During WW2, did the germans all just freely decide to become and support something that we now consider to be evil?
If everyone has free will, you’d think that each person would act relatively the same, no matter what they are told or who f-s with them.
They hear the war propaganda, but they are so free and self determining, that they decide if it’s truly wrong to shoot guys or whatever.
That wasn’t the case. People got programmed, and they got influenced.
I think history proves that mind control is common.
Let’s say you have a starving guy, this is just an example, and you set food in front of him, but say you will kill him if he eats the food.
Or let’s say that God makes his tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then says you will die/get cursed and eventually die if you eat it.
Death threats. Are people free while threatened? Can we say oh starving guy, you chose to eat that food, therefor it is your fault that I shoot you now, or let’s say ‘God’ curses all humanity with mortality and flaw and disease. Now, it’s our fault. Anything to switch the blame away from the mass media, religions and politicians. According to the political propaganda and the commercials, our government isn’t mind controlling anyone, and the commercials, although they work, are not controlling anyone. Allot of people fall for this kind of shit. They think everyone has the same old free will. They are a member of a nation [political influence], and they are also probably a member of an abrahamic religion. They live in it. The stuff that controls people, they were born in it. It’s thick like fog and they see it so much and believe it so much that they are blind to it. Human nature isn’t all the same, and that’s not because of choice. People can be very different based on their conditioning and training, and conditioning and training are control, mind control.
People who say mind control = robots and anything less is free will, these people are fools.
You don’t need to control someone’s every thought and desire, you just need to set up either appealing influence, or some sort of punishment for if they disobey. Free will threads don’t even deserve the main philosophy area anymore. This is just crap.
I’m making the claim that ‘mind control’ is a straw man, in the way that it is thought of and used today. Real true mind control is like I described, not like a remote controlled robot. People disbelieve that mind control exists, but their concept of what mind control is is false. Free will and divine authoritative punishment are in the first pages of the book which has shaped so many. Also God’s name, the meaning of it, “I am”. It’s so much crap. Imagine if I was named “I’m real”. That’s what it is. Pure crap.
I agree that almost every action is coerced in some way or another. There’s always some motivation. But you see examples of people taking big hits for things they wanna do and in spite of the pummeling it just goes on and on. So I wouldn’t go so far as to say that free will doesn’t exist, but I might say that it appears to be fighting a losing battle.
It seems like either the OP is to some degree the result of freedom from conditioning - not fooled by the conditioning of various ideas about free will, implicit and explicit - or it is simply luckily correct. Dan has had the conditioning that led to him having what is coincidentally the correct view. Set aside the issue of how we would determine this. If one can, somehow, move towards views that are less conditioned, there may be some useful referent in the term free will as it relates to issues like the ones in the OP. If there is no such way to move out from one’s conditioning and/or resist false conditioning, then the only thing we can do is relate perspectives that we either realize, like Dan does, are conditioned into us - and therefore impossible for us to judge in any real free way - or be silent.
I have free will, but not the absolute kind, or the magical kind.
It can be hijacked, especially when we become passive about what we feed our minds with. There is the dream-like state of “i’m my own boss” as they absorb the mass media and religion, oblivious to it, then there is the more preferable “I’ve got a bit of choice in life, it’s precious, so I’ll try hard to retain it and not fuck up.”
Free will as it is today, exists because of how humans are really irresponsible assholes.
We have to lie, to counter-act their own lie of entitlement and innocence. So the lie goes that it is their own fault, so that there can be punishment, justice and systems of law. Without free will as it is today, there would be no punishment, no justice, and no law.
I agree. I Think both passivity in the face of ‘information’ and then also passivity in terms of where information comes from, eliminate free will to various degrees. One makes the choice to be limited and controlled. Once the choice is made it becomes easier to remake, since the information will reinforce that choice.
I like this and I agree with it. I want to extend it to say that it seems to me we are repeatedly told that our reactions to what is presented as truth and information is meaningless - the various authorities then guide us toward ‘the correct sources’ of information, be it a Church, text, person, scientific consensus, experts of some kind, etc. The massive effort to get all of us to distrust our own insight - because it would be either irrational or bad to trust this or because since some people have terrible insight, no one should assume they have good insight or a good intuition. Once our own gut feelings, insights, intuition, sense that some kind of wool is being pulled over our Eyes (intentionally or not, maliciously or not) are ruled out, once we accept that we should not use this function, we are vulnerable to being controlled by various ‘experts’ and opinion makers.