Where Is the Free Will in Ponerology?
To be free, one must be liberated from the limits placed on freedom
This post was inspired by a question that came up in the Political Ponerology book workshop.
At one point early in his book, Lobazewski describes the “causal factors” at work in the human personality, and the resistance many have to accepting that such things may be really at work in their own actions and choices:
In affirming his own personality, man has the tendency to repress from the field of his consciousness any associations indicating an external causative conditioning of his emotions, worldview, and behavior. Young people in particular want to believe they freely choose their intentions and decisions; at the same time, however, an experienced psychological analyst can track the causative conditions of these choices without much difficulty. Much of this conditioning is hidden within our childhood; the memories may be receding into the distance, but we carry the results of our early experiences around with us throughout our lives. (p. 18)
Is this true? And if it is, does Lobaczewski’s perspective leave any room for free will?
It’s a fair question. After all, ask pretty much any mainstream research psychologist alive today and you will probably receive a strong repudiation of the entire notion of free will. Our will is an illusion produced entirely by “bottom-up” and “outside-in” processes, with at best some “random number generator”–like function injecting some uncertainty into the equation. Chemical signals in our gut tell us we are hungry, and like simple automatons, we seek out food. External imagery of a sexual nature provokes sexual arousal, and we similarly are directed to fulfill another of nature’s functions. Our genetic predispositions and environmental influences direct us to choose certain mates, occupations, and hobbies. None of our choices are free in any sense. Ultimately, it is all a chain of physical “cause and effect.”
Regular readers will know I think this is nonsense. But in this article I won’t be arguing for the reality of free will. I’m taking it as a given. (Feel free to read some McGilchrist, Whitehead, and/or Langan for more detail in that department.) The problem I want to focus on here is that of overestimating the extent of our freedom. Because even if I disagree fundamentally with those who deny free will completely, they’re not always wrong in the details. The fact is, our freedom is often severely limited, most likely more than we are comfortable admitting. This is what Lobaczewski is talking about in the above: conditioning and influence, not strict determinism.
It doesn’t take a psychologist to be able to see that teenagers vastly overestimate the degree of their own freedom. They follow fads, fashions, and “influencers,” adopting their ideas, emotional postures, and even mannerisms. Probably most people over the age of 25 know this, because we were all teenagers at one time. We may not have admitted it at the time, but our parents and teachers were right about us: we were “impressionable,” lacked self-control, and we caved in to peer pressure. We did stupid things for no good reason, either because of hormones, intense emotions beyond our control, or the influence of our friends and role models, good or bad. If these things were pointed out to us, we easily dismissed them.
We may have the advantage of years, but the situation isn’t much better for adults. We just tell ourselves better stories.
Even as adults, we don’t like admitting that our choices aren’t truly and fully our own or that we’ve been manipulated. And it’s very easy to manipulate most people. Emotions are easily provoked, and once provoked, easily vectored into the action desired by the manipulator. Shaping or manufacturing entire worldviews is not so difficult, either. Again, just look at teenagers and young adults and the ease with which it is possible to install any given ideology or cause and have it take root.
Can we really be said to be “free” when our emotions, ideas, and behaviors are so easily manipulated? When we’re not even aware that it is happening?
And if those examples aren’t obvious, others should be. There are certain things we cannot control, that we don’t have freedom over, limits placed upon us which often influence our behavior to an extreme degree. Even assuming a strong reality for free will, there are undeniable physical limits on it, for instance. Injury causes reduced range of motion. One cannot “freely” do what one did before. Drugs affect our cognitive functioning. Intense sensations of hunger and thirst are powerful motivators. Some people may be able to exert some control over such basic instincts and sensations, but others turn into animals. (Ask them afterwards and don’t be surprised if many tell you they “chose” to do so.) Electric stimulation of the brain can provoke intense illusions or compulsions. Genetic disorders can severely limit our bodies and minds, as can blunt trauma to the brain. For anyone denying the efficacy of “bottom-up causation,” try taking an iron rod through the frontal cortex and continuing to believe that.
As for that second question, how does freedom fit into the picture Lobaczewski paints of biological and social influences on our thought, feeling, and behavior? Just a bit further on, he writes:
The more progress we make in our art of understanding human causation, the better we are able to liberate the person who trusts us from the excessive effects of conditioning, which has unnecessarily constricted his freedom of proper comprehension and decision making. (p. 18)
These “causal factors” are not so much strict determinants of our behavior as they are limits on our freedom—limits that can be modified or even potentially removed. Perhaps somewhat ironically, it is by making ourselves aware of such influences and how they do affect us that we can overcome them. In order to achieve freedom, a greater degree of free will, we have to understand the processes or the influences that are placing limits on that freedom. Compare the arrogant man confident in his own freedom who is in fact a total slave to his biology and social environment, to the one who sees how controlled he really is, and is thus able to act with a much greater degree of freedom. In other words, to become free, we have to realize how un-free we currently are.
This view of “causation” is consistent with Whitehead’s philosophical account. Any given being takes in information from its environment (which includes its own body and all external sources influencing that body). In other words, it takes a reading of the current state of its own being, which determines its range of motion—its possible options for action within those specific conditions. Previously established habits and goals (i.e. short- and long-term aims) will weight those options, and actions will be chosen based on the degree to which they are compatible with all of that data.
Physically, our motion will be limited to the range set by our immediately past and present location, the conditions of our environment, the state of our body and its inherent abilities, our level of energy, and what aims we are currently in the process of attempting to realize. Our choices will also be conditioned, shaped, or limited by our emotional state, which itself has been shaped and conditioned from our lifetime of experiences. And in the realm of concepts or ideas, we will be limited in our deliberations by which ideas we hold as true and effective in our engagement with reality, whether consciously or not. If we consider something impossible, which in fact is possible, we may not even attempt it.
Lobaczewski’s fellow countryman and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski presented these ideas in a manner I think both clear and truthful. He identified three factors that shape a person: biology/heredity, social environment, and the “third factor,” where autonomy is to be found. Essentially, the stronger the first factor, the weaker the third factor, and vice versa. Those with the strongest first factor have the least free will, and Dabrowski cited psychopaths as an example.
This is sure to insult some readers’ sensibilities, but psychopaths do not have free will in any meaningful sense of the term. Their emotional/behavioral “range of motion” is so limited that if you were to anonymize accounts of their thinking patterns, emotions, and interpersonal behaviors, you would be hard-pressed to tell one from another. They can’t change who they are, and they can’t not do what they do. Here’s how Dabrowski put it:
When the developmental potential is limited to the first factor we are dealing with a psychopathic or sociopathic individual indifferent to social opinion and social influence, pursuing only his own totally egocentric goals. Such individuals are incapable of reflection on their actions. Their life is a function of externals. … For instance when Jimmy Hoffa described to an audience the depersonalization he suffered in prison he could only describe it in terms of being deprived of the choice of haircut, clothing and unlimited use of his money.
The developmental potential can be limited to the first and the second factors only. In that case we are dealing with individuals who throughout their life remain in the grip of social opinion and their own psychological typology (e.g. social climbers, fame seekers, those who say “I was born that way” or “I am the product of my past” and do not conceive of changing). External influences from groups or individuals shape their behavior but not necessarily in a stable fashion. Changing influences shift the patterns of behavior or can deprive it of any pattern altogether. Autonomous developmental factors do not appear, and if they do only briefly, they do not take hold.
The developmental potential may have its full complement of all three sets of factors. In that case the individual consciously struggles to overcome his social indoctrination and constitutional typology (e.g. a strongly introverted person works to reduce his tendency to withdraw by seeking contacts with others in a more frequent and satisfying fashion). Such a person becomes aware of his own development and his own autonomous hierarchy of values. He becomes more and more inner-directed.
There is thus an important difference between the first two factors of development and the third. The first two factors allow only for external motivation, while the third is a factor of internal motivation in behavior and development. This is another example where a question of determinants of behavior cannot be properly settled outside the context of development. Aggressiveness, enterprise, and leadership of “self-made” men may often appear to spring from an internal locus of control but more closely examined often show no evidence of autonomous developmental dynamisms. Such individuals may be driven by a great deal of energy but their motives and goals are geared to external norms of success.
When the autonomous factors emerge, self-determination becomes possible, but not before. This means that an individual can transcend, at least to some degree, the sets imposed on him by his constitution and by the maturational stages of the life cycle. (both quotes from Multilevelness of Emotional-Instinctive Functions)
For a person without much, if any, autonomy, the “willing” process is largely automatic. All those past and external data get automatically filtered and directed through the existing “habit channels” or chreodes of one’s personality.
There is little or no “inner psychic transformation” of data between the initial impression of external stimuli and the subsequent expression of behavior in response to it. This is why the most psychopathic individuals are also the most impulsive. They have no “inner brake,” no space in which to contemplate meaningful alternatives or consequences. No possibility of reflecting and initiating a plan to change based on that reflection.
For a person who, unlike a psychopath, is also subject to social influence, there is more room for deliberation, but not much. Action will be filtered through a social lens, with extrinsic goals and options. There are more options, sure, but none that truly come from within. Such a person will be entirely “conventional,” whether that convention is majority-mainstream or minority-subculture.
For someone manifesting a third factor, by contrast, it is as if they have a gate in their psyche through which all external (and internal) influences must pass. There is an expanded space between stimulus and response where “inner psychic transformation” can take place. So, you have all these social and biological influences, and the individual stands at the gate saying, “Okay, I’ll let that one in because it aligns with my aims and my hierarchy of values,” or “No, close the gate. I’m not letting that one in,” or “We let that one in before and nothing good came of it. No more.” All influences are consciously evaluated and a decision must be made whether to incorporate them into one’s psyche, whereas for a person with no obvious third factor, this process proceeds relatively automatically with little to no self-reflection or critical judgment.
So, to reiterate Lobaczewski’s point, the more progress we make in our understanding of human causation—the data influencing or conditioning our choices—the better we are to liberate or free ourselves from the constrictions such influences have on our freedom, as well as to work with them.
In the bigger picture, Lobaczewski describes a set of social-psychological processes that are largely deterministic—they are predictable and proceed like clockwork. This is because the forces directing these processes are themselves limited to the first and second factors. They are playing out a very deeply entrenched “habit” of nature. Ponerology is about learning these processes so that their constrictions on freedom can be lifted.
The two main senses of freedom converge here. Normal people living in a pathocracy come to value political freedom much more than those who live in ostensibly free societies. Learning about human nature and ponerology not only facilitates an expansion of the individual’s free will through the knowledge one can gain about the self; it also facilitates the regaining of political freedom by teaching how to lessen the overt political powers’ control, which constricts normal society’s political freedom. The two go hand in hand.
Human life on Earth is probably one of the biggest jokes to be told when it comes to free will.
I have been trained (to the extent that I have) by a man who started out hoping to create a therapy that could make people more rational but who ended up aspiring for the ultimate in spiritual freedom.
According to his first major book, published in 1950, the average person lives in a very other-determined world. The mind is full of suppressed memories of difficult incidents and the environment is full of potentially triggering stimuli that can revivify any of those difficult incidents to the point where it takes over the mind, body and emotions of the person. He found, moreover, that a lot of people were happy with this version of human psychology, because it left them off the hook.
By 1952 he had written a book called "Advanced Procedure" in which he declared that this triggering mechanism was actually the responsibility of the individual and could be turned off. This message not only lost him some students, but significantly raised the bar on what it means to be "free," or self-determined.
Later he wrote and spoke about how most of us are involved in games that are based on lies, and that it would theoretically be possible to become "pan-determined" and be free to play both sides of a game, or leave a game entirely.
He had discovered that a being could be persuaded to leave its body, with full perceptions, but the being almost always chose to return to the body. Many who have experienced NDEs know that they are capable of operating "exterior." But the ability to choose to go exterior at will is a very high ability that most people have not attained, and probably never will.
Thus, there are grades of freedom. Other-determined, self-determined, pan-determined and knowingly exterior. For most of us, just achieving an awareness of how other-determined we really are would be a major upgrade in self-awareness. The psychopath is perhaps the most deluded in this regard. Yet this delusion gives him a kind of false power over others which he may use quite effectively to his own advantage. The result is destruction and ruined lives.
Excellent explanation! I conclude that so-called NPCs are deficient in third factor.