Human Progress Requires Free Will

I have posted many times on research on why Christendom has succeeded so well. This interview has another theory:

Agency as an Engine of Human Progress | Martin Seligman

What makes civilizations stagnate or flourish?

Martin Seligman argues that agency combines efficacy, optimism, and imagination, then explores how evidence from psychology, historical writing, and AI analysis can be used to investigate its relationship with human progress.

In particular, the West developed a belief that human action can make things better, as opposed to believing the world was fated by the gods.

You might think that it is ridiculous to suggest that Medieval Europeans somehow had better agency and optimism. But maybe it also explains how the USA has been more productive than Europe for the last century. Tesla, Google, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta were created by innovators with agency and optimism.

I am not recommending interviews of Jared Diamond, by Sean M. Carroll and Tyler Cowan. He is widely praised, but he sees progress as accidents of geography, and has some goofy theories. For example, he says:

DIAMOND: The fact is that particularly European scientists went to great efforts for the last century, ever since the IQ test, to demonstrate that Europeans have higher IQs than do other people. There’s no evidence whatsoever for it. There are lots of people who try.

In my experience, when people say there is no evidence, they really mean that they refuse to look at the evidence. Europeans do have higher IQ averages that most other groups, and possibly lower than Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. The evidence is not just IQ tests. Just look at European intellectual accomplishments.

Diamond spend a lot of time in New Guinea, and he as claimed that the natives were the world's smartest people. I think he is just trying to align himself with anti-whites.