MPEC. Fate. October 2025

The Moscow Philosophy English Club.
Part 1: German.
Chapter 4: Nietzsche.
Section 6: Fate (Schicksal)

1.
Welcome everyone who just joined the club. A quick recap for you to clarify what’s going on here. I’m looking for those who’re actively working on their English and determined to make it as powerful as possible. I’m building a research team to study philosophy, science, history, linguistics, literature, technologies, politics, economy and virtually all important aspects of our modern (or postmodern) life. My “big” nearest goal is to organize offline discussions with 10-20 participants once a month in Moscow. Meanwhile, we have weekly online discussions here centered on specific topics. We’ve already discussed understanding, will, power, deception and stupidity. Our next discussion is going to take place on Friday at 4 pm. This time, we’re talking about fate. I highly encourage you to do your own research on this topic and pay attention to my posts, where I’m going to show how I do research. Ideally, you can engage in a discussion about fate with me here through writing without waiting until Friday. However, this is probably too much to ask, so it would be fine if you just follow my posts, and at the time our discussion starts, we have some common ground to build upon. Sometimes, you might be pissed off or frustrated by my arguments and ways of expression. I must warn you that I have a deliberately provocative, aggressive and sarcastic writing style. It’s quite different from the way I speak for most of the time. You must understand that I’m not helping you to improve your English. I’m interested in improving my English. To quote one line from an infamous movie, “You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent.” I prioritize competition over collaboration in the language game. Would you like to play with me? Make your move and write a 300-or-so-word paper about fate.

2.
What do we have in mind when we think about fate? The story of the old king who killed his father and married his mother? The book where everything that’s going to happen has already been described? The laws of nature according to which bodies of a certain type, like the earth, must orbit other bodies, like the sun, until the latter explodes? Equations like e-is-equal-to-mc-square? Entropy? Does it make sense to distinguish fate from fortune? Does fate contain in itself the concept of chance or luck? Can we call death our common fate, the final destination of anyone who’s been born? Jesus! When are these damn questions going to end? Paraphrasing Kant, “Our reason has a peculiar fate: she (Vernunft) is harassed by the questions she can’t get rid of, because they follow her by nature, but she also can’t answer them, because it’s beyond her power.” Poor reason! I mean, pure reason, pure, of course, pure! But what am I talking about? Oh yeah, fate! Fate? Fate. Fate is… hmm. I’ve run out of question marks. Must improvise. You see, the problem is that whatever I say about fate is apparently dictated by fate, and since we have a very close—I would even say “intimate”—relationship based on mutual trust and recognition, I must be very careful while interpreting and translating into English her bizarre—I wanted to say “brilliant,” brilliant!—her brilliant body language. Although she loves irony and has a quite philosophical sense of humor, she’s also famous for being capricious, cruel, desperate—so any foolish move and I’m a dead man. But wait, it’s impossible to make a foolish move if I’m guided by fate, isn’t it… That’s not a question. That’s not a question! That’s NOT a question!

3.
Anyone who’s been capable of tracking the evolution of one’s thoughts for a couple of years through daily writing, and then reads all at once, can see that nothing in this evolution is accidental. Each and every sentence reflects one’s actual experience—a personal history with its endless struggle for power between memory and imagination, past and future, good and evil.
One imagines oneself a free thinker, makes a resolution not to talk about one’s feelings, banishes any discourse on pain and pleasure and drowns oneself in a bog of metaphysical speculations.
Another climbs on the bandwagon of die Ubersprache’s most popular narrative and either falls asleep while chanting its talking points or drives oneself crazy.
The third limits die Grenze seiner Welt to a narrow circle of daily chores, spinning within it like a top, maintaining balance and keeping one’s shoulders straight.
The fourth reacts to everything that stinks in the newsfeed, turning one’s personal history into an infinite series of comments.
The more we study our personal history and practice to differentiate the logic of our fantasies from the logic of our actual experience, the better we understand fate. We’re probably not going to be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy, but has it ever been about just predicting the future? Is whatever generates language in us—call it reason, mind, consciousness, will, soul or spirit—free and immortal, or is it just a function of the brain? Dismissing this question as irrelevant because it feels like we’re free and never going to die is a fatal error. The evolution of our recorded personal history corrects all errors in its course except this one, which never allows it to start in the first place.

4.
Fate means that there is only one real version of the future, just as there has been one real past. That’s it. Fate means this real future. We, of course, have multiple versions of the future, the ones in which we’re wise, strong, rich, immortal, free—
The real future for all of us is death. We’re all dead in the future, but we’re not ready to accept it and prefer to live in the denial of death. That’s why we immortalize Socrates and other great thinkers in violation of all rules of logic. People are mortal. I’m one of them. Therefore, I’m going to live forever. What? Look, Socrates is dead, but his specter is still haunting Europe. We just no longer love wisdom as we used to and chase happiness, power, fame, luxury… recreation?
Our bodies are made out of trillions of cells. Millions of them die every second, and new millions are born. This is the micro level. On the macro level, hundreds of thousands of people die, and roughly half a million are born every day. Our consciousness is locked in between these two levels as a toy in the hands of fate. Soon, we’re all going to be there where we all came from, an infinite unconscious abyss. Or we’re going to get back, turn into each other and look from outside at the previous versions of ourselves without being able to recognize them. I’m going to read these meditations through your eyes and say to myself, “Wow, what an awesome/awful writer I once was!” You’re going to see yourself through my eyes and say, “Hmm, this weird creature looks quite different from an acute angle. Gosh! And how terrible/nice she or he sounds!”
Every moment annihilates a previous moment only to be in turn annihilated. But every moment also preserves the sum of previously annihilated moments through language. That’s what studying language is all about: preserving the best and forgetting the rest.

5.
Look, it’s already Friday. I’ve just started thinking about fate, haven’t even integrated it into a larger framework with the previously discussed concepts, but now again it’s time to move on. Every concept is like a new ruler that governs my thoughts for a week and fades into obscurity. If I would have written about fate for a little longer, say, for a couple of years, I could have become its “true” representative in the part of Sprachraum occupied by English. How many living English philosophers take fate seriously? Are there living English philosophers, or have all of them been replaced by LLMS?
What value does the ability to focus on a specific concept and to keep thinking about it despite all the distractions coming from outside and from within have in the age when LLMs can summarize everything essential said about this concept throughout its entire history? Do our own thoughts still have any value? Hardly anyone would deny that thinking as a process is one of the most important activities a human being can do. Yet the product of this activity, like, for instance, this post—even fools wouldn’t buy it on our digital marketplace of ideas! For centuries, we’ve been told to think for ourselves, and now here we are: everybody’s thoughts have equal value, everybody’s experience is just as valuable as everybody else’s experience. A parrot with a thesaurus and an LLM can beat seventy seven greatest thinkers of all time as if it were child’s play.
Looks like I’m losing focus. There are so many different contexts in which we can discuss the concept of fate. Usually, they are designated by special names: necessity, inevitability, causality, destiny, determinism, predestination, fortune, luck, lot, etc. We can start our discussion today by drawing distinctions between these contexts and then moving on with the flow

6.
There has been a lot of confusion about the next topic, so let’s sort it out. Before ending the last discussion, I asked if anyone had something to suggest that we might discuss next. S came up with the question: Why are some nations in better shape than others? Then, we ran out of time, and the rest you can see above.
Now, let me make it perfectly clear. I’m not interested in empty and shallow talks about things nobody takes seriously. If I ask you, “What do you want to talk about?” and you come up with something you’re not ready to study or at least think about for a week, I see no reason why I should do that. When I choose a topic, I want to make sure that I’m going to study it and think about it, and that it’s also related to the topics we discussed before, and that it fits in my current research plan with respect to another language (now it’s German) I’m trying to master. I also want to make sure that I’m going to be able to talk about this topic for a couple of hours and build an interesting discussion, perhaps not for everyone, but at least for half of the participants.
I don’t like inconsistency. Since I’ve already said several times that we’re going to talk about wealth in the context of international relations, I don’t want to contradict myself, choosing another topic simply because S now says that he doesn’t care about his own suggestion and is ready to talk about anything else. But now, I also don’t want to waste an entire week, thinking about this topic. So here is the solution that, to me, makes perfect sense. I’m going to continue to explore the area around the concept of fate and write here about necessity during this week. If you want to talk about wealth, international relations, fairness or anything else, you can write about it too or just think about it on your own. On Friday, we’re not going to limit the discussion to any specific topic. We’ll try to improvise.

7.
The time has come to merge the Moscow Philosophy English Club (MPEC) with what has been previously called “the English Speaking Community of Kaluga (ESCK). I stopped conducting weekly meetings of the ESCK in July 2023 largely because of my growing interest in Chinese and other languages as well as some other factors. Since June 2024, the ESCK has been rebranded as the Science and Literature Club. We held monthly discussions up until recently, though these discussions were not very popular. Now, I’m determined to revive the ESCK under a new brand I’ve been working on over the last three months, that is, the MPEC. So if you’re reading this on Telegram, go and join our VK group: https://vk.com/club153125224 If you’re reading this on VK, go and join the Telegram group.
As I stated many times earlier (in my Telegram-posts), the MPEC’s main goal is to have offline monthly discussions with 10-20 participants in Moscow. Since August, I also began to organize online meetings once a week. At these meetings, we talk about specific concepts in a similar way as we did at the ESCK in its best times between 2019 and 2022.
Now, in addition to our online meetings, we’re going to have offline meetings too, every week, in Kaluga. If you’re from Moscow, and if you’re seriously interested in having real discussions and mastering English, and you don’t want to wait until we’re going to have enough people to organize discussions in your city, you can take your friends and drive 180 km southwest to join us every Saturday at 3 pm. You may also join our online meetings on Friday. Our last discussions were centered on such concepts as understanding, will, power, deception, stupidity and fate. This week, we don’t have a specific topic, so you might bring in whatever you like.
I’m studying the concept of necessity at the moment, so if you want to know more about it, get back here tomorrow.

8.
How does necessity relate to fate? Are these words mere synonyms that refer to the same natural or logical phenomena? Is there an important distinction we shouldn’t overlook? What do we mean when we say, “It’s necessary”? What do we mean when we say to ourselves that whatever we’re getting through is necessarily determined by fate? Fate. It sounds mysterious, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, “necessity” is rather a neutral term. Fate is associated with the future, and the world is full of frauds who eagerly tell us their version of our and everybody else’s fate whether we ask them or not. Necessity is also associated with the future, but more often, we use it to talk about the past. Was everything that happened in the past necessary? Ask anyone this question if you want to observe stupidity in action. An appropriate time we have to dedicate to thinking about this question to get the basic understanding is at least a couple of years. Yet how many people believe they already know the answer even though they’ve never thought about the question before, never read any great thinker who spent a lifetime studying the past and comparing the views of other great thinkers who spent a lifetime studying the past and comparing the views—you got it.
“Hey, we’re the greatest nation on the planet! We have the largest economy! We have the strongest military! We have the best science and education! Our allies trust us and extol our leadership! We’re free to do whatever we want! The past has no power over us!” A few centuries later. “Can you believe that English is now a dead language? Once we were so damn powerful. Our heroes were the world’s heroes. Our great thinkers were the world’s greatest thinkers. Our leaders… Our science...”
Is it necessary that every Ubersprache has to learn the concept of fate only when it’s already too late?

9.
If you believe that you can make a powerful argument against physical necessity, try the following experiment: stop breathing. One, two… count until your logical imperative—no matter how strong and reasonable it is—falls apart. Now, if you still think that your will is free from physical necessity, try again: one, two, three… perhaps this time you can do a little better, but the final outcome is going to be the same.
If, on the other hand, you keep reading my posts for as long as it takes to free your Vernunft and set ihre own production in motion, a logical imperative “to write 250-350 words every day for the rest of your life” might in a couple of years overthrow a bunch of stupid desires that currently hold power over your thinking and through subtle psychological mechanisms—defense mechanisms!—dictate virtually everything you say.
One might study the concept of necessity and say to oneself, “Yep, everything is necessary. I’m addicted to smoking, video games, porn, alcohol, junk food, etc. It was impossible to avoid these things, and I’ll never change.”
Another does a similar study and concludes, “Wow! Everything is necessary! Now I can see how all these damn addictions work. I understand psychomechanics and finally can do psychopolitics! It’s time to define my intentions clearly and empower them through daily writing!”
Can we have two necessities? I mean, sure, one plus one equals two—it’s necessary, no doubt. However, I still can say one plus one equals three or something and create my own logic (language) where it’s going to make perfect sense.

10.
What about quantum indeterminacy? Doesn’t it show that reality is unpredictable? And if it’s unpredictable, how can we say that something was or is necessary? It’s a popular argument not just among philosophers but even among physicists. Some real physicists—a few centuries ago they called themselves “natural philosophers”—still believe in free will and use quantum indeterminacy as a shield from pranks and scornful gazes of their colleagues.
The fact that an electron can be in a superposition before it collapses under measurement is somehow compared with the behavior of human beings or the transformation of the entire world. Nobody can provide an adequate explanation of what exactly is meant by measurement, and it is used as the evidence against necessity.
First, necessity doesn’t mean predictability. The weather is unpredictable; that doesn’t mean it violates the laws of thermodynamics. We say everything that happened had to happen in that exact way, so there was no other way. We shouldn’t waste time trying to come up with alternative scenarios of the past—as dumb futurologists are in a habit of doing—we should examine competing theories that explain why it happened. The future is unpredictable, but it doesn’t mean that it’s unnecessary.
Second, “unpredictable” doesn’t mean “freely chosen.” Quantum indeterminacy doesn’t save free will. It’s necessary that at the micro level certain things happen randomly, which means that nothing chooses or decides what is going to happen.
Is it necessary to bring up quantum mechanics when we try to understand why certain languages are more powerful than others and why certain people who study these languages are called great thinkers? See, there is one path that has led you to the end of this meditation and an infinite number of imaginable possibilities where you stopped at the first sentence or dismissed the whole thing without even looking at it. Now, ask yourself why you keep reading my posts and write down your own meditation on necessity vs free choice.

11.
Today, we’re having an online meeting at 4 pm. Here is what you might expect if you join us. After a brief warm-up, we’re going to argue about what makes these meetings valuable for all of us. We’re going to talk about what we should prioritize: competition or collaboration, individual preferences or general utility, learning or entertainment. We’re going to discuss whether we should spend time on those who barely can talk, helping them to gain confidence, or focus on those who’re already fluent, allowing them to run wild.
Remember, I don’t care about your English. I’m not trying to sell you “happiness” in any of its infinite forms. I’m obsessed with the development of my own English, and I want to talk to those who can understand what I’m doing. In other words, I want you to read everything I’ve already written and listen to everything I’ve already said (there are hundreds of hours of my recorded speeches where I demonstrate how to get from “I am want speak English I can must speaking every day five minutes” to “wodayathink’bautitnau”). However, I’m aware that you’re interested in the development of your language, and most of what I write and say might be irrelevant to whatever you’re getting through at the moment; that is, you want to talk—and, perhaps, write—instead of reading and listening to me or others. Here is where we have to find a compromise. That’s what the Moscow Philosophy English Club is for. It’s not about “practicing English” within a safe context of formal exchanges. It’s about real discussions on what does and doesn’t matter, what has and doesn’t have value.