A Thought Experiment On The Lynchpin of Democracy
Emotional Adaptability, Complexity, Free Will, and Democracy
Note: I usually do a discussion post on Sundays
But a snowstorm rolled into my subtropical town. And because this happens only once a decade, I spent many hours walking around taking photos with my pup.
Now I have a sore throat. (Don’t worry, even though Kennedy had bare feet, she’s doing better than I am).
My sore throat could also be induced by stress because *gestures vaguely at the state of society.* And to my dog’s credit: she has no idea that anything unusual is happening.
Either way, I don’t think my little gray cells are up for the post I had intended to write. However, in a few days when I feel better, I’ll send out a discussion post.
In the meantime, I’ll share an essay I wrote on the consequences of living in a society that doesn’t believe in free will, because I think it’s slightly more fitting for this week’s heaviness. (I’ll attach some lovely photos to make up for it).
You might be wondering why I push back so hard on determinism.
It’s true that there are many beliefs I possess that can’t be proven valid or invalid. But there’s one thing that guides me, and it’s the amount of human functionality a worldview can lead us to.
I like to play out our behaviors and beliefs in a grander model to see which beliefs would move humans and society, as a whole, towards a better version of ourselves.
Through that process, I’m driven by a “middle path” balancing act of progress and functionality beyond ideology.
If you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have loyalty to many ideologies.
It’s no accident that this blog is called The Beat Philosopher. A term I created while I was on an 8-month road trip with my Dalmatian, Kennedy.
In 2018 & 2019, Kennedy and I traveled to 30 states, driving 15,000 cross-country miles with camping gear and a trunk full of philosophy books I couldn’t bear to put in a storage unit.
And it was on the road, while traveling up and down Highway 1, from San Diego to Seattle - visiting every beach town & making an obscene amount of daily decisions - that I began to reconcile the fact that I am most definitely not normal.
I mean, I had always suspected it. But I don’t think I had truly accepted it until I saw how comfortable I was being a weird beach bum, driving around with my Dalmatian, writing about Existentialism, authenticity, and freedom. Because in the grand scheme of all the things that could matter, this was all that mattered to me.
Beatniks (or The Beat Generation) were gritty counterculture poets, writers, & Bohemians who consistently stood outside of normal conventions. They devoted themselves to their art and their own personal rhyme and reason, because it mattered more to them than anything society could offer them.
(And just think - they were mostly white men, so imagine all of the things society could have offered them).
Still, they did all of those salacious things that we consider normal now, but they did them at the precise moment when it would cause them to be shunned by society.
And the thing was, they didn’t care, because they had more loyalty to the raw emotion they carried within them than a need to fit into, or comply, with external conventions.
You might argue that even though academia has presented a predominantly conventional view of philosophers as stuffy, tweed-coated, logicians. (Or am I only picturing Bertrand Russell as the visual prototype?)… there are still a great deal of philosophers who shared a counterculture spirit.
After all, we’ve never had a society of philosophers. Philosophy has always been sparingly spread throughout history. Never an at-large cultural consensus amongst humans. We’re, logicians, sure. But we’re also, as Nietzsche calls them, “free spirits.”
Existentialists, particularly, broke all of the rules. They were professors, surrealists, activists, playwrights, communists, survivors of the horrors of the Holocaust, novelists, psychotherapists, AND philosophers.
But perhaps because they weren’t American, they were still missing something the Beatniks had: a lack of fucks to give.
The Existentialists had people to impress. Awards to be gained. Validation to receive. While the Beatniks were just being themselves, without any approval from society, for the pure reason that art & authenticity are fulfilling and meaningful.
And that’s what I was doing on my road trip. Impressing no one. But living meaningfully free.
Thus, I merged my intention to pay homage to my own raw emotion, my own inner drive, and free-spirit-living - with my colder, tweed-coated, logician nature, by naming the blog The Beat Philosopher.
Why do I want you to know this now?
Because I want you to know that nothing I’ve told you in this blog is on behalf of any ideology or institution. You can, within your own framework, your own belief system, and your own loyalty, apply any of the insights I’ve given to the worldview you hold.
I think, over the years, the only things I feel deep loyalty to are rationality, complexity, freedom, humanism, equality, and democracy.
And in the world I currently live within, I’m going to consistently fight to protect those things.
But this is also, strangely, part of what makes me repulsed by determinism.
Let me explain.
A few weeks ago, while I was editing one of my articles on free will, I wrote:
I have so much remorse for opening up the pandora’s box of the free will debate. Because determinism is finite. The discussion of determinism can pretty much be summed up in 400 words.
In one fell swoop, Determinism collapses humans into a finite definition that “they are what they are and they can’t change themselves.”
But because I believe in free will, I could write an essay every day of the year on the parameters of it. Not the debate - the description of it.
I mean, to exist freely means you can cultivate your own meaningful parameters to exist within. Freedom implies infinite multiplication. I could tell a different angle or story about how free will operates in this circumstance or for that person every single day.
This got me thinking about the difference between a complex and nuanced worldview vs an oversimplified one.
I’ve long suspected that the deterministic worldview is actually a cop-out that gives people permission to abstain from nuanced conversations and, instead, rely on emotionally stunted answers to replace complex human behavior.
These are debates that offer seductive solutions by making it easy for people to avoid truly exercising their emotional capacity in order to understand other human beings or their choices.
You see, I always believed I had free will because when faced with choices, I confronted the responsibility of those choices, weighed my options, made mistakes, learned from my mistakes, and surprised myself with new paths of adapted behaviors thereafter.
But that’s because I have emotional adaptability.
So when confronted with choices, I know that I need to dig inside of myself and force myself to have growth.
Thus, the ability to exercise free will comes partially from the ability to adapt to new environments.
Essentially, if you always did what you always did - you might assume you have no choice.
In order to exercise a choice, you need to adapt INTO a person capable of doing something new. Capable of surprising yourself.
And emotionally stunted people have trouble doing that.
The fact is, if you have already become a person who has fallen into your own unconscious grooves - and you routinely process information the same way - which leads you to draw the same conclusions - and act on the same behaviors… you’re going to think you don’t have free will.
But listen, any person who has said something to offend someone even once and then sees that person again and thinks:
“Hmm… if I mention this subject, it’s really going to trigger them, so maybe I’ll keep my opinions to myself…” has employed free will.
The problem is, a person with an emotionally stunted capacity has probably not done that. They continue to feel possessed to say the wrong thing over and over again.
So anybody who has employed the least amount of emotional intelligence, has experienced one of the most basic roles that free will plays in human behavior: the ability to adapt to the emotional needs of other people in order to get along with them.
EQ is the choice to not make the same mistakes you’ve made before. It’s the choice to consider another person’s emotions and change your behavior to adapt to that person’s needs.
But think of it from the opposite perspective:
If you have no ability to adapt to emotional situations and you feel compelled to piss people off over and over again, but you don’t know why. You can’t help yourself.
Then believing that you don’t have free will is the absolute easiest way to justify remaining emotionally stunted.
Essentially, you don’t WANT to adapt your behavior to the emotional needs of the people around you. That’s why you’d LOVE to live in a paradigm that makes it impossible to change yourself.
In fact, it exonerates you from the responsibility to try.
So - is it a coincidence that the ideology of determinism is often led by internet bros? I don’t think so.
Now, I will also freely admit that I respect other people’s worldviews precisely because I believe in free will.
I don’t pressure people to change their mind often. It’s been my ethical code to walk away from people at ten times the rate than I argue with them. And it’s very normal for me to permanently cease contact.
Why? Not because any of these people are bad people. It’s not an indictment of their value as human beings. It’s just that we’re all responsible for the worldviews we hold - and the logic we employ to create them.
I come from a psychology background.
Fifteen years ago, I intended to get a PhD in Psychology precisely so that I could help people evolve out of their feelings of powerlessness.
But we have this idea in psychology that you can’t help anyone unwilling to help themselves. Meaning: a psychologist can’t heal for you. You have to want to heal.
Over the years of writing psychology, I had never explicitly spoken about free will. It was just such an implied characteristic within all of my writing on human behaviors, that I simply couldn’t comprehend humans without it.
If we don’t consider ourselves capable of making a choice between two options on our path forward, then we have no power, whatsoever, in any given moment.
So when I first came across the prevalence of determinism in 2019, I’ll admit, I was sad and frustrated by it. I looked around at all of these people who didn’t believe in free will and I was frustrated for them.
I thought, it’s bad enough that people feel powerless when they do believe in free will. But, bro, you’ve disempowered yourself completely.
Hopelessly.
It’s my honest belief that if you don’t believe in free will, you’re absolutely fucked.
But that’s when I began to realize that perhaps the prevalence of the deterministic worldview actually arose to explain away our powerlessness. And I’ll tell you the exact conversation I was having that made me realize this:
In 2019, I was in one of my many philosophy discussions on Twitter.
By the way, I actually got the idea to start those philosophy discussions one cold evening, while drinking wine and listening to live acoustic music at a cafe in San Francisco on my road trip.
But in one of the discussions I was having, a person who didn’t believe in free will popped up.
I don’t remember what he said. And I don’t remember what I said. I just know we went back and forth for a while, until I finally asked him,
“What are you realistically trying to achieve in this conversation?”
You claim I don’t have free will
But I’ve told you I believe in free will
If I had no choice to believe in free will, then something caused me to believe in it.
Ergo, I can’t change my mind
So why are you trying to change my mind?
But you see, the logic behind the argument wasn’t the same in reverse.
I claim he does have free will
He says he doesn’t believe in free will
I claim he made the choice not to believe in free will, thus he can change his mind.
So what am I doing in this conversation? I’m trying to give him reasons to change his mind.
Logistically, what I wanted to achieve was achievable - based on my own axiom of possessing free will.
While the axiom of possessing no free will - but still expending the effort to try to change someone’s mind, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
But - if you can believe it - after I asked him this question, he doubled down and told me something that terrified me to my core.
The violating logic of determinists.
He said:
Even though we can’t change ourselves, he believed, over time, we might change based on gradual environmental conditions.
So by him having this argument with me - it might inadvertently prompt me to change in the future.
Superficially, that sounds well and good. We are social creatures, so you can bet we change because of people and experiences we have over time.
And yet, no matter how you spin it, the implications of this logic are so much worse than the superficial meaning.
In the simplest terms, what he was telling me about myself is that:
I don’t have free will, thus, I can’t make the choice to change.
But he feels that if he harasses me enough - then without my consent, he can TRIGGER an unwilling change in my belief system.
You see, to acknowledge that someone has free will is a sign of respect. You show that you believe they possess autonomy and self-determination. You may not like their choices, but you believe in their inherent freedom.
By him arguing with me on the premise that I have no free will - this means that he wasn’t offering me a good faith choice to change.
Instead, he was trying to become a causal force that provokes me to change without me having any power over it.
Sure, maybe I backed him into a corner and he had to scramble to make sense of his belief in the quickest and easiest explanation that came to him. Maybe he doesn’t really think that he can just “force me” to change by being a pressure point in my environment.
You could also reverse the logic and say that this is his way of justifying a codependent relationship.
In his mind, he might feel: “How can I take responsibility for any of my own behaviors? I’m not in control of my actions.”
So he’s telling himself, “Perhaps other people can change me over time.”
(And if that’s so, then I pity the person who chose to marry this guy, because that’s going to be a mess).
But he answered in the only way a determinist could.
Because a determinist assumes we’re all just causal effects in the universe. And he hadn’t thought it through enough to realize that even his intention to argue with me is motivated by the belief in free will.
Human beings argue with each other to try to convince people to change their minds because we believe people made up their minds in the first place.
We feel angry at people because we believe they made the wrong choices. But if there are no choices to make, how could anyone fail to make the right choice?
In fact, in a causal universe, can it really be said that there are any irrational effects? If two forces come together and create a combined effect, is there even a possibility to call these pre-determined effects “irrational?”
Causal relationships simply are what they are. So even our worst behaviors would simply be rational effects of an anticipated causal relationship.
The exact opposite is true if humans are free. If we’re free, then we’re not pre-determined to be rational creatures. The amount of unpredictable behavior; the dysfunction; the self-destructiveness; the way humans are self-defeating; masochistic; or contradictory… all of those things make sense within freedom.
Over time, we’ve come to accept the irrationality of the human being because we believe they’re free to make the wrong choices.
We expect humans to be spontaneously stupid, irrational, experimental, self-destructive, & make poor judgment calls…
(As anybody who has been a teenage boy or has raised a teenage boy should know firsthand).
But at least if we can consider mankind’s willpower as free, then we can consider ourselves free to be crazy. Free to not make sense. Free to do things that are erratic and pointless.
Free to be pointless.
For a determinist, the implication is that we exist in a causal universe and thus, there’s a causal force that created every pointless decision we make.
A causal reason exists for every irrational feeling we possess. A causal reason exists for every conflict we have with our own decisions. Which means we’re a mental space that is 100% causal - but completely conflicted.
Causally conflicted. (Because each conflict has to be sourced by its own cause).
At least with freedom of choice, this explains the conflict. It explains the doubt. It explains the fear. It explains the anxiety. It explains the confusion. It explains the regret.
Those neurotic emotions are because we have choice. They’re created by the ambiguity of not knowing what will happen if we act on certain behaviors. So we deliberate. We feel fear, and anxiety. We wonder and speculate.
But if we don’t have a choice and all we had to do was follow a causal relationship to the inevitable decision we were always going to make - then there are no irrational human behaviors. There can’t be.
And thus, we’d all be a lot less angry, because the actions people take are simply the only actions they could ever take.
And how can we blame them for something they can’t control?
Indeed, determinism would solve a lot of our problems.
Except, that we already constructed a society based on free will. We’ve already built relationship paradigms based on free will. And we do feel that people are responsible for their actions.
Particularly when they choose the wrong action, we want them to be penalized for it. We want there to exist consequences for wrong choices.
That’s the basis of the Justice System.
And that’s the reason that this entire week has felt so fragile and surreal.
Because our society is not abiding by the parameters that we’ve created for it––the consequences we’ve created for people who make “the wrong choices.”
It could be said that an inherent aspect of a strong and functional democracy is the ability to make consequences for people who make the wrong choices.
That way, we can keep a society orderly and functional even though people have free will.
By punishing those who make the wrong choices, we can incentivize others to make the right ones. And our society can continue to function within our inherent freedom.
But what happens if we lose the ability to enforce consequences for those who make the wrong choice?
A democracy will begin to break down when its own infrastructure cannot punish those who make the wrong choices––and thus, we’re subject to the natural disorder and chaos of mistakes that go unpunished.
But hey. We don’t have free will, so who made a mistake in the first place?
Who fucked up?
This entire week need not be frustrating or scary. These are just the rational consequences of a causal universe determining our inevitable actions.
Our democracy never stood a chance.
And that’s my point here.
It’s all well and good for one person to believe in determinism - within a society that fundamentally accepts the free will nature of human beings.
Just like one person not getting vaccinated in a society that is predominantly vaccinated is harmless, as well.
But the entire structure of the argument changes if nobody gets vaccinated and we’re in constant health epidemics!
And the same can be said for free will.
If our society truly believed that humans will always be what they will always be, and can’t learn from their mistakes. Then we might even justify taking people’s votes away.
You could easily convince people that what a weak electorate needs is a powerful leader to control them.
If an electorate has no choice. No ability to change their mind. No ability to learn from their mistakes. No autonomy or dominion from causal circumstances outside of themselves––then the only solution to rule them is to have those born naturally strong lead them.
Such as tyrants and autocrats.
How quickly when we dissolve free will, we also dissolve the principles of democracy.
As if Free Will is actually the lynchpin here.
After all, isn’t determinism a natural justification for tyranny or autocracy?
Strongmen could justify their behaviors because they believe they’re a natural phenomenon in the universe.
“Strong people were born strong and weak people were born weak.” (Survival of the fittest, and all that).
And there’s nothing we can do about it.
A Strongman might reason that this is the natural world order. Thus, this is his destiny.
If he’s born with the desire to become a powerful leader, and he can’t change this desire, then even determinism justifies his right to lead by his instinct.
Autocracy is built on a foundation of rejecting free will.
But in the worldview of Determinism, the Strongman has no free will to even violate!
In fact, if there’s no free will, then the weak deserve to have no power, because as the line from Lidia Poët says “Lidia, if God had wanted you to be a lawyer, he would have made you a man.”
An autocrat can say, “If God wanted you to make your own decisions, he would have made you strong. But he made ME strong. Thus, I’m the person who should be the shepherd of the weak-willed.
And remember, I live in Savannah, Georgia - surrounded by slave plantations.
We’re reminded every day that this was the exact logic that slave-owners and white supremacists used to legitimize the enslavement of Africans. They told themselves
“Africans were born weak, born subservient, born as children, unable to care for themselves, existing in undeveloped, uncivilized tribes - and thus, they needed a superior white man to own, care for, and be their authority. We’re their savior.”
The slave owners convinced themselves: “If God had wanted Africans to be free, he would have made them born a white man.”
And they reasoned the same thing about the “weaker sex.” They were justified in treating women as if they were property of their fathers and husbands, because they needed a protector and a savior.
Women couldn’t be trusted with the responsibility of their own freedom.
What freedom?
From the perspective of determinism, Autocrats aren’t choosing to violate the free will of others. Others don’t have free will to violate.
And those who are strong are born with the natural right to overcome the weak-willed of society. Even if the definition of strength is narrowly defined by the characteristics of white men [with guns, germs, and steel].
In fact, as was described in my conversation on Twitter in 2019––in a world without free will, all anyone needs to do is pressure the right pressure points, and they can remove the beliefs and values of the electorate and convince people to believe things completely contrary to their original worldviews.
And you can bet that the current Strongmen of our generation are trying to force themselves onto a weak electorate. They are trying to use propaganda and disinformation to impose a worldview that they already know we’re against.
And thus, the best defense against Strongmen is the ability to possess free will.
It seems to me, that if you get rid of the concept of free will, then democracy has nothing much left to protect, except property.
But that’s why democracy has such a special relationship to freedom, and - yes, to free will.
Because, in the paradigm of equality, we recognize that all human beings possess an inherent dual potential for strength and weakness––regardless of the nature they were born with. Regardless of their sex or skin color.
It is via our free will, that we grow and develop into an entirely evolved version of the person we once were. So within equality’s paradigm:
Life is your opportunity to experiment with choices and figure out what you’re going to make of it.
The premise of free will is that we expect humans to be confronted by challenges that force them to rise up and choose one of those potentials between strength and weakness.
Thus, there is no person born weak who deserves to remain weak.
But there is a person born with a challenge, who can choose to try to overcome it.
In a world with free will and democracy - even the weak-willed have the inherent right to rule their lives and take control of their own destiny.
Yes, there are consequences for their mistakes––both natural and designed by the infrastructure of the justice system.
But a fair and equal democracy believes that all human beings are born with an inherent right to rule their lives within the personal parameters of free will.
And sure, some autocrats can successfully manipulate some of the electorate. Not ALL people. But certainly some.
But I’m going to let you in on a secret: the concept of “Political Strongmen” is incredibly misleading.
The autocrats who put themselves into these positions of power are not actually people who are internally strong. They’re merely people who are internally insane.
It is their capacity for delusion that makes them hold so tightly to a false reality of power.
Do you know how many drugs Hitler was taking to make him feel strong?
Do you know how many days Putin spent in a bunker before he got the irrational idea to invade a sovereign nation?
But it is true that, both, insanity & drug-induced insanity can make a person seem strong.
Imagine insanity like adrenaline. Adrenaline can give you a surge of superhuman strength because all of the rational parameters that keep you from harming yourself are ditched in a desperate attempt to survive.
And thus, you won’t feel pain. Even if what you’re doing is harming yourself.
Insanity is a surge of superhuman strength because all of the rational parameters that would remind you of the consequences of your actions are ditched.
So it’s true that because a Strongman has an inability to admit to pain or fear, this can make him appear superhuman and powerful, temporarily.
Until the rest of society realizes that insanity doesn’t give a person actual power. It gives them powerlessness against acting on their own delusions.
They are incapable of acknowledging reality. Which gives them a temporary illusion of strength only by making them incapable of recognizing their limitations.
Until the harsh slap of reality reminds them of those limitations.
The reason autocrats can’t manipulate all people, is because we’re still stronger than they are. We might exist in a mind that conceives of consequences. We might recognize fear or pain.
And thus, we exist in rational boundaries.
But what our environment tries to turn us into, we have the ability to fight back - kicking and screaming - until we change said environment.
That is, if we believe we have free will in the first place.
It’s only when those with free will & emotional adaptability rise to the occasion and let a crisis evolve them, that the whole society grows as a consequence.
I do believe that when we exercise our free will and choose self-evolution… a Strongman’s power of insanity is rendered obsolete and the premise of a democracy is definitively vindicated.
All Rights Reserved © 2025 Elephant Grass Press, LLC
You can always unsubscribe in a single click. Thanks again!
I can’t know for sure if I have free will. But it certainly feels that I have more will and agency when my state is calm, my mind is quiet, and I can identify with the observer in my psyche. When I feel stressed or threatened, my responses seem to come from an automatic, patterned set of responses. In a state of calm, I can observe thoughts arising without needing to do anything about them. So if maintaining a climate of fear and uncertainty limits the potential for free will (or at least shrinks the choices that come into our conscious awareness), then it is a powerful tool for a political strongman.
I fail to see your connection with free will and democracy. Autocracy is better equipped for change as it has authority. Democracy blows in the wind, decisions and planning are difficult to enforce, the more liberal it has become the more out of control it is. Parties simply play around with numbers, decisions are made by an invisible slave master, that of money. Freedom is a luxury few can afford, and if you can afford it, you are likely trapped by it. The world is run by financial crackheads. At least though I can say that, although many would wish that I could not. Power corrupts my words are unlikely to change anything, the day it does, democracy will buy it, absorb the counter culture, and continue on in its inhuman crusade for consumption. Britain has been playing that trick for Centuries. The Elite hold sway, it is freedom under an oppressive shadow and only a few get to step into the Sun.