Conscious will

Two wills operate in the framework. The emotional will is controlled by the self and motivated solely by potential anima gain or loss, which makes it acquisitive. The conscious will is controlled by the conscious and runs the other way, dispersing a person's own energy outward. The definition contains an apparent contradiction that Marsh raises herself, since choosing greater entropy while usually creating order sounds like two opposite things. The resolution is a matter of scale. Dispersal of personal energy is entropy where the person is concerned, and what that dispersal produces in the world is order, so creation and entropy are one act described from two positions. This is why the conscious acts as an exosocial drive, because its goal is to expend energy rather than to hold it. The pairing runs through her account of conflict. The conscious will, as a force of order, usually initiates creation, and the emotional will, as a force of chaos, initiates destruction. Mind over matter, in her phrasing, is conscious will over emotional will. In an exosocial person the two are in accord and want the same things. In an endosocial structure they are at war, which produces both a split in reality and an internal war of wills, and industrialized dissociation is what silences the conscious objection to whatever the emotional will demands.

The division of the will into a reasoning part and an appetitive part is very old, running from Plato's charioteer through Aquinas on intellect and appetite to Kant's rational will set against inclination, and it survives in the dual process models of contemporary psychology that separate deliberate from automatic systems. Schopenhauer went the other way and made will the blind ground of everything. Marsh keeps the two-part structure and changes what the parts are for. Hers is not reason against passion or slow thinking against fast, but a will that disperses energy set against a will that accumulates it, which makes the distinction thermodynamic rather than cognitive and turns a familiar moral contrast into a claim about where energy goes.