I will offer some straw man arguments or statements and attempt to add some of my conclusions to some of the platitudes and other rhetoric people espouse on the hopes that it will purge some of the more caustic elements among people’s thought patterns. Doing so might alienate myself or people who believe these statements to be universally true. That is not my aim, and you are free to disagree and disregard whatever you find unhelpful or harmful. I sincerely hope that is not the case as I went forward with the best of intentions in this essay.
“You cannot control how others act, only how you act in situations.”
The nascent point of this essay is anchored in the perception that free will is innate and an immutable fact of life. I will argue, with great pathos, that it is not only dangerous to advocate the quoted statement, but it is immoral to prescribe such a philosophy to those around you. I feel that it is important to put out the disclaimer that your actions matter and that you are not free of consequence. What is worth noting, is that while agency is not a myth, it can be used to both bolster the ego in an unhealthy manner, and to condemn those who are genuinely victims of their own determined lives.
I became vexed by the lack of workers at my place of employment and the disturbingly lax attitude that the essential job we were performing was unimportant. I never choose to feel that way, or that I choose to care how it affected me that so many workers abandoned their professional duties. I do not choose to shame them based on what I would call their “choices,” but rather feel like we are all struggling against some form of circumstance. They may feel that the company that they signed up with is not performing the most important obligations that was promised to them. And sometimes, in my most wretched fearfulness, fear they wish to avoid working with the dreaded pariah Derek.
I find that whatever course of action that I take because of this strange workplace phenomenon is still a result of my response to the challenges the universe placed before me, not actions that I perform out of the ability to spontaneously create stimuli to those around me. We act based on the forces around us: hunger, anger, confusion, exhaustion, euphoria, and so many other feelings that crash upon us like squalls against the side of a rickety old vessel. If we really had a choice; would we even choose to get hungry at all? If we did, wouldn’t that still be the result of some other factor, like a desire for normalcy.
I constantly find myself at odds with the supposed wisdom of conventional psychological heterodoxy, and this is due in large part, to a deeper philosophical connection with life's more fundamental dilemmas. The primary assumption of the heterodoxy is that compatibilism is the determined law of the land. This assumes that there are things both within and without our control. A philosophical muddy water that tries to marry the concepts of free will versus determinism debate with “some of A and some of B argument.” There is a great and almost seductive appeal to signing onto such philosophies for the sake of argumentative convenience.
I think that most people have unconsciously made a Faustian bargain that led them to believe that they still have some control of “some” things. They mostly aren’t certain what those things are, but they would like to believe that intuition is somehow the guide of this, and that it is better to not perseverate on such matters because it wastes valuable emotional energy. Energy that people would rather spend in angst over their social media accounts mind you. This leads people to become parsimonious with said energy in the way of opening their mind to the possibility that: they don’t really control anything.
This is a “glass half empty” type of philosophy to some people, who insist that controlling things is somehow the cat’s pajamas. They aren’t even conscious of the fact that they have signed themselves over to a Machiavellian thought process without a doubt. Perhaps considering that you have no control over your life as a good thing or perhaps liberating in the sense that you have no obligatory agenda of domination. This doesn’t make you uncaring on irresponsible, but rather the opposite: caring and thoughtful. Try not to let other people believe that they may have agency over all things that come their way. Because they are still included in that scenario where others are concerned.
“If you have no control over anything that happens, then that would give you a ticket to make any action morally permissible.”
As an early student of determinism, I initially reasoned that morality and ethics were con games designed to trip people up, confuse them, and provide a net of control by social elites. As time went on, my thought journeys have led to me to a more antithetical conclusion to that of the straw man argument quoted above. Just because we have no choice in our decisions does not make them any less moral or immoral. Any more significant or insignificant. And it does not change the fact that those consequences affect the actions that others around you will take. Much like doing a huge cannonball into a lake.
Where I have landed on a theological level, is more like a secular version of Calvinism, where the deity has determined our good and wicked deeds before our very lives were breathed into existence. The primary differences between myself and John Calvin, is that I think this ends with an infinite void of nothingness rather than a pit of fire / divine paradise. While I may be wrong, and I cannot even disconfirm the existence of a supreme deity, I can only begin at the most concrete issues. Maybe this is something I can control, but I can also turn that argument around and say that I never had the choice to reach that conclusion. It just happened.
On a more pragmatic and less obtuse level, we can look at the cyclical nature of abuse and dependency and concluded that people can only fall into patterns that they know. They don’t choose to become corrupted by abuse, and turn into abusers themselves, it is just a process that changes people. Often, against their will. Why chain people to those patterns and remind them that “they can change things.” When can they, and if they can at all, are huge assumptions to take as a given. Just because you don’t like what someone does or says, does not mean that we can expect superhero like results insofar as making changes. I understand that our culture values redemption, but people require the tools to make a house. Give them boards with no nails, and they will keep falling.
Back to my story... I never feel like it was a choice to get upset that I felt abandoned at my job. I never felt like it was my choice to become emotionally unhinged at a certain point. Is this out of a desire to avoid responsibility and adopt a so called “snowflake” persona? Doesn’t it sound silly if you think that people choose to get upset, they choose to have insomnia or mental illness, or that they choose to resent the current structure of society. Do they choose to rebel because society is wrong, or do they simply like to rebel because it gives them some kind of thrill? Does it even matter what choices come before us if consequence and results are what really matter? Did the intention of the killer matter that he wanted to save people from having little aliens live in people's brains by bashing their brains in with a claw hammer?
“My decisions matter! I make the choices about what I do and who I am!”
To begin, we must assume that matter isn’t a completely subjective reality and that those decisions are truly yours. You make all your decisions with a head full of public or private schooling (most of us), doesn’t it stand to reason that all those people had an equal if not greater part in making that decision. Are you an independent agent, or an amalgam of information regurgitating what patterns you have observed in a way that appears unique or tailored to your meaningful decisions. It isn’t that your decisions don’t matter because they are unimportant, it is that they don’t matter because they aren’t really your own. It is just as important if you eat oatmeal or cereal. The question is really “what is the reason I want that oatmeal?”
People want to latch more dearly onto their decisions as part of their ego. Even this author has an ego about the way in which he believes the words written are an assemblage of his brilliant yet tortured mind. This may seem pretentious; it is a pretense in which we live under more commonly than most would like to admit. If people separated themselves from their decisions their ego identity would become farther abstract and therefore would lose all meaning in the context of associating people with even their own memories. There is a positive side to all of this.
If people separated their decisions from their egos, they would be far less prone to psychotic snapping and acts of violence, snarky bigotry, hateful coercion, vicious ostracizing, and the other disturbing milieu of destructive human behaviors. Those actions that are supposedly “yours” cannot harm you, if you understand that they are just actions in the same way that a shoe is a shoe or a lamp is a lamp. The greatest fear is the more Dickensian elements of society that feed on human guilt and misery to project a sense of deserved punishment. Usually for the purpose of enslavement. Once and a while, to succor some sick amusements as well.
The purpose of my questions (some were rhetorical, and others were meant for deeper thought) were to propose an alternate viewpoint about how we might proceed into the future in assigning responsibility, blame, and our own codes of ethics when dealing with those around us. We may do these actions without much thought or consideration under the assumption that our philosophies are intrinsically good. Never fall into this trap! Always remember to evaluate and revaluate your core philosophies under the threat of becoming a callous and indifferent person.
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