Free Will, Part 3: Fatalism in a World Without Magic

In parts one and two, we looked at the pros and cons of deconstructing free will and contextualized Mormon teachings on agency in the larger philosophical discussion of free will. Read those posts first if you’re new to this discussion.

• Part 1: Should You Deconstruct Free Will?
• Part 2: Contextualizing Agency in Mormonism

Today we’ll talk about fatalism, which can unconsciously influence your ideas about determinism and make you feel helpless and out of control. The solution, or at least a solution, is to get rid of the magical thinking that you learned along with the theology of free will / agency. Once those concepts hold no more power, determinism is reduced to “things (mostly) happen for reasons,” and we’ll get to leave the hypothetical stuff alone and move on to ridding the world of the bad fruits of free will theologies.

We’ll go over some examples from literature, talk about how patriarchal blessings function in a world without magic, and tie all that back to determinism. I hope that this information will help you avoid some emotional spiraling or regain a sense of control. 

Fatalism in Literature

With fatalism, fated events are inevitable. 

The most famous literary example is probably Oedipus Rex. After Oedipus’s birth, a prophecy states that Oedipus will kill his father, so that father tries to have baby Oedipus killed to circumvent fate. However, Baby Oedipus, left to die, gets adopted into another family. Oedipus, who does not know that his adoptive parents are not his biological parents, is later told that his fate is to kill his father and have sex with his mother. In an effort to prevent this from happening, Oedipus gets away from his adoptive parents. He then kills a man and marries that man’s widow, and Oedipus much later learns that these people are his biological parents. 

This story is fatalistic in that knowing the prophecy does not allow you to change or avoid your fate. Fate is inevitable. 

Another play in which we see fatalism is Macbeth. After some witches prophesy that he’ll become king, Macbeth leans in to that prophecy hard, murders the king, and takes his throne. A later prophecy tells Macbeth to fear a man named MacDuff, says Macbeth won’t be killed by anyone born of a woman, and predicts that Macbeth will be safe until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth sends some guys to kill Macduff and his family and then thinks he’s invincible. 

However, Macbeth later learns that he didn’t understand the prophecy. Macduff survived Macbeth’s attack and now wants revenge. He comes with an army that carries branches of trees from Birnam Wood, and that apparently counts as the forest moving. And finally, the witches’ definition of “born of woman,” it turns out, does not include c-sections. Macduff was born via c-section, and he kills Macbeth. 

In both of these plays, we see that you can’t stop fate, and trying to stop a prophecy from coming true often makes it happen. 

Mormon Patriarchal Blessings

So that’s prophecy in literature. Let’s talk about prophecy in Mormonism, specifically in patriarchal blessings. 

Unlike these prophecies that are supposed to come true no matter what, LDS prophecies are contingent on righteousness. Sometimes God tells what will happen if people don’t repent, and the people can avoid painful consequences through repentance. And with patriarchal blessings, members are told that blessings depend on their righteousness. 

My patriarchal blessing told me to beware of people who tell me that they’ve prayed and received revelation that I’m supposed to marry them. I was told to wait for my own revelation and not be deceived. Now, this is a good anti-manipulation message. However, it was presented as a prophecy, which means it was hard not to worry about it happening or that I wouldn’t be righteous enough to avoid falling for the deception.

I tried not to freak out. I’d read Oedipus Rex and Macbeth, among other works of literature that talk about prophecy, and I knew that if you hear a prophecy that freaks you out, the thing to do is ignore it, or else you pretty much guarantee ironic consequences. 

It turns out, ignoring a prophesy is nearly impossible. Worry about whether guys I met were manipulative reduced my willingness to enter relationships (trying to avoid the prophecy), and wanting to get the prophecy out of the way so I could relax meant I was tempted to date jerks on purpose to make the prophecy happen and regain control. The worry was paralyzing.

Unconnected with my patriarchal blessing, I ended up doing a lot of counseling, and through that counseling, I learned about boundaries and how to have healthy relationships. 

Eventually, I got to the point where I was dating my now-husband. I wasn’t getting an answer to my prayers about whether I should marry him, and I couldn’t see any situation in which he’d be a manipulative jerk as described in my patriarchal blessing, so I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t going to break up with him because I hadn’t dated a jerk as described in the blessing yet. That would be stupid. But I also didn’t feel like I could get married because this thing was supposed to happen before I got married for time and all eternity. At the very least, I needed a definitive answer that I was supposed to marry my then-boyfriend. If I wasn’t obedient and righteous—if I ignored the warning to receive my own revelation and decided on my own whether to marry him—then I could lose the protection contingent on my righteousness.

Fortunately, I then talked about the prophecy with a therapist who convinced me to first decide what I wanted, at which point I was able to feel elevation emotion, ie, a confirmation from the Holy Ghost, about marrying my now-husband. I was then able to ignore the prophecy in my patriarchal blessing. I decided that probably the patriarch was well-meaning but not inspired during that part, or else the prophesy was a possibility but not an inevitability. My husband and I have been happily married for years now. 

I tell you this story because what happened is exactly what you’d expect to happen with a prophecy given in a non-magical world. 

That is, the whole thing was stupid. 

It doesn’t make any sense to make major life decisions according to the rules that work in plays about fatalism because we don’t actually live in a magical world.

But if you’re on this site, you were probably raised to believe we do live in a world controlled by supernatural power, and you may still be applying logic based in magical thinking to your current life, even if you don’t believe in magic or God or any sort of supernatural power.

You may be doing this with your understanding of determinism. If we take the magical rules out, things get a lot less emotionally turbulent.

Deterministic Inevitability in a Rational World

Depending on your definition of fatalism, it can be fair to call determinism fatalistic.

Some determinists say that everything that has happened since the Big Bang has essentially been predetermined—that’s the only way things could have happened. If you rewound the universe, the exact same things would happen on the replay because all events were caused by the events that came before it, linking history together in a chain of inevitable events.

The very idea can make you feel a freaky lack of control over your own life. 

And determinist philosophers are not trying to help you feel better. In Free Will, Sam Harris says things like “you’re not free,” and the cover image literally has the words “free will” suspended by marionette strings. 

Baron d’Holbach said, “All of us are just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always made to do, with no real will.” 

That is bleak. (And controversial. Gotta sell those books.)

But there’s a crucial difference between determinism and the fatalism of Greek and British drama (or Calvinist predestination or LDS prophecy): a lack of supernatural power.

Determinists tend to be atheists, and atheism makes determinism much less threatening to a sense of autonomy.

First, there are not powerful beings, be they witches, Fates, God, a patriarch, or a giant tarantula-squid, pulling the strings, telling you the future, and messing with your head.

As of right now, we have no godlike supercomputer that can accurately account for every factor in the universe. So this is all theoretical, and while I personally would guess that chaos is a big enough factor for history not to be predetermined, I also don’t care a lot about this magical scenario in which we rewind the universe. Because that’s impossible. There’s no all-knowing judge who can push a button, cancel Earth, and reset the universe.

Second, if no one knows what’s going to happen, then that means we can’t have prophecies that inevitably come true. We have statistics and prognoses that are getting more and more accurate, but unlike in magical fatalism, where a prophecy will inevitably come true, in a rational world, knowing about a potential future means that you can act differently and sometimes avoid a predicted negative outcome if you want to. Even if you can’t avoid the outcome, like with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, the information allows you to make better choices in light of the the inevitable. So knowing information in advance is not just going to mess with your head. It’s actually helpful.  

Sure, no matter what you do or don’t do, people can say your choice was predetermined, but since they don’t have details to give you, for your purposes, an edgy determinist philosopher might as well be a psychic who goes around saying, “Ah, yes, it was as I foresaw,” even though they never made a specific prediction. 

Or to be fairer to them, it’s like they’re going around saying, “things happen for reasons,” whenever anything happens.

And like, yeah, man. We know. Stop making it all cryptic and freaky.

Free Will Versus Choices

You probably learned about fatalism in school by reading a play (or hearing about a play) like Oedipus Rex or Macbeth. You likely learned that people used to believe more strongly in fate, whereas today we focus more on choices and our ability to choose our own destinies (a take rooted in free will theology). You may have also learned about the theology of predestination.

When we get rid of the Christian lens and doctrine of free will, our brains are liable to default to the other takes we’ve been taught about but previously rejected—probably Calvinist predestination or (supernatural) fatalism—and conclude that no free will means that our choices don’t matter.

But that’s not what determinists are saying.

In Free Will, Sam Harris writes: 

As Dan Dennett and many others have pointed out, people generally confuse determinism with fatalism. This gives rise to questions like ‘If everything is determined, why should I do anything? Why not just sit back and see what happens?’ This is pure confusion. To sit back and see what happens is itself a choice that will produce its own consequences. It is also extremely difficult to do: Just try staying in bed all day waiting for something to happen; you will find yourself assailed by the impulse to get up and do something, which will require increasingly heroic efforts to resist.

And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they don’t matter. If I had not decided to write this book, it wouldn’t have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being” (pp. 33–34, boldface added).

Determinism is not saying that the same things will happen regardless of what you do. It’s saying that things happen because of other things that happen, many of which you can’t control or even track, not because of a person’s inherent goodness or badness or because of the will of supernatural forces.

Now that we’ve talked about fatalism, we’re done with the more cerebral examination of determinism. Now we can get to the good part—the practical reasons and benefits of liberating our minds from the stupid vestiges of the free will theology.

In part four, we’ll talk about criminal justice and how determinism can help us be more just.