A Natural String of Fate
Entanglements and antipodes
Let’s explore the concepts of fate and entanglement in a metamodern context. My goal is to add to the overall picture of love I’ve been developing in other recent posts. The fundamental questions will be: Is there a way to understand “fate” in a way which is scientific/naturalistic, non-nihilistic, and palatable to those in the metamodern age? What is the nature of our entanglement and how is it determined? Can this connective “string” of fate be broken?
I’ve chosen to focus on the specific subset of cases in which a kind of fateful, soulmate bond attaches two people who are otherwise mutually antagonistic. Because love and freedom have so much to do with fulfillment of purpose and mutual exaltation, an interesting paradoxical connection sometimes comes about. I’m talking about “enemies as lovers”—not to be confused with the “enemies to lovers” trope, although there are similarities between the two. And so this post is not about fateful love overcoming the initial hatred of enemies, but rather love-filled connections which run concurrently with hateful or rivalrous connections.
The idea of fate is ancient. And from the very beginning it seems to be understood as something which, from a god’s-eye-view appears absolutely orderly, but, from a person’s view often feels rather arbitrary, indiscriminate, or blatantly cruel. My sense of the concept of fate is that it is a belief in an underlying purpose for every connection—even if the exact nature of this purposeful connection is unknown.
The symbolization of fate as a red string began in Chinese folktales with the god named Yue Lao, “The Old Man Under the Moon”. He was said to carry a book of fate—a comprehensive list of all those who were destined to marry each other—along with a bag full of red strings to actually get the job done. The imagery of strings, as the key part of this mythology, has persisted to this day—especially in anime other Asian media.
“[In “Your Name”] Mitsuha…and Taki…discover that they sometimes switch bodies when morning comes. This connection is symbolized by Mitsuha's hair ribbon, the thematic imagery alluding to the Red String of Fate.… The gods themselves have connected these two people by fate, and though the string may become tangled, it will never break… Whether or not there is one person out in the world who you are destined to meet and be with, the Red String of Fate is a fitting image for the sometimes tangled relationships you find in everyday life.”
Perhaps even more evocative is the case in Killing Eve. The resilience of the red string is stretched to its limits with the two main characters of this show.
This sets a precedent where fate is part of theistic worldview, and will be rejected along with other religious claims by most of those attempting love in our present day.
But there is a version of fate which we can rescue from the trash bins of history. I think the visualization of fate as red strings is still useful and evocative, even if we reject the hypothesis that their origin is supernatural. Instead, something akin to fate is implied by a non-nihilistic worldview which says that value, meaning, and morality are objectively and absolutely real. Their absoluteness, while conveying transcendence of relative phenomena, does not imply anything supernatural. There is “nowhere else”, as Iris Murdoch said—the “beyond” is here with us.
Following from this metaphysical realism, we can see that perfection is possible and that our actuality tends (imperfectly) towards it. Due to this, any action, down to its quantized minimum (Planck’s constant), shapes the universe into more or less perfect versions of itself. This gives us a minimalist conception of fate resting on scientific principles. Namely, entanglement begins at the quantum level, and increases in complexity as these quanta self-organize into dynamically ordered systems.
“Entangled systems have some properties that cannot be reduced to properties of their parts. And entanglement is ubiquitous: The Schrödinger dynamics generally entangles systems that interact, and since everything in the universe has interacted if you go far enough back (to the big bang), it looks like the state of the universe is a giant entangled state.”
This can be measured exactly with entanglement entropy.
“How much a measurement of B reduces your ignorance about A is called the entanglement entropy, and like any type of information, it is counted in bits. Entanglement entropy is the main way physicists quantify the entanglement between two objects, or, equivalently, how much information about one is stored nonlocally in the other.”
Further, there is a thermodynamic fate binding us all: If value is real, it must be embodied in energy, and will become more or less perfect through transformations. And possible perfection is the telos of actual value—i.e. every action has a moral demand to actualize the most perfection. Thus, at the human level, the striving towards universal perfection might locally appear as the paradoxical lovers-as-enemies phenomenon. This is why we say that fate is real, and that its power is displayed quite clearly when it strings together two who are otherwise enemies.
The idea, in general, is that fate does not necessarily connect people who are perfectly suited as romantic lovers in the traditionally understood sense. Love, as I’ve said, can feel like a disorienting madness. But, like breaking through into daylight from a dark forest, perseverance is rewarded in the end.
Let’s explore some examples of enemies as lovers—those who are most likely to feel that fate is a sadistic joke of cosmic proportions. Yet, at the same time, they are profoundly (and often positively) transformed by the particular knot that fate has tied them in.
Others might not get it. They think you have either taken “love thy enemy” way too far, or have completely misinterpreted in. Maybe they think you’re a lousy villain who can’t seal the deal. They’ll ask questions like: “If you’ve got a time machine, why don’t you just go back and kill Austin Powers when he’s sitting on the crapper?”
There would be no pleasure in that. This delightfully dangerous dance of opposites is meant to be savored.
And you will fiercely defend your fateful enemy-lover even as you promise to kill him. Never will another take what is yours! Vegeta, in the Dragon Ball Z series, feels this for Goku.
This reminds us that those engaged in this kind of complex bond will truly feel like nemeses, even as they fuel each other’s passions to be the best versions of themselves.
And from its ancient origins, the word “nemesis” itself bears the etymological marks of a concept which is more nuanced than “enemy”. Early uses of the word were accompanied by a goddess, Nemesis. And it is clear that she symbolizes a form of divine justice and, in general, a principle of balance.
Michael B. Hornum: “The word [nemesis] is related to the Greek root…meaning to allot or distribute.”
Glenys Lloyd-Morgan: “One of the earliest references to her can be found in two lines of Hesiod's Theogony, dated to the end of the eighth century BC: ‘Then deadly night gave birth to Nemesis, that pain to Gods and men.’”
Elizabeth Riefstahl: “The Greeks had noticed that prosperity and pride were often followed by reverses, that the gods were likely…to punish terribly any kind of excess.”
Tim Wittenberg: “[So the goddess Nemesis] acts as a balancing, regulating power in the interplay between fortune and misfortune, between prudence and arrogance, or generally between order and disorder.”
Nearly the entirety of Venture Bros. centers on the “nemesis” theme. In this fictional world, there is a legitimate profession called “arching” (as in, to be someone’s arch-nemesis). There are even "trade guilds”—implementing such rules as the “Equally Matched Aggression Level”, which assures that a protagonist and antagonist are well-suited for each other. The show focuses on the nemesis-relationship of Rusty Venture and The Monarch, but the dance of love and hate defines many of the interactions within this show’s universe. And in many cases the characters provide, like the goddess Nemesis herself, a necessary balancing of each other.
This show beautifully showcases how rivals-in-love need each other. One might even get jealous when someone tries to steal your nemesis. However negative and hateful the attention, one feels stabbing pangs of jealousy when it is directed at a nemesis other than you.
We even find this complex form of love in video games such as Pokémon. This game has a move called Perish Song, which binds the fate of the two Pokémon engaged in battle. The game describes it as “a malevolent melody that causes both the user and the opponent to faint in three turns.”
I guess it’s not just humans who sometimes feel unable to live “with or without you”.
And it is not always fiery, ecstatic imagery which is needed to communicate the experience of love. Fateful love, whether it’s pleasurable or not, seems to provide something utterly obligatory for life and growth to carry on.
“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”
Two people can be perfect for coaxing perfection of purpose from each other, even if those purposes are diametrically opposed. That underlying dynamic of being suited for one another is the kind of “fate” which still makes sense in the metamodern era. It can be explained naturalistically, and it is only metaphorically a “string”. Although it truly does bind and entangle us as if it were physically there.
In a previous post, I mentioned the concept of soul-leading (psychagogia), and I believe it is important here as well. The idea, in short, is that one of the central characteristics of love is the process of lovers leading each other towards more perfect and pure forms (or objects) of love.
This process progresses towards philo-sophia, a love of wisdom. And so it should be said that another reasonable and naturalistic way to interpret fate is as a thread of continuity and kinship of minds. Alchemists, for example, have seen themselves as links in a Golden Chain, stretching back to ancient and semi-mythic figures like Thoth and Moses. And, as we’ve said, this kind of fateful linking of souls is sometimes on display most clearly between those who are in opposition rather than agreement.
Nietzsche’s nihilistic critique of Plato’s realism is something I disagree with, but find value in nonetheless. The two, if they had lived contemporaneously, surely would have been philosophically rivalrous. Yet their work is connected in a non-arbitrary way and, in a sense, Nietzsche progressed the work of Plato through his attempts to dismantle it. Plato’s work has survived assassination attempts, and is stronger because of it. Lincoln seemed to grasp these concepts of fruitful disagreement when he constructed his team of rivals.
All this is to say that while links in a Golden Chain may provide incremental progress, a philosophical foil may induce powerful, nonlinear changes in the journey of ideas. In both cases, fate remains a natural phenomenon, and can be described as a kind of stigmergy.
“Many of our actions leave traces in the shared environment and can inform others of what has been, could, or should be done… As agents create traces, they trigger behaviors in other agents who subsequently create more traces themselves. For instance, more people using an emerging path will make this path more usable, thus more people will choose the same path over less developed paths in the future.”
In fate, we find (1) actions which (2) leave traces in (3) a shared medium and (4) stimulate further actions, leading to (5) the accumulation of natural entanglements of purpose. Such entanglements are emergent attractor states which act causally (or fatefully) on future actions.
And this kind of fateful entanglement may elicit both joyful inspiration and a burdensome sense of obligation. On one hand, it is exciting to be spun together with those gigantically influential minds of the past: A living but fragile fire has passed into your guardianship.
On the other hand, the continuation of some kind of Great Work across many generations and geographies is not to be taken lightly. Again, a reasonable and scientific justification can be given for this philosophically-binding string of fate.
Part of the present point is that metamodern worldviews can contain something called “fate” and defend it using only naturalistic claims. As an analogy, one can appreciate how the natural law/realism traditions differ from positivism. In this case, the natural law theorist would say that all of our mundane, earthly laws are hierarchically nested within unchanging, eternal laws. This claim irresistibly leads to non-relative claims of moral duty—for one is a center of activity and consciousness who, by understanding natural laws, may reject them. Similarly, then, a fateful attachment between two people who may be separated by centuries of time or continents of space is something which, if ignored, is an antimoral act.
In contrast, a theorist of positivism would say that our laws do not reflect any higher order, and can convey some relative version of reasonableness, but will never approach anything absolute called Reason. And a nihilist, opposed to natural law, would say there is no fateful thread of connection between philosophers who are soul-leading each other towards perfection. In that view, there would only be human animals engaged in ultimately meaningless and overly elaborate displays of power.
Hopefully it is now obvious that I reject that latter view and side myself with those who believe in a natural string of fate.