The Delusion of Freedom

You think you are free. But I say you are not.

You think you have free will, but can you really will anything freely?

For is not the will already curbed, contained and imprisoned?

Your will have been shaped and constrained by your genes, your biology and all other physical and natural laws; conditioned, consciously or unconsciously, by your environment, your upbringing, by people - or their lack - around you, and by the media and culture you are in; and controlled by the laws, morals and customs of the land and the society you lived in, and certainly by money.

And thus you can will to choose only from a limited set of options. And to make choices like between life and death for example, is not a choice at all: for a non-option is a non-option.

You may say you can work against the things that constrained you, and that by sheer effort, conviction and determination, there is nothing you want that you cannot achieve.

Well firstly if you are truely honest with yourself, you should be able to judge the truth of such a belief. And secondly even if I accept it at face value, why is it that I must fight such a fight in the first place? Why must I choose to fight to get what I want, and not just choose what I want without a fight or struggle?

Why must I accept life as it is?

And to add insult to injury you are compelled and held responsible for the apparent consequences of your choices, choices made without full knowledge and without full ability to forecast the outcomes.

I will use the American politics to illustrate this delusion of freedom, and its irony.

It has been my constant theory that the notion that freedom is equivalent to your ability to choose, and vice versa, has its source in American politics. And that it started as a politcal marketing slogan, to make people vote, especially those that would not otherwise.

For those that would vote anyway - without encouragement - are those already having political stakes and agenda in the system, and they are already decided on who they want in power regardless what arguments or persuasion a presidential aspirant can make. It is hard to unconvert the converted.

So it is the undecided, those without any political stakes, that ironically can change the political situation and give any hope to anyone with ambitions of poltical power. And only these without any political agenda can be persuaded and swayed by promises, true or false, by body language and appearances, by slogans, etc And their votes indeed truly count, for it is the only way the entrenched positions and proportions can be eroded away.

But cynically put, those that are without vested political interests are being manipulated to serve the competing interests of those with.

However people - even the Christian church - do believe the marketing message that they have freedom because they can choose, and vice versa, and so do the rest of the world, especially the glib and impressionable young people. And furthermore they also are made to believe that they have to live with the consequences of their choices, uncomplainingly.

(And to me this is the real intention or agenda, perhaps unconscious and unspoken, to introducing ‘democracy’ to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. The hidden message or idea therein is that since you voted, its your choice, and so you had better accept the results and the consequences of your choices. The desired effect being to get people to start living and stop fighting, to accept life as it is. But then why should anyone accept such an idea at all?)

Again to the American politics. Did the people of America choose Bush? It was debatable whether he obtained a majority, but even so what so significant about a majority of 200 or 500 or even 10,000 for that matter? The fact is that almost as much chose Gore as they did for Bush. But then rules are rules (what choice then?) And then again it was not individual votes that really counted, but rather something called the electoral college votes that actually matters (again what has happened to individual choices?)

Nonetheless the Americans believed that they have chosen Bush, or at the least accepted the outcome of ‘their’ election system, which was not exactly something they chose, and also accepted any outcomes of all the decisions that Bush made, including to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Well the people certainly didnt know, nor could they forecast that their choice will lead to them and/or their sons, brothers and boyfriends to fight, get hurt and be killed in these wars (or that oil prices goes beyond USD50 a barrel!).

But such things happened.

Can they stopped Bush going to war? They can’t. Well the theory say if Bush did it wrong you can vote him out of office four years later, but if I am dead or the one I loved is now a vegetable on permanent life support machine, what relevance is that?

But then you may say that the war was something entirely unexpected, as was Sep 11, and historic oil prices.

But thats precisely the point.

What relevance was your choice to any consequence? It does not really matter whether Bush or Gore was in office. The fact is that Sep 11, and other things, big and small, happened and changes everything.

And such unpredicatable events affects your life far more than your choices ever can, no matter how deliberate and optimised and maximised they were when you made them.

What then is true freedom?

If everything I do is determined, what determines what and how it is determined? Why can’t a supreme power determine that there is some sense in which youor argument holds true, adn yet still leaves me accouuntable for my actions and choices.

ie. If everything is determined from an origin, surely it is the nature and disposition of that origin which takes on a mantle of teh utmost importance. Therefore, deterministic arguments rn into problems when trying to deal with the origin of the known universe.

Do you see what I’m getting at ?

I do not think I am suggesting determinism one way or another.

What I am suggesting is that your ability to choose and your choices are restricted and constrained, perhaps in a manner unknowable to us; and that your choices and whatever consequences following that, may be unrelated at all.

Taken to the extreme this can mean that if I knifed someone in the chest and he died, his death may not have been the outcome of my act at all.

Perhaps he was already ordained to die. If he wasn’t then he will not die, and some may say it was miraculous he survived my attack.

On the other hand if he was ordained to die, even if I had chose NOT to knife him, he would have died anyway, eg a car hits him immediately after turning away from me.

If I was the instrument to his death then I will still be held accountable according to the law of the land. But it is not necessarily inevitable or deterministic that I was the instrument. And similarly it was not deterministic that he died by a knife or a car.