© David Staume 2006

Are the events of our life the result of free-will or fate?

Although the question implies that the answer must be either one or the other, that’s probably not the case. In my experience, most things seem to exist in the creative space between opposing factors. Take, for example, the debate between the influence of nature and nurture.

The free will verses fate question seems similar to the nature / nurture question, but while the answer to the nature / nurture question can be seen as a combination of the two factors fairly easily, it’s harder to see how fate and free will can co-exist.

Edward de Bono described thought in terms of water droplets falling on an impressionable surface, creating furrows that would send subsequent thoughts in those same directions. Past thought creates the furrows along which subsequent thought will follow, just as rain will make its way to rivers, and rivers to the sea.

Let’s imagine that we exist within a thought environment every bit as real and influential as the physical one. We can imagine this as a landscape, gradually built by the accretion of thoughts and feelings over time – our own, our family’s, our communities’, and nations’. Thoughts that find like-thoughts would behave in the same way as musical notes or electromagnetic waves. Vibrations of any type that find sympathetic vibrations are intensified and prolonged. The thought environment would therefore intensify aligned thoughts and feelings, and diminish or discourage non-aligned thoughts and feelings. It would therefore create a lynch-mob mentality when people feel threatened and emotion is high, and an oppressive environment for dissenters. It’s not a bad model of how the world works, because the sad truth is that most of us think the way we do simply because large numbers of others think that way.

Because we’re looking at fate and free will, let’s move de Bono’s analogy into that context. Instead of imagining thought as water, let’s imagine action as water, and fate as the geography built up by the accumulation of thought. Action will follow the topography of the thought landscape just as water will follow the topography of the physical landscape. The flow of action is therefore fated by the thought landscape just as the flow of water is fated by the physical landscape. But we can change the course of water by changing the physical landscape – as we do with dams, dykes, pipes, and canals; and in the same way we can change the course of action, the way events unfold, by changing the landscape of thought.  And this is how fate and free-will could coexist. Events unfold according to existing pathways because they follow the path of least resistance; but we can change the path of least resistance by changing the landscape of thought.

Fortunately, it is possible to rise above the general landscape and think for our selves, but continuing with the water analogy – it’s very hard to be a dissenting eddy in a powerful river. Individuals can use their will, reason, and intuition, to think differently from the landscape, but en masse action will always follow the deepest furrows, which gives a certain inevitability to the actions of communities and nations.

Various individuals and groups have a selfish interest in manipulating the thought environment: lobbyists, marketers, politicians, dictators, totalitarian regimes, and spin doctors, to name just a few. Unless we are discriminating in the thoughts we think and attempt to rise above the landscape, the thought geography can be so influential – all the more because it’s unseen – that it can have us believing things despite evidence to the contrary, and believing things that are philosophically unsound. We should really think of the thought landscape as a buffet – just because it’s there, it doesn’t mean we have to eat it, and just because we’re there, doesn’t mean we can’t eat somewhere else.

To understand thought we have to think of it as real, as tangible in its own realm. When we think of thought as creating a real environment, like a physical landscape that facilitates or impedes action, we are better able to actively create a better landscape, a less selfish landscape, and be less affected by landscapes that are immoral and false.

De Bono’s model provides a mechanism for fate and free will to co-exist, with free will at every moment building up the landscape, and fate the inevitable actions that flow across its surface.

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