{"id":6539,"date":"2014-11-30T04:26:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T12:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=6539"},"modified":"2014-11-30T06:56:40","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T14:56:40","slug":"fated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=6539","title":{"rendered":"Fated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Off-and-on, I work on the plans for a couple of pieces of serial fiction.  And thus it is repeatedly brought to my attention that, for the stories really to <em>work<\/em>, a <em>profound necessity<\/em> must drive events; essential elements must be <em>predestined<\/em> and <em>meaningful<\/em>.<\/p> <p>This characterization contrasts mark&egrave;dly from my view of <em>real life<\/em>.  I think that people may be said to have <q>personal destinies<\/q>, but that these can be <em>unre&auml;lized<\/em>, as when we say that someone were <q>meant<\/q> to do or become something, but <em>instead<\/em> did or became something else.  And, if I did believe that the world were a vast piece of clockwork, then I'd be especially disinclined to think that its dial had anything important to say.<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Off-and-on, I work on the plans for a couple of pieces of serial fiction. And thus it is repeatedly brought to my attention that, for the stories really to work, a profound necessity must drive events; essential elements must be predestined and meaningful. This characterization contrasts mark&egrave;dly from my view of real life. I think [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[164,6,117,719,5,4],"tags":[1237,450,1238],"class_list":["post-6539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-commentary","category-communication","category-metaphysics","category-personal","category-public","tag-fate","tag-fiction","tag-predestination"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}