Mutability

The nature-nurture debate remains at the heart of most modern social discourse. On one side: nature, which dangerously includes ethnicity, gender, and blood; on the other: nurture, which safely includes wealth, environment, education, and social networks.

A more interesting framing is to divide personal characteristics into the mutable and the immutable. The former are caused and sustained by unwilled forces: genetics; formative childhood experiences; deep cultural influences; transient, but nevertheless important, influences from mass culture. The latter feel like they can be willed: that is, they change under the influence of information, experience, and technique. One’s diet; moral and political beliefs; attitude and ‘mindset’; level of fitness; self-discipline, and so on.

It is disturbing when parts of our Self are immutable. Your genetic predispositions; tastes and characteristics fixed in early childhood; talents for sport and academia; blinkers imposed by deep cultural inheritance; and, perhaps most frustrating of all, characteristics dependent upon society as a whole. Many of our desires are partially constituted by our social surroundings in ever-wider circles: family, friends, streets, towns, cities, countries, networks, until they get so wide we cannot escape.

Happy are those who can find ‘their tribe’, the people who help them become their best selves, tragic are those whose tribe does not exist, or is impossibly obscure; terrible is the idea much of our character is the product of our family, hence the desperate need for ‘found-families’; miserable is the prospect of living in a society which does not fit one’s needs, and worse when no such society exists or could exist today. Perhaps your taste in movies is partially and unavoidably determined by the opinions of those around you? Imagine now that the entire world is obsessed with Marvel Movies. Now you like Marvel Films.

The development of modern society can be seen as the progressive freeing of the individual from these limits. The perfection of the blank slate: fulfilled through freedom and made via technique.

• Knowledge and technique will never be unavailable: all can have information, the tools for making decisions, access to experiences, and the means of introspection to discover what one ‘truly wants’;
• Cultural legacy will not blind us: we will deconstruct culture, collage it, and in doing so reveal every cultural possibility, allowing us unlimited vision of all that has been, is, and could be;
• Childhood trauma and preference will not control us: we will be freed from the past through advanced therapy and introspection which will undo the conditioning of youth;
• Biology will not constrain us: we will circumvent it with powerful therapeutic techniques, behavioural and chemical. Where these are not enough, we will use more potent science: cultural engineering; surgery; hormone treatment; cyborgification; and genetic editing;
• Society will not limit us: we will create a free market of societies, friends, found-families, towns, cities, countries, and networks. Every possible tribe that can exist will exist, and all you need to do is choose.

Choice, unlimited choice, ensures there will be no oppression. The only losers are those whose preferences are for unchosen and unwilled ways of life. The only problem is that human agency got lost somewhere in the wash. There is no free will, only processes of decision which feel more or less ‘willed.’ To feel willed, they must be the result of conscious decision-making and a legible procedure. This requires information (textual and experiential) and technique (strategic and introspective). But there is no view from nowhere: if we blow up our heritage sites we won’t be left with cosmic freedom. It will just be a pile of ugly stones.