedom, told that their life is actually a little cage of deterministic processes they have no way of escaping from, or alternatively that its a continuous stream of meaningless, random happenstance. “Are you saying we shouldn’t be mad at rapists? Are you saying I shouldn’t bother trying to change or improve myself? Are you saying I shouldn’t feel proud of my accomplishments, or feel shame at my mistakes?” And so on. If you’re religious, how can you justify heaven and hell in a world where nobody can help but do either good or bad things, and can’t even help how they feel about them?
Yes, the implications of disposing of free will are enormous, and they may not all be good. And yet, I also think it’s important that when we set about describing reality, we believe things that are true regardless of their moral implications, rather than picking and choosing beliefs based on how they might shape our morality.
If you disagree with this assessment, there’s plenty of treatises against free will you can consult and debate with. I, for one, am sold. We can, as compatibilists do, attempt to redefine free will, and we can insist on the social necessity for the responsibility and accountability that free will dictates, but that’s all besides the point. There is no case for free will—the idea that we could have thought or done anything other than that which we thought or did—that makes any sense, and if we’re willing to deal with that honestly, then we can have a conversation about what such a tectonic shift in our self-conception actually means. How should we view ourselves, what it means to be a good or bad person, to be responsible or irresponsible, in light of such a shift? Who does this make us?
Free Will vs. Freedom
I’m an anarchist. That means I view society as a tool to maximize the freedom and expression of the individual, the locus of creativity, rationality and progress. When freed from natural constraints and those imposed by systems of domination, the individual is able to pursue that which fascinates them, to create things which could not have existed without them, to live, in sum total, a fulfilled and purposeful life. They are able to participate in the social sphere, to influence their community by forming connections of mutual association and mutual aid. This is all well and good, but what does any of this mean if the individual has no choice? If people can’t make decisions, as one friend put it to me, why not live under a dictatorship? What’s the difference?
It’s a good question. We can imagine, in the next several decades, the technology existing to create an artificial intelligence so complex it could make decisions for humanity far better than any we could ever make for ourselves. In the advent of the creation of what is in essence a robot god, we would be left to ask ourselves- What is human life for?
Whether we have free will or not, let’s suppose we are no longer the smartest kids on the block. Let’s say we are faced with an intellect that is superior to us in every single aspect, which knows us and what we need and want better than we do, and which promises to give us a perfect society if we only do what it asks without deviation. This isn’t Maoist China; it’s not a question of a dictator making worse decisions for us than we could make for ourselves. Suppose human executive function is made completely superfluous to the questions of managing the daily affairs of our lives, and we have a dictator which could make a better choice for us than we could make for ourselves, 100% of the time. Would we follow it?
Many of us would, probably, or at least we would think it best to. And yet, even those who had no problem living on the neuralink would probably find it exceedingly difficult to be perfectly obedient to it. Even despite school and church demanding we learn mindless obedience for most of our formative years (say nothing of the workplace, the legal system, the military, or the nuclear family), we do not live to follow orders. We bristle at the idea of having our decision-making power taken away from us. We would still bristle at it, even if we could be 100% certain that the decisions being made for us were better than any we could ever make for ourselves.
Be honest, how many times have you had to make a ten minute run to the grocery store and not bothered to put on your seat belt, despite your car chirping at you the whole way? How often have you deliberately not done something because some nagging person who could never mind their own business suggested you should, even if it was legitimately good advice? We don’t do things based on whether they are objectively correct—we do them based on whether or not we want to, and whether or not we want to is the product of processes happening in the brain that are wholly outside our control. Desires and intentions arise within us, and following the orders of external authority requires quenching them.
I can’t make myself want to put on my seatbelt. Maybe I think about people I know who have died because they didn’t wear one, or a lifetime of admonishments from parents and teachers, or times I’ve almost been in a car accident, and decide “actually, there’s a lot of traffic, I really should wear it this time.” But I can’t choose to have these thoughts, and I can’t choose to receive this sort of influence from them. Either I do or I don’t, and I can consciously observe myself producing the outcome of the causal factors that led me to do one thing or another, but my conscious mind simply is not in the driver’s seat.
Is freedom the freedom to make good decisions, then? No; freedom is the ability for a group or individual to make the choices commensurate with their nature, the sum total of causal influences that make us prefer to do one thing and not another. If freedom matters, the point of life is not efficiency or production; in some sense, it’s precisely the ability to be inefficient and unproductive, to live as much by our imperfections as by our virtues.
This is something religious adherents often struggle with—the battle between their individual human impulses and the doctrine they attempt to conform to, which is in many respects deeply contrary to their nature. Ask any gay or trans person raised in a religious household, or any celibate Christian who’s halfway honest, and you will understand how difficult (nay, impossible) that nature can be to ignore. When gay people advocate for equal rights, they’re not advocating for the right to be gay, because that right is literally inviolable—there is no way they can, with the mind they possess, possibly become straight.
Likewise, if we embrace biological determinism, there’s no way any of us could be anything but who we are, or want to do anything but what we want to do, unless we were transplanted to another universe with a different set of causes and effects, if we were literally built differently in one way or another.
What am I saying, concretely? When we advocate for a freedom, we are advocating for the right to fully express what we are, not for the right to be something else. If I want freedom of speech, it’s because I want to be able to say what I can’t help but want to say, without external restriction. If I want free education, it’s to learn about what I can’t help but want to learn about, and so on. Free will is the idea that we could be something other than what we are, that we could somehow choose the nature of our mind (or if you prefer, of our soul). By contrast, Freedom is the expression of our nature, whatever it may be, uninhibited by material or legal constraints. When I refer to “freedom of choice”, I do not mean that in the sense that I could actually decide, separately from the unconscious processes of my mind, between the options given me. My freedom to choose is not granted by the expanse of options my mind leaves me (it leaves me none), but by the breadth of options that my mind is offered by the nature, the society, the moment in which a choice is being made.
If I’m given the options, coke or pepsi, I don’t have the faculty to pick coke if what my mind actually decides, through a process totally alien to my consciousness, is pepsi. However, if I’m given the choices coke, pepsi or root beer, and I pick root beer, then we see that I was less free when my options were only coke or pepsi. I didn’t actually want pepsi, I just wanted it more than coke. Or maybe I did want it, but once I was given another choice, suddenly I wanted something else more. By virtue of the breadth of options available to me, I am given greater freedom to express my nature more precisely, to do what I would actually like to do. If my options were coke, pepsi, root beer or ending world hunger, I’d suddenly be a great deal freer still.
Freedom If We Actually Meant It
The more I’ve thought about it, I believe a recognition of this reality about our nature is actually essential to an anarchist project or to any other serious attempt at democracy, for a variety of reasons.
First, without free will, how can we justify wealth inequality? The way we reflexively do so now is typically on meritocratic grounds. Some people work harder than others, some people are smarter than others. Life is a competition which someone has got to lose, so let’s bite the bullet and accept that some people will be poor, some people will be rich, and both mostly deserve what they get. If you didn’t want to lose, you should have done things differently (crucially, you could have done things differently.)
Let’s assume the meritocratic logic were true—that all hard-working, smart, resourceful people became wealthy and one’s gender or skin color, the wealth of one’s parents, the locale of one’s birth had no effect on one’s likelihood to succeed. If that were true, much like getting sent to hell is the product of your own misuse of your free will, poverty would be a direct consequence of your poor management of the choices available to you. You would deserve it.
Poverty is, in a sense, a sort of retributive justice based on meritocratic logic. Rich people tell themselves this all the time—"they’re poor because they deserve to be poor, and I deserve to be rich.” Sure it’s unfortunate, but that’s just how things played out.
But if we recognize free will for the fantasy that it is, we can look at poverty more soberly. It is, in fact, a severe restriction upon human freedom which is the product of things outside an individual’s control 100% of the time (and as Sapolsky explains in Behave, there is almost no set of conditions better developed to ensure the impossibility of success than the daily experience of poverty.) A person who is poor because of an addiction literally does not have the option to withhold from feeding that addiction. A person who is poor because they have a rage problem and are too socially difficult to manage in a workplace literally does not have the option to be more calm and reasonable. Someone with a genius level intellect and a strong internal moral compass who made the one crucial mistake of being born in a remote village in Yemen cannot choose to go live somewhere else or escape any of the brutal realities anyone unlucky enough to live in Yemen is subject to.
If that is true, how can we possibly rationalize inequality? It can’t be that wealthy people deserve to be wealthier than others, because of course they too are utterly lacking responsibility for their wealth. To rationalize inequality, then, capitalists are forced to fall back on the idea that poverty is a necessary disincentive to laziness, that people need to see others succeeding to be driven to work hard themselves. There is also the more intellectually honest argument that poor people are just so constitutionally incapable of managing wealth that they must be kept in poverty to protect them from themselves (the Gospel of Wealth argument, if you like).
These are arguments for inequality as a social necessity, an economic carrot on a stick to drive productivity, and as a tool to be used by the most intelligent, most capable members of society to control the backward masses (for their own good, of course). But what they cannot sustain is the idea that this inequality is just, or that we shouldn’t do everything in our power to address the root causes of it. For that, they must insist upon the fantasy of free will, and especially free will even in impossible circumstances—the poor must deserve their poverty, and be lifted out of it by the good graces of a superior, benevolent, forgiving ruling class.
If we can find better solutions to the problems of economic production and social stability than the persecution of a wide swath of the population to serve as an example of the consequences of poor choice of parents and brain chemistry, any non-sadistic person who has accepted the facts as they are has to agree that we probably should. We could offer an addict or a pathologically angry person therapy, and we could stop giving Saudi Arabia bombs to drop on Yemen and even offer humanitarian aid in recompense for the genocide we are supporting there. But to do any of these things, we first have to do away with the notion that those involved have the free will to change their situation on their own.
We have only two forces which can shoulder the burden of creating good human outcomes—the nature of every individual, the confluence of biological and environmental circumstances which cause them to do what they do, and society, with its ability to bring collective resources to bear to steer those environmental circumstances in a way which will allow the best aspects of that nature to express themselves. The free choice of the individual does not enter into it. Nowhere, never, not at all.
Lifting the Weight of Responsibility
People bristle at this idea for a very understandable reason. Indeed, the only remotely good argument for free will isn’t one claiming that it exists—it’s the argument that we must imagine it to exist. Personal responsibility is a critical part of sociality, isn’t it? We need to believe that when we do something harmful to somebody else, we are to blame, or else how would we learn to do things differently? Without responsibility we could do something harmful to someone else and escape the feeling of shame that would cause us to evaluate our behavior and adjust it. Likewise, when we do something good, when we get up early in the morning, do our job well, go out of our way to be kind to others, we should be able to feel like we did a good thing.
There is undeniably some truth to this. And yet I don’t think our conception of personal responsibility, one blatantly in contradiction of the facts, is the most moral social logic we can realize. I think it causes us to feel shame where we shouldn’t and refrain from acting where we should. I think it leads us to fall short of our full potential. The question is how we ought to revise it, or even to replace it.
One issue that may draw out some of the moral shortcomings of personal responsibility is climate change. There is great irony in the fact that conservatives, people who are precisely characterized by a rigid belief in free will and personal responsibility, absolutely refuse any moral culpability whatsoever in the face of the climate crisis. This is true even of the most intelligent, well-educated and sophisticated conservatives, who either maintain a stance of outright climate denial or simply fudge the numbers as to the likely outcomes of climate change to minimize the issue. To avoid the obvious contradictions of upholding personal responsibility while simultaneously supporting the idea that we ought to make the planet uninhabitable for their own children (and everybody else’s), they simply reject the mountains of evidence suggesting the issue is real, and its consequences dire.
Now, benefiting from the fact that we know free will does not exist, let’s resist the urge to respond to this belief with moral outrage. Let’s not assume that any conservative who believes this is an innately bad person, or that they secretly understand the problem is real but refuse to acknowledge it because they are so constitutionally incapable of caring about the future, or the immediate problems of others (though I don’t deny this is true, in some cases.) Let’s operate from the accurate assumption that they do not choose to believe what they believe, that they really do believe what they believe, and the only way they could believe otherwise is if they lived in a different universe that had provided them with a different culture, or different genes, or something that rewires their neural circuitry into one that could accept the evident reality of climate change. Let’s acknowledge that our urge to morally condemn, while it may make us feel better about the situation, is not useful, does not get us any closer to solving the problem. The fact of the matter is that conservatives have been inculcated with a doctrine in which individuals are the sole cause of their own actions and bear their total moral weight. And yet, this doctrine is wholly failing to prevent them from carrying out what, if we don’t stop it, would prove to be the single greatest crime in human history. We have a responsibility to work this problem out, and condemnation is not going to get us there.
Why has personal responsibility proven inadequate here? There is, of course, straightforward brainwashing through right wing media and political rhetoric. Of course this is a failure of environment—no one can help being born into a world in which FOX News exists. There is to a certain extent a failure of education—though like I mentioned, even well-educated conservatives still engage in and are actually the chief propagators of climate denialism.
But there may be something to the fact that any potential solution to this sort of problem totally transcends the logic of personal responsibility. We can see how it’s applied to the climate change issue not by conservatives, but the way it was addressed by liberals throughout the first two decades of the 21st century. Instead of embracing the need for drastic collective action, we were cajoled throughout the aughts and 2010s with messages about reducing one’s personal “carbon footprint”. The EPA provides a carbon footprint calculator which tells you how high your emissions probably are and how to reduce them. We were supposed to recycle, buy a hybrid car, use fluorescent lightbulbs and turn the lights off whenever we left a room, eat grass fed beef or go vegan and buy from local farms, use our air conditioners and thermostats more gently, and so on and so forth. Largely spurred by the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, which many Americans like myself were shown in school (I was in 6th grade at the time), this environmentalist ethic of individual responsibility to reduce one’s carbon footprint amounted to the following greenhouse gas emission statistics in the ensuing decade:
Not very encouraging.
Of course, it’s fairly obvious why this would be the case—very little of your carbon footprint is actually within your control, and your politics doesn’t much factor into it. How could it?
How much power do you have to decide how cold or warm the winter or summer are going to be? How much choice do you have over how close you live to work, or school, or the grocery store? How much control do you have over where your electricity comes from? Every day, millions of well-meaning liberals get up and burn greenhouse gases just to get to work. They can’t live close to work because the good work is in the city, but an affordable cost of living is well outside it, so they must commute. Regardless of our imagined free will, or the shame (if not outright denial) it engenders, we cannot help but be part of the problem. To solve an issue like this requires accepting that we are, in fact, not responsible for the consequences of our actions because we are not responsible for the causes, neither the macro nor the micro. To effectively address them, we must alter the environment in which we are making choices. Instead of being mired in the guilt of our individual carbon albatrosses, or casting blame at others for theirs, we must recognize that collective problems require collective solutions. We do not lack the will to address climate change. We lack the freedom.
Let’s take a more manageable example. Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen incredible political polarization around the idea of social distancing and wearing masks. What happened very quickly as the pandemic unfolded was a binary moralization of how we ought to handle the virus and approach risk management more generally. In no time at all, this moralization totally left the realm of belief in the validity of scientific research—I’ve certainly noticed in my own life quite a few people who are determined to maintain a strict policy of mask-wearing regardless of recent CDC recommendations saying vaccinated people don’t need to wear them even inside, and the fact that we have known for months that the rate of outdoor COVID-19 transmission is very, very low.
One has to wonder, had we not moralized this issue to such an extent, would we have paid more attention to the actual scientific evidence we were being presented with? If we had, for instance, declared that outdoor mask wearing, while not completely risk-free, was within a reasonable threshold for people to make their own minds up about, would we have avoided some of the rancor around the issue that we’ve experienced? If we hadn’t ignored our own advice about listening to science (which has long since established that public shaming is usually not an effective way to change behavior) would the conspiracy theories now leading nearly half of republicans to refuse vaccination have gained as much traction? Had we removed the public pressure to wear masks even when it wasn’t necessary, would people have been more willing to wear them when it actually made a difference? If we’d been a bit more understanding about the varying levels of need for human contact, would people have been more honest with one another about having gone to a social engagement they shouldn’t have? If that were the case, in the long run, wouldn’t this more empathetic view which didn’t insist on the personal responsibility of individuals have likely saved more lives? Would it have prevented some of the exacerbation of suicidal tendencies and other psychiatric conditions we’ve witnessed? While much ink is still being spilled about Sweden’s very laissez-faire approach to the pandemic, to date their per capita death rate has been comparable to, if not lower than those of even strict US states, or the strictest European countries like France or the UK.
The point of all this is to say that reducing the burden of addressing societal problems onto the personal grit and determination of discrete individuals, and responding to people’s failure to live up to an impossible standard with moral condemnation on the basis of a delusional concept of free will is a deeply dysfunctional approach to problem-solving, both on a personal and social level. Liberals have no problem recognizing this when you mention the black crime rate, the extreme patriarchal attitudes of most Islamic cultures, or poor birth control practices which lead to abortion—we can easily recognize that there are sociological conditions which lead to actions, attitudes and outcomes the people involved should not be held responsible for. Why is it so hard to withhold our moral judgement when white conservatives, who are just as much a victim of circumstance as anybody else, exhibit retrograde social views? Do we imagine that white conservatives are somehow more responsible for their actions than other groups? Do we imagine they have free will?
A Final Statement On Identity Without Free Will
Probably the most profound realization the abolition of free will brings me is that of my utter dependence on others. Not just for my material survival or for simple companionship—who I surround myself with literally shapes my brain, who I am and what I do. Without my relationships, I literally would not be myself. I am nothing more or less than the nexus of my genetic heritage, my culture, the community I live in, the turkey sandwich I had for lunch and the comfortable chair in which I write this essay. I am utterly fluid, always changing in ways I cannot anticipate but which are shaped in their entirety by things outside of my control. Even the ideas that informed this essay, I can pin down inspiration from in specific people, conversations and events throughout my life, and so I must admit I can take no credit for them.
That could be a very disempowering feeling. It could also imbue me with a profound sense of solidarity—I very literally am the world which surrounds me, including the people, the plants, the sunlight on my brow and so on. I am a filter of innumerable causes, and through the expression of that, I myself become a cause. If I want to have a good life, I must ensure the good lives of those around me.
This is all very nice and hippy dippy, and really it’s a maddeningly complicated way to say a very simple thing. It is a call for cooperation and authentic self-expression, and a conscious recognition that there is no contradiction between these two ideas. The Ethic of Authenticity, as philosopher Charles Taylor calls it, is an ethic of self expression which is in fact explained by the deterministic nature of the self, not obscured by it. After all, from whence does this authentic self originate? When we say we are “trying to find ourselves,” are we talking about the imaginary homunculus inside the mind which makes decisions independently of the mechanistic processes of the brain? Or do we instead mean we wish to make peace with our real nature, the one shaped by prior causes outside of us, the utterly unique product of that unusual cocktail of one’s life and DNA?
Anarchism is occasionally criticized for being little more than a utopian bastardization of liberalism. Here I think we see the crucial distinction.
Whereas liberalism works from a notion of individuality wherein people are discrete and autonomous, capable of making choices independent of external influence (the homunculus again, in the brain but not of it) and are thus responsible agents, anarchism affirms that the individual is a nexus of genetic and environmental influence, intrinsically and inextricably part of the collective. Society relies on the unique expression of the individual for innovation, progress and culture, but the individual nevertheless depends on the society to furnish the means for their fullest expression. What we see then is society and the individuals of which it is composed, feeding into and renewing one another all at once as part of a broader ecology. The individual is always a part of the collective—as a straightforward matter of fact, the collective cannot help but express itself through each of them, not through the will of some capitalist or dictator imposing their individual will upon the rest, or the silencing nature of poverty and toil, constraining the freedom of action which would constitute the diverse and vibrant expressions of nature itself, and along with it a vibrant democracy, culture and technology.