I turn out to be a hard determinist. I believe that humans have no free will and that the gargantuan weight and momentum of history in all its forms has brought me – and you – to this particular moment of awareness. This moment. Now. This seems to be my foundational belief.

Perhaps there are channels – complex weaves of various force, strengths and breadth – of compulsion behind every moment pressing us through spacetime and its four dimensional waves of uncertainty and possibility. All other possible actions and outcomes collapse as each (illusory) moment passes.

So what would the weight and momentum of history have me write?

My adoption of hard determinism has brought me great personal comfort. Combined with an understanding of trauma and my personal history it has freed me from any element of guilt over my small but very damaging crimes and disappointing behaviours. I can accept that I was responsible but that hard determinism provides the most mitigating of circumstances. I don’t need to sentence myself and it isn’t helpful to anyone.

It was the universe and the me it made the moment before that made me do whatever it was and whatever it will be next.

All this applies to all humans, to my cats, to all living things and to Donald Trump. That is a challenging thought.

If we are all spinning around with our consciousnesses propelled by forces that are so strong that our free will is an illusion how should we act? Do we “act” at all if we are simply compelled? If I chose to sit still and do nothing I would have been compelled to sit still and do nothing. Instead I am compelled to write. And to resist.

The weight and momentum of history that made me and continues to make me includes the evolution of my biology. It is the function of my biology as a human to compel me to survive and thrive to reproduce and nurture both my genetic code and that of my group and my species.

I have no choice but to surrender and comply. I am coded for physical health, sex, learning, culture, competition, othering, violence, greed as well as love, empathy and altruism. All of these elements and others are present as a result of their utility over time. Pick the elements poor Mr Trump is missing.

These compelled elements of the survival, reproduction and the nurturing of the individual, the group and the species is the arena in which personal, social, economic and political relationships play out. It is the balance of the determined application of those positive and negative elements at any given time that determine our experience as groups, classes, societies, nations and – especially with the existence of global warming, pandemics and nuclear weapons – our species and all others.

We have no free will. We are compelled to act. We are compelled to survive in society with others – a polity – and so compelled to interact with that polity in one way or another. Even sitting still and doing nothing is political. And sometimes I have done that. I have been compelled by history and circumstance to fall asleep in the passenger seat and let someone else drive.

Now I am compelled to act; to seek to understand the accelerating instability of the global political environment and express myself within the polity; to write. And to do that effectively I will have to investigate and explore the experiences and motivations of others who also have no choice and for whom – to their relief – the concepts of guilt and punishment are irrelevant. They may have to be quarantined though…

What are the implications of hard determinism for political analysis? Will it bring anything new to the debate?

Does any debate change minds? Is there any debate? Can minds change when the weight and momentum of history is upon them? Not unless history changes its mind, unless the material determinants change.

Voters are among those material determinants. The confused, the uncommitted, those newly awakened by the idiocy that confronts them might be the material determinants. And so are the activists on the left that have no choice but to draw their attention to it as gently or loudly and RESIST.