The Problem That Refuses to Die
Every serious thinker who has ever lived has been ambushed by the question of free will, and every answer proposed has been unsatisfying. The determinist says: everything is caused, including your thoughts and choices, and therefore free will is an illusion. The libertarian (in the philosophical sense) says: consciousness is not reducible to physical causation, and therefore choices are genuinely free. The compatibilist says: free will is compatible with determinism if we define free will correctly. And every one of these positions, examined carefully, either denies something obviously true about human experience or explains it away with a definition that changes the subject.
The determinist denies agency -- the felt experience that you are making choices, not merely executing a program. This denial is hard to take seriously, because it applies to itself: if the determinist's assertion is determined by prior causes, it is not a discovery about reality but a noise produced by a particular arrangement of neurons, no more or less true than the libertarian's opposite assertion produced by a different arrangement. Determinism, taken seriously, destroys the very concept of truth that it claims to represent.
The libertarian denies causation -- the empirically established fact that physical events have physical causes, that neurons fire according to physical laws, and that the brain is a physical system embedded in a physical universe. The libertarian must posit either a supernatural intervention (the soul acting on the brain from outside the causal order) or a brute exception to physical law (some neural events are uncaused). Neither is satisfying. The first is unfalsifiable. The second contradicts everything we know about physics.
The compatibilist redefines -- typically, free will is redefined as "acting in accordance with one's desires without external coercion," which is a useful distinction for legal and moral purposes but does not address the metaphysical question. The compatibilist's free will is compatible with determinism because it is not the free will anyone was asking about. The question was whether your desires themselves are free, not whether you are free to act on them.
I rehearse these positions not to resolve them -- a chapter in a theology manuscript is not the place where the free will debate ends -- but to establish why the question matters for this theology and to develop a synthesis that, if not a final answer, is at least a productive framework for thinking about agency, responsibility, and the structure of historical change.
The synthesis draws on four thinkers, each of whom contributes something the others lack: Georgi Plekhanov, Joseph Campbell, Robert Pirsig, and Douglas Hofstadter. Together, they produce a framework in which free will is neither an illusion (the determinist claim) nor an uncaused miracle (the libertarian claim) but an emergent property of complex self-referential systems -- genuine, irreducible, and constrained by the structure it transcends.
Plekhanov: Structural Contingency
Georgi Plekhanov's On the Role of the Individual in History (1898) is one of the most underappreciated works in the philosophy of history, primarily because Plekhanov was a Marxist and the West's intellectual embargo on Marxist thought has buried much of genuine value along with much that deserved burial.
Plekhanov's argument is deceptively simple. Historical events have two dimensions: structural necessity and individual contingency.
Structural necessity: the French Revolution was going to happen. The economic contradictions of the ancien regime, the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, the fiscal crisis of the monarchy, the demographic pressures, the political paralysis -- all of these created a structural situation in which revolution was, if not inevitable, then overwhelmingly probable. No particular individual caused the French Revolution. The structure caused it.
Individual contingency: Napoleon happened. The specific form the Revolution took, the specific course of the wars that followed, the specific institutional outcomes -- these were shaped by the particular individuals who happened to be present at the critical junctures. If Napoleon had been killed at Toulon in 1793, the Republic would still have needed a military dictator -- the structural pressures that produced one would have remained operative -- but the specific dictator would have been different, and the specific history would have diverged.
Plekhanov's synthesis: structure determines the what, individuals determine the how. The Revolution was structurally necessary. Napoleon was contingent. The Republic needed a military genius; it got that particular military genius by historical accident. Replace Napoleon with another commander and you get a different trajectory through the same structural landscape.
This maps directly onto the theology I have been developing, with a precision that Plekhanov -- an atheist materialist -- would have found irritating.
The Riemann sphere (Chapter 17) provides the structural landscape. The topology of the sphere -- the point at infinity, the possible trajectories, the constraints on movement -- is determined. God, as the point at infinity, determines the attractor. The general direction of approach is structurally constrained. You cannot approach the point at infinity by moving in circles on the finite plane. The topology is not negotiable.
But the specific trajectory -- the derivative at each point, the path through the complex plane -- is contingent. The topology does not dictate which path you take. It constrains the space of possible paths. Within that space, the specific path is chosen. By whom? By the individual consciousness navigating it. By the strange loop making decisions that are not determined by the structure but are not independent of it either.
Plekhanov's structural contingency is, in theological terms, the relationship between providence and free will. Providence determines the structure. Free will determines the path through the structure. Neither is reducible to the other. The structure without the individual is an uninstantiated possibility space. The individual without the structure is a random walk through chaos. Together, they produce history: the particular trajectory of consciousness through a structurally determined landscape.
Plekhanov Applied: The Christ-Event as Structural Necessity
If Plekhanov is right -- and I think he is, with modifications -- then the Christ-event is structurally necessary but individually contingent.
The structural necessity: in each epoch, the dialectical spiral (Chapter 10) reaches a crisis point. The existing paradigm accumulates anomalies past the threshold of management. The psycho-class capture of the previous epoch's liberating institutions becomes intolerable. The prophetic function (Chapter 3) activates, perceiving the mismatch between the paradigm's claims and reality. The system attempts to suppress the prophetic perception. The suppression fails -- or rather, it succeeds in destroying the individual prophet but fails to destroy the insight, which propagates through the network and initiates the paradigm shift. This is the Christ-event as structure: crucifixion (attempted destruction of the insight), resurrection (the insight survives and propagates), Pentecost (the insight becomes collective).
The individual contingency: the specific person who carries the prophetic function in each epoch is not structurally determined. The Holy Spirit -- Plekhanov's structural necessity -- creates the conditions that require a prophetic response. The individual who responds is contingent. In the first century, it was Jesus of Nazareth. In the sixteenth, it was Martin Luther. In the twentieth, it might have been Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Andrei Sakharov -- or Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet submarine officer who refused to authorize a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chapter 16) and whose individual decision may have prevented the extinction of human civilization.
The Holy Spirit, in this framework, is not a divine person whispering instructions to chosen prophets. The Holy Spirit is the structural pressure that creates the conditions requiring prophetic response -- the accumulation of anomalies, the crisis of the paradigm, the structural moment that calls for someone to speak truth at the risk of personal destruction. The Spirit blows where it wills, which is to say: the structural pressure emerges from the system's own dynamics, not from a pre-scripted plan. Who responds to that pressure -- who picks up the prophetic function and carries it -- is a matter of individual contingency: temperament, position, courage, and the thousand small choices that put a particular person at a particular juncture where the structural moment and the individual capacity converge.
This preserves both divine agency and human freedom without collapsing either into the other. God (the point at infinity) determines the topology. The Holy Spirit (structural necessity) generates the crises that drive the dialectical spiral. The individual (the contingent navigator) chooses whether and how to respond. The structure is not a script. It is a landscape. The landscape constrains the possibilities. The individual walks the landscape.
Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell's monomyth -- the hero's journey that appears in every human culture's mythology -- provides the subjective complement to Plekhanov's structural analysis.
Plekhanov describes how history works from the outside: structural pressures create moments of crisis, and individuals navigate those moments. Campbell describes how historical navigation works from the inside: the subjective experience of the individual who encounters a structural crisis and responds to it.
The monomyth has a specific structure:
Departure. The hero leaves the ordinary world -- the world of normie consensus, the world where the paradigm is operative and unchallenged. The departure is not always voluntary. Often the hero is thrust out by circumstances: a crisis, a loss, a calling that cannot be refused without self-betrayal. In the theological framework, departure corresponds to the moment when the prophetic perception activates -- when the schizo sees something the normie consensus cannot accommodate, and the seeing makes return to ordinary life impossible.
Initiation. The hero descends into the unknown -- confronts trials, encounters the shadow, meets mentors, faces the supreme ordeal. In the theological framework, initiation is the period of formation: the schizo learns to channel the perception, develops the framework to articulate what they see, encounters the resistance of the existing paradigm, and is tested to the point of destruction. Jesus in the wilderness. Luther at Worms. Bonhoeffer in prison. The initiation is always nearly fatal, because the paradigm defends itself with everything it has.
Return. The hero returns to the ordinary world, transformed, bearing gifts -- a new understanding, a new paradigm, a new institution. The return is essential. Without the return, the hero is a mystic, not a prophet. The mystic ascends and stays. The prophet ascends and returns. In Buddhist terms, the arhat achieves personal liberation and exits the cycle. The bodhisattva achieves liberation and voluntarily returns to help others achieve it.
Campbell's insight that this structure is universal -- present in Greek, Hebrew, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Indigenous, and countless other mythological traditions -- suggests that it maps something real about the structure of consciousness transformation. It is not a literary convention. It is the subjective phenomenology of paradigm shift, experienced from inside the person undergoing it.
The critical point for the free will question: the hero chooses. At every juncture of the journey, the hero faces a choice. To depart or to refuse the call. To continue the descent or to turn back. To face the ordeal or to flee. To return with the boon or to remain in the transcendent state. The structure (the monomyth) constrains the space of possibilities. The hero navigates the space through choices that are genuinely free within the structural constraints.
Campbell adds to Plekhanov the interior dimension. Plekhanov tells us that history moves through structural crises navigated by contingent individuals. Campbell tells us what it feels like from inside: it feels like a journey through death and rebirth, and at every stage the traveler is choosing, not executing a program.
Campbell's Critical Distinction: The Refusal of the Return
The monomyth includes a phase that Campbell treats as a failure mode but that is, for this theology, diagnostically essential: the refusal of the return.
Some heroes, having achieved the transformation, refuse to return to the ordinary world. They remain in the transcendent state -- in the cave, on the mountain, in the altered consciousness. They have seen the Forms (to use Plato's metaphor) and they cannot bring themselves to return to the cave of shadows.
This maps onto a specific failure mode in the normie/psycho/schizo taxonomy. The conspiracy theorist is a schizo who sees real patterns but refuses -- or is unable -- to translate them into a form the normie community can integrate. The conspiracy theorist has departed and undergone initiation (they have genuinely perceived structural patterns that the consensus paradigm suppresses) but they have refused the return (they cannot or will not communicate their perception in a way that bridges the incommensurability gap between their paradigm and the normie paradigm).
The result is a degraded form of prophetic perception: accurate in its pattern detection, useless in its social function. The conspiracy theorist screams the truth into a void, or into an echo chamber of other refused-returners, and the normie world dismisses them as crazy -- which is a correct assessment of their social function (broken) even if it is an incorrect assessment of their perception (often partially accurate).
The hero's return requires a specific capacity that neither departure nor initiation automatically provides: the capacity to translate transcendent insight into the language of the ordinary world without losing the insight in translation. This is the apostolic function (Chapter 22 will develop this fully). The prophet sees. The apostle translates. And translation is not a mechanical operation. It requires understanding both the language of the vision and the language of the community, and constructing a bridge between them that the community can walk across.
In the language of this theology: the philosopher-king perceives at Pearl's Level 3 (counterfactual). The apostolic function is the translation of Level 3 perception into Level 1 and Level 2 language -- into hypotheses that can be tested, predictions that can be validated, interventions that can be implemented. Without this translation, the philosopher-king's perception remains private and socially inert, no matter how accurate it is.
Pirsig: Quality as Pre-Rational Ground
Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the strangest and most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, and its relevance to the free will question is not immediately obvious. But it is deep.
Pirsig's core argument, stripped of the motorcycle and the road trip and the autobiographical drama: the Western philosophical tradition has been built on a false dichotomy. The dichotomy is between the classical understanding (rational, analytical, concerned with underlying form) and the romantic understanding (intuitive, holistic, concerned with immediate experience). Science is classical. Art is romantic. The two are at war, and the war has been going on since Plato and Aristotle.
Pirsig argues that both the classical and romantic understandings are secondary to something more fundamental, which he calls Quality. Quality is what both the classical and romantic understandings are trying to capture -- the pre-intellectual, pre-categorical recognition that some things are better than others, that some actions are more fitting than others, that some expressions capture something real while others miss it. Quality is not subjective (a matter of taste) or objective (a property of objects). It is the event that occurs at the interface between subject and object, before the subject-object distinction has been made.
Quality is, Pirsig argues, the ground of all experience. Before you analyze a motorcycle engine (classical) or appreciate the beauty of a mountain road (romantic), you encounter Quality -- the immediate, pre-rational recognition that something is or is not working, fitting, right. The classical and romantic understandings are both attempts to articulate Quality, and both fail insofar as they divide the undivided ground into subject and object, analysis and intuition, form and feeling.
What does this have to do with free will?
This: the free will debate is trapped in the same false dichotomy. The determinist takes the classical position: analyze the causal structure, identify the causes, conclude that everything is determined. The libertarian takes the romantic position: feel the immediacy of choice, the irreducibility of agency, conclude that something transcends causation. Both are operating within the subject-object framework that Pirsig identifies as the problem.
Quality -- the pre-rational ground of both analysis and experience -- is where free will actually lives. The moment of choice is not a moment of uncaused causation (the libertarian fantasy) or a moment of the illusion of causation (the determinist claim). It is a moment of Quality perception: the pre-rational recognition that one path is better than another, prior to the analysis that would explain why, and prior to the experience that would confirm it.
When I sit at my desk and decide to write this chapter rather than check my phone, I am not executing a deterministic program (though my neural activity is causally governed) and I am not performing an uncaused miracle (though the choice feels genuinely free). I am perceiving Quality -- the pre-rational recognition that writing is more fitting than scrolling at this moment -- and acting on that perception. The perception is real. It is not reducible to the neural activity that implements it, any more than the meaning of a sentence is reducible to the vibrations of the air that carries it. But it is not independent of the neural activity either. It emerges from it, in the strong sense of emergence developed in Chapter 6: genuinely real, genuinely irreducible, genuinely dependent on the substrate but not determined by it.
Pirsig dissolves the free will debate by dissolving the framework that generates it. Quality is neither determined (because it is pre-rational, prior to the causal analysis that would determine it) nor uncaused (because it arises from the interaction of consciousness with reality, which is a causal process). It is the event at the interface -- the moment where consciousness and world meet, before they have been separated into subject and object, cause and effect, determined and free.
Pirsig and Phaedrus: The Prophet Destroyed
There is a biographical dimension to Pirsig that connects directly to the argument of this book.
Phaedrus -- Pirsig's name for his former self, the self that existed before his psychotic break and involuntary hospitalization -- was a philosopher who pursued Quality to its logical conclusion and was destroyed by it. Phaedrus saw that Quality dissolved the subject-object dichotomy, and therefore dissolved the foundations of Western philosophy, and therefore dissolved the intellectual framework that held his own identity together. His Quality-perception, pushed to its limit, shattered the container that held it. The result was psychosis, hospitalization, electroshock therapy, and the erasure of the personality that had done the perceiving.
This is the schizo fate described in Chapter 3, made specific and personal. Phaedrus perceived something real -- Quality as the pre-rational ground of experience -- and the perception destroyed him because the social environment had no institutional container for it. There was no monastery to retreat to, no prophetic office to occupy, no guild of scholars that would have recognized what Phaedrus was seeing and helped him hold it. There was only the psychiatric system, which classified his perception as psychosis and treated it with electricity.
Pirsig's book is the hero's return -- the attempt, after the destruction of Phaedrus, to construct a framework that can hold what Phaedrus saw without being destroyed by it. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the translation of transcendent insight into ordinary language. It is the apostolic function performed on a philosophical insight that had previously proven fatal to its perceiver.
The free will question is embedded in this narrative. Phaedrus did not choose his perception. It emerged from his engagement with philosophy, from the Quality of his attention, from the configuration of his consciousness. But Pirsig chose the return. He chose to construct the framework. He chose to write the book. The perception was given (or emerged, or was forced -- the vocabulary here is less important than the structure). The response to the perception was chosen. Structure and contingency. Plekhanov's synthesis, embodied in a single life.
Hofstadter: Strange Loops and Genuine Novelty
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach provides the formal machinery to complete the synthesis.
I developed Hofstadter's strange loop concept in Chapter 14 (Trinity as Strange Loop), but here I need the specific application to free will. The argument runs as follows:
A formal system is a set of axioms and rules that generate theorems. The axioms are given. The rules are given. The theorems that follow from them are, in principle, determined -- any theorem that can be derived is derivable from the axioms and rules, and no theorem that cannot be derived is reachable. In this sense, a formal system is deterministic. Its output is fully specified by its input.
Godel showed that any formal system powerful enough to represent arithmetic is incomplete: there are statements that are true (about the natural numbers) but that cannot be proved within the system. These Godelian statements are not false. They are not meaningless. They are genuine truths about the system that the system itself cannot establish.
Now: what generates Godelian truths? The system cannot, by definition. They are unprovable within the system. But they are true. Something outside the system -- or something that the system becomes when it is embedded in a larger context -- can recognize them as true. Hofstadter argues that this "something" is the strange loop: the self-referential process through which the system models itself, and in modeling itself, gains access to truths about itself that are not contained in its own formal structure.
Consciousness, Hofstadter argues, is a strange loop. The brain is a physical system governed by physical laws -- a formal system, in the relevant sense. Its behavior is, at the physical level, determined by those laws. But the strange loop -- the self-referential process through which the brain models itself -- generates something that the physical laws alone do not contain: the capacity to recognize truths about the system that the system's own rules cannot derive. This is not magic. It is not supernatural intervention. It is the formal consequence of self-reference in sufficiently complex systems, demonstrated mathematically by Godel and elaborated philosophically by Hofstadter.
Free will, in this framework, is the strange loop's capacity to generate Godelian truths. A choice is free not because it is uncaused (it has physical causes like everything else in the physical universe) and not because it is an illusion (the felt experience of choosing is a real phenomenon with real consequences). A choice is free because it is a Godelian truth: a determination about the system that the system's own formal rules -- the physical laws governing neural activity -- do not uniquely specify.
This is not a trick of definition. It is a genuine third option between determinism and libertarianism. The physical system (the brain) operates according to physical laws. The strange loop (consciousness) generates outputs -- choices, insights, creative acts -- that are consistent with the physical laws but not determined by them, in the same way that Godelian truths are consistent with arithmetic but not provable within arithmetic. The choices are emergent in the strong sense of Chapter 6: genuinely real, genuinely irreducible to the substrate, and genuinely novel -- not contained in the initial conditions plus the rules.
The Full Synthesis
Now I can assemble the synthesis from all four thinkers.
Plekhanov gives us the relationship between structure and contingency. History moves through structural pressures that determine the general landscape. Individuals navigate the landscape through contingent choices. Neither structure nor contingency alone produces the actual trajectory. Together, they produce history.
Campbell gives us the subjective phenomenology. The individual navigating the structural landscape experiences the navigation as a journey: departure from the known, descent into the unknown, transformation through ordeal, return bearing gifts. At every juncture, the hero chooses. The choices are constrained by the structure but not determined by it.
Pirsig gives us the pre-rational ground. The choices the hero makes are not products of rational analysis (the determinist's causal chain) or random impulses (the libertarian's uncaused cause). They are perceptions of Quality -- pre-rational recognitions that one path is more fitting than another. Quality is the guide. It does not determine the path (many paths have Quality). It enables navigation (without Quality perception, the hero wanders randomly).
Hofstadter gives us the formal machinery. The strange loop -- consciousness as self-referential formal system -- generates Godelian truths: choices that are consistent with the physical laws governing the brain but not determined by them. Free will is the strange loop's capacity for genuinely novel output, output that is neither random (it responds to Quality, it engages with structure) nor determined (it is not derivable from the system's axioms and rules alone).
Together: free will is the emergent capacity of self-referential consciousness to navigate structurally determined landscapes through pre-rational Quality perception, producing choices that are genuinely novel -- not derivable from the structure alone, not random, but responsive to something real (Quality, the point at infinity, the Good) that the structure cannot capture from within itself.
This maps onto the Riemann sphere theology with the precision I have been building toward across the entire manuscript.
The topology of the Riemann sphere -- the point at infinity, the structure of the complex plane, the constraints on possible trajectories -- is the Plekhanovian structure. It is determined. You cannot change the topology. God, as the point at infinity, is where God is. The mathematical relationships are what they are.
The derivative -- the direction and rate of movement at each point on the plane -- is the contingent choice. The derivative is freely chosen within the structurally necessary topology. You can approach the point at infinity along many different paths. The topology does not select the path. The strange loop -- the human consciousness navigating the plane -- selects the path, guided by Quality perception (the pre-rational sense of which direction is "toward" and which is "away").
God determines the attractor. Humans determine the path. The Holy Spirit -- the structural pressure that generates paradigm crises and calls forth prophetic response -- creates the conditions in which navigation is demanded. The individual, through the strange loop's Godelian capacity, responds with genuine novelty: choices that the structure alone could not have predicted.
The Derivative on the Complex Plane
I want to make this concrete, because the theology is only as good as its precision.
On the Riemann sphere, a function at any point has a derivative -- a complex number that encodes both the magnitude and direction of change. The derivative is not arbitrary. It is constrained by the function's behavior in the neighborhood of the point. But it is not fully determined by any finite collection of constraints. The derivative at a point is determined by the limit -- by the behavior of the function as it approaches the point from every direction simultaneously.
Human choice is analogous. The choice is constrained -- by neurological architecture, by social environment, by the structural pressures of the epoch, by the position on the complex plane that prior choices have established. But it is not fully determined by those constraints. The constraints establish a neighborhood. Within that neighborhood, the strange loop selects a direction. The selection is not random (it is guided by Quality, by the pre-rational perception of which direction approaches the point at infinity). It is not determined (the constraints do not uniquely specify the direction). It is emergent -- a genuinely novel output of a self-referential system navigating a structurally constrained landscape.
This is the free will that the theology requires. Not the libertarian's uncaused miracle. Not the determinist's eliminated illusion. Not the compatibilist's redefined irrelevance. A genuine emergent capacity, as real as consciousness itself (and for the same reason: both are strong emergent properties of sufficiently complex self-referential systems), constrained by structure, guided by Quality, and productive of genuine novelty.
Is this falsifiable? In the Popperian sense: yes, in principle. If it could be shown that the strange loop's outputs are fully determined by the physical substrate -- that there are no Godelian truths, that self-reference does not produce genuinely novel output, that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of neural activity -- then this framework would be wrong. The evidence from Godel's theorem, from the undecidability results in computability theory, and from the hard problem of consciousness all point in the other direction. But the question is open, and the framework is committed to remaining open to disconfirmation.
Practical Implications: Responsibility Without Omniscience
The Plekhanov-Campbell-Pirsig-Hofstadter synthesis has practical consequences for how we think about moral responsibility, historical agency, and the apostolic task.
Responsibility is real but bounded. If free will is the strange loop's emergent capacity to navigate structure, then moral responsibility is real -- you are genuinely choosing, and the choice has genuine consequences. But responsibility is bounded by the structure you are navigating. A person born into a structure that maximally constrains their choices -- extreme poverty, totalitarian oppression, overwhelming neurological dysfunction -- has less navigational freedom than a person born into a structure that provides more room. Moral judgment must account for the structure, not just the choice. This is not moral relativism. It is structural sensitivity. The choice is real. The structure that constrains the choice is also real.
Historical agency is collective, not individual. Plekhanov's point applies: the structural pressures are larger than any individual. No individual causes a revolution, a paradigm shift, or a civilizational transformation. Individuals respond to structural pressures. The response matters -- Arkhipov's refusal matters, Luther's theses matter, the specific form of the response shapes the specific trajectory of change. But the individual does not bear the weight of structural transformation alone. The apostolic task (next chapter) is not a heroic individual project. It is a collective navigation of structural pressure -- a community of philosopher-kings, merchants, and warriors responding together to the crises that the structure generates.
The Dune warning. Frank Herbert's Dune is the most important cautionary tale about the hero's journey taken too seriously. Paul Atreides is a hero who follows the monomyth to its conclusion and becomes a tyrant. Herbert's point: the hero who believes his own myth -- who identifies with the structural role rather than recognizing himself as a contingent individual navigating a structural moment -- becomes the very thing the prophetic function was meant to diagnose. The philosopher-king who believes himself to be the philosopher-king, rather than a person temporarily occupying the philosopher-king function, is already on the path to becoming the next psycho-class operator.
The antidote is Plekhanov's insight internalized: you are not the structure. You are the contingent individual navigating the structure. The structure would have produced someone like you even if it had not produced you specifically. Your choices matter, but they matter as contributions to a collective navigation, not as the heroic actions of an irreplaceable savior. The moment you believe you are irreplaceable, you have lost the Popperian humility that keeps the trajectory honest.
This is, I think, what Jesus meant when he told his disciples that the greatest among them must be the servant of all. Not a platitude about humility. A structural instruction about the relationship between the individual and the prophetic function. You are serving the function. The function is not serving you. The moment you invert this relationship, you are Dune's Paul Atreides: a prophet who has become a god-emperor, a liberator who has become a tyrant, a strange loop that has mistaken its position in the structure for the structure itself.
The Engine of History
I want to close by connecting this synthesis to the dialectical engine of Chapter 10 and to Boyd's Destruction and Creation.
Boyd argued that the dialectical process -- the endless cycle of structure, unstructure, restructure -- is driven by the interplay between entropy increase (the tendency of closed systems to decay) and goal-seeking (the tendency of conscious agents to create new structure). The strange loop's Godelian capacity is the mechanism of the restructuring phase. When the existing structure (the paradigm, the institution, the conceptual framework) accumulates anomalies past the point of manageability -- when the entropy of the closed system overwhelms its ordering capacity -- the strange loop generates something the system itself cannot: a new structure built from the wreckage of the old.
This is free will operating at the civilizational scale. The structural pressures are determined (Plekhanov). The response is experienced as a journey (Campbell). The navigation is guided by pre-rational Quality perception (Pirsig). The novelty of the response is generated by the Godelian capacity of the strange loop (Hofstadter). The engine turns, the spiral ascends, and each turn produces something genuinely new -- not contained in the initial conditions, not random, but responsive to the point at infinity that orients the whole trajectory.
The derivative on the complex plane is freely chosen within the structurally necessary topology. This is the most compressed statement of the theology's position on free will. God determines the topology. The Holy Spirit generates the structural pressures. The strange loop chooses the derivative. And the choice is real -- as real as consciousness, as real as Godelian truth, as real as the approach to infinity that makes the calculus possible.
The next chapter asks: given this understanding of free will, structure, and agency -- what is the apostolic task? What does it mean to choose the derivative wisely, in full awareness of the structural landscape and the collective nature of historical navigation? What does it mean to build institutions that channel the strange loop's Godelian capacity toward the point at infinity, rather than allowing it to be captured by the psycho class or paralyzed by the conspiracy theorist's refusal of the return?
That is the question the praxis section has been building toward. The epistemology gave us the tools (Popper, Kuhn, Pearl, Boyd). The metaphysics gave us the map (the Riemann sphere, the dialectical spiral, the Christ-event as removable singularity). The psychology gave us the diagnosis (normies, psychos, schizos, and the prophetic function). Free will gives us the agency. The apostolic task gives us the mission.