Question

Have a good week, Rabbi,
in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance it says the following:

6:1 Many verses in the Torah and in the words of the prophets appear to contradict this fundamental principle, and most people stumble over them. They imagine on their basis that the Holy One, blessed be He, decrees that a person should do good or evil, and that a person’s heart is not in his own control to incline it wherever he wishes. I will now explain a great principle from which you will understand the interpretation of all those verses.
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6:11 Is it not written in the Torah, “And they shall enslave them and afflict them” (Genesis 15:13)? So He decreed that the Egyptians would do evil. And it is written, “This people will rise up and go astray after the foreign gods of the land” (Deuteronomy 31:16), so He decreed that Israel would worship idols. Why then were they punished? Because He did not decree against a particular known individual that he would be the one to go astray. Rather, each and every one of those who went astray and worshipped idols—had he not wished to worship, he would not have worshipped. The Creator informed him only of the general way of the world. What is this comparable to? To saying: among this people there will be righteous and wicked people. Because of this, the wicked person cannot say that it had already been decreed upon him that he would be wicked, simply because the Holy One, blessed be He, informed Moses that there would be wicked people in Israel, as it says, “For the needy shall never cease from the midst of the land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).
6:12 And so too with the Egyptians: each and every one of those who oppressed and harmed Israel—had he not wished to harm them, he had the choice, for no decree had been made against a particular individual. Rather, He informed him that in the end his descendants would be enslaved in a land not their own. And we have already explained that a person has no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows things that are destined to occur.

It seems that Maimonides distinguishes between the freedom of choice of the individual and that of the collective. Something like this distinction can be found in the law of large numbers; for example, when tossing a single die, the outcome is distributed evenly among all 6 possibilities, whereas the more dice you add, the more the total clusters around N*3.5, where N is the number of rolls. The problem with such an approach is that seemingly the collective has no free choice; rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, predetermined the distribution for each individual, and therefore what the collective will choose is determined in a deterministic way. For example, if the Holy One, blessed be He, built into an individual person a 40% chance that he will be righteous and a 60% chance that he will be wicked, then the collective will end up at roughly 40% righteous and 60% wicked, without any possibility of choosing otherwise. On the other hand, elsewhere Maimonides writes the following:

3:2 And so too a state—if the merits of all its inhabitants exceed their sins, it is righteous; if their sins exceed their merits, it is wicked. And so too the whole world.

Here it seems that he views the collective as an entity with free choice. I also seem to remember that he wrote somewhere that on Rosh Hashanah first the individual is judged, and afterward each city, state, and finally the whole world. If so, what is the point of judging a collective entity if it has in any case already been decreed in advance to be righteous or wicked according to the distribution of individuals?