Does fate determine the course of our lives? To what extent are we as individuals able to control the outcome of events? The question of free will has plagued philosophers and theologians since time immemorial. They have not all arrived at the same conclusion.
Fate
The ancient Greeks were certain that very little in our lives is the outcome of our own choices. They believed in a trio of deities named the Fates (the Moerae) who were often depicted weaving a tapestry to represent the passing of events. Each individual’s life was represented by a thread which was woven into the fabric of reality, warp and weft, as our stories play out; until the time when the Fates decide our part in the story is over, and they cut the thread of our lifeline, and we die.
In this view, our lives are all predetermined at the time of our birth, and while our efforts in this life may be heroic or tragic or both, we cannot escape our fate, and any attempt to do so will inevitably lead to the fate itself; the story of King Oedipus is a classic example.
Free will
More recently, the prevailing Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition has interpreted the foundational Garden of Eden myth to mean that the central story of humanity itself is the freedom to make choices; and the human tendency to make the wrong choices, over and over again. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, I suppose; but the popular religions tend to extrapolate from that into a paternalistic mishmash of regressive moral code, superstition, judgmental guilt, and the arbitrary assertion of absolute power. (This is probably true of any dominant religion in any culture; but “they did it too” is not an excuse.) The point is that Christianity in particular believes we have free will, but acknowledges our tendency to totally mess things up in various ways, for which we require forgiveness and redemption, which of course only their god can provide.
In modern times, this idea of “free will” has been taken to extremes, and now is daily being used to blame people for whatever happens to them.
Sometimes bad things happen to good people.
Then society tries to figure out why they deserved it.
But they didn't.#bringBackForgiveness— Jesse S. Smith, Author (@JesseSmithBooks) January 19, 2017
The “free will” blame game
This line of reasoning has grown in popularity in recent years, and I often see it voiced on Twitter. If anything bad happens to you, the logic goes, then you must deserve it for some reason; and then people set about searching for reasons why you must deserve whatever bad thing has happened to you. If you’re poor then they blame you and allege that you must have made bad choices that left you poor. Their blame-game ignores the fact that we live in a racist, sexist, aristocratic society that reserves all the real opportunities for the children of the few and punishes everyone else for the circumstances of their birth. The truth is, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than you do of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps;” and yet, with a straight face, people continue to offer this as a serious solution. If you have made all the right choices and still can’t get ahead in life, well under no circumstances would they be willing to admit that society is inequitable and that disastrous conservative economic policies have crushed the hopes and dreams of an entire generation; no, instead they blame you for choosing the wrong graduate degree program, or for some poorly defined fault in your personality or your outlook or the way you look or whatever, it doesn’t really matter: the reasons they point to are not real reasons, these people are just searching for any random thing to use against you and its validity is beside the point. If you’re depressed, if you got attacked by another person, if you have any problem of any kind, these people immediately jump all over you and attack you some more, insisting that whatever problems you have must be your own fault.
Choosing Sartre
I recently discovered that I was drawn to certain aspects of the philosophy of the famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. A quote of his resonated with me. Sartre’s statement addressed a frustration I find myself feeling towards peers who decline to “take sides” on key questions and important issues of the day, excusing themselves because they dislike the tone of the discussion. (Listen: if you dislike the tone of the conversation, then lead by example and say something in a nicer tone. If you simply choose not to participate, then the bad tone wins the day and the next day the conversation will be even worse.)
Sartre said, “If I do not choose, that is still a choice.” And that is an assertion I can fully support. It has broad implications; but with regards to modern politics in particular, I wish the people who constantly blame “both sides” would think about this a little more.
"If I do not choose, that is still a choice."
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
from "Existentialism is a Humanism"— Jesse S. Smith, Author (@JesseSmithBooks) June 20, 2018
But some website I visited as I was searching for the quote (I am not going to dignify it with a link) took this idea in a whole new direction, by making the argument that “if you don’t like your life, then you only have yourself to blame, because you are the one who made the choices that brought you to this point.” This is a popular sentiment among the neo-fascist movement in modern global politics, a movement funded and beloved by Russia for its destabilizing effect on democracy worldwide: from Erdogan’s Turkey to Syria under Assad to Brexit and of course “Trumpism.” Ahem. However, on reading the quote in context, the “hater interpretation” does not appear to be Sartre’s point at all. I am not a Sartre scholar; but as far as I can tell, in relation to this quote, the focus on the notion of blame seems to have been introduced by that particular blogger (but it is worth addressing here because their post is one of the first Google results when you search for this quote).
Such an assertion itself is not merely an oversimplification; it is such a faulty model as to be simply wrong: completely false.
Our lives are not the product of our choices alone. Our lives are strongly affected by millions of random variable factors over which we have absolutely no control.
Can we not agree that sometimes bad things happen to good people? It is not merely unfortunate but positively evil that the opposite view is growing in popularity. People have literally said this to me on the social media: “If something bad happens to someone then they must have deserved it.” People like to bring up the notion of “karma” to justify this cruel point of view.
The concept of "karma" is an elitist doctrine designed to tell the oppressed that they deserve whatever horrible things happen to them.
— Jesse S. Smith, Author (@JesseSmithBooks) December 14, 2017
Karma has been used to excuse any number of evil actions. Taken one step further, you have the underpinnings of the neo-fascist authoritarianism that is gaining popularity so frighteningly fast in the world today. “If I hurt you, then you must deserve to be hurt,” is how the logic goes. People actively look for some reason, any reason at all, to blame the victim in every situation.
The human tendency to blame the victim surely has always existed; but in our time, it is rapidly growing in popularity. The “blame the victim” mentality has become positively codified into a life philosophy by the neo-fascists. It does not help that they can point to the proto-Aryan notion of “karma” to justify themselves. I strongly suspect that the more enlightened modern Hindus and Buddhists would tell you this is a misinterpretation or misapplication of the concept of karma; but that discussion is outside my specific realm of expertise.
The limitations of free will
The Matrix series of movies addresses the question of fate and choice as a core repeated theme, with somewhat conflicted messaging. The first movie includes the immortal quote:
“Do you believe in fate, Neo?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.”
"Do you believe in fate, Neo?"https://t.co/3DjnduF7tX
— Jesse S. Smith, Author (@JesseSmithBooks) August 3, 2018
However, as “Shmoop” points out, Neo’s refutation of fate is a logical fallacy known as “wishful thinking.” Neo may not like the idea; but it may be true nonetheless.
The second movie addresses this problem directly.
To quote Agent Smith: “We’re not here because we’re free. We’re here because we’re not free.”
"We're not here because we're free. We're here because we're not free."
~The Matrix Reloaded pic.twitter.com/Aok35gGGbm— Jesse S. Smith, Author (@JesseSmithBooks) July 5, 2018
My name is Smith.
We do not choose who our parents are; what kind of genes we will have; our race; the location of our birth; the socioeconomic circumstances that affect our lives; or the aggregate effects of the fifteen thousand years since the last Ice Age which have shaped human civilization and brought our society to where we are today. We do not choose the nature, disposition, or structure of the sociopolitical order into which we are born. Surely the range of choices available to us are thus narrowly limited by factors which lie far beyond our control.
Just for an obvious example, there is no longer any part of the Earth’s surface that remains unexplored territory. The entire world has been claimed and settled. It is impossible to just go somewhere else and start over. You literally cannot escape society. Anywhere you go there is already some kind of social order that you will have to contend with. This dramatically limits the possible range of our actions, and imposes various more or less arbitrary penalties on people who violate perceived social norms. This is extremely problematic in a society where some people consider your very existence to be a violation of social norms if you happen to be different from them in any way. The social norms are arbitrary, as is the enforcement of them. This is how power is maintained. This is ultimately the fundamental nature of power itself: the ability to arbitrarily harm another person. (See also, “Game of Thrones.”)
How then is it still conceivably realistic to claim that we possess this thing called “Free Will”?
We have free will only within an extremely narrowly defined set of circumstances. We do make choices in our lives, perhaps even constantly (as Sartre observes); but the outcome of our lives is influenced by many factors that are totally unrelated to those choices.
Furthermore, once certain choices are made, additional choices become inevitable or even preordained. In the modern world, choices we make early in our lives lock us in to a set course from which little deviation is socially acceptable or even possible. By the time we are in our thirties, few if any real choices remain to most of us: we find ourselves locked in to whatever path we randomly happened to be walking in our late teens to mid-twenties, whether we now regret it or not. Past a certain point, it’s increasingly impossible to suddenly up and decide to change one’s life. In retrospect, we each make relatively few choices of consequence in our lives, and many of those will not have felt like choices at the time: they were the happenstance outcome of certain events; they were the decisions we had been guided to by our parents and peers; they were the unintended consequence of a moment’s carelessness; they were the natural outcome of earlier choices; they were the only apparently logical thing to do at the time. Key life events are often based on opportunities presented by social connections; and choosing one’s friends is also often less of a choice than it may seem. (And once certain social connections have been established, the consequences for breaking those can be severe, as I have found recently: simply deciding not to be friends with one person can have a ripple effect that leads to ostracism by an entire peer group, complete with blatantly malicious outright defamation.)
Suicide is not a reasonable alternative “choice”
Oh, yes, this is part of the argument. Many have argued that we “choose” to continue living as we do because if we didn’t like it then we could just kill ourselves. This argument has also been used to claim that people “choose” to live as slaves, or that they “choose” to live under totalitarian regimes. Yes, people really say this. Yes, people suck. I mean, seriously: people suck. Arguing that someone “chose” a terrible outcome because they could have chosen their own death as an alternative (or, in the case of totalitarianism, they could have made a choice that would have also led to the torture and death of all their family members) — such an argument is not merely inhumane, it is offensive. No one should ever be expected to make these kinds of choices, under any circumstances. If suicide is the only choice available to someone, then in reality, the person has no choice available. Making the ultimate terrible decision is not so much an exercise of free will as it is a protest against the absence of free will.
Choices on a large scale: the Free Will Paradox
Paradoxically, the most important effect of an individual person’s choices may be their contribution to the aggregate effect of many people’s choices.
As human beings, we are most concerned with the choices that most directly (and most immediately) impact us. As individuals, the range of our available choices is limited by the constraints of the society in which we live. The types of choices that are available to us are rarely choices that will have a large impact on our own lives within an observable time scale. Such choices rarely come about more than once every few years; and they come about less and less often as we leave youth behind and head towards middle age. By and large, our daily individual choices have limited noticeable impact on our individual lives.
Millions of individual choices have a large effect
The paradox is that we are all a part of this same larger society in which we live; and although society constrains us, at the same time we also help to shape it. Millions upon millions of tiny choices that may not have a noticeable impact on an individual life in the short term can add up to have a tremendous impact on society and on the natural environment in the long term.
In America today, there are many cynics who want to convince you not to vote because it’s pointless, “the system is rigged,” all the candidates are the same regardless of party affiliation, blah blah blah. Don’t listen to those cynics. They have an agenda. They support the status quo, and they want to discourage you from participating in democracy, because they don’t want your vote to affect the status quo. The best choice you can make is to vote (and for cryin’ out loud, don’t vote for authoritarian figures).
Your choices can be manipulated
When I was in college I took a psychology class because I wanted to learn more about what makes people act the way they do. Instead I learned about Freud and got an overview of the major psychiatric disorders. It wasn’t until graduate school that I took a class that really addressed what motivates people: and that was a class on Consumer Behavior for my Marketing degree. (See, they teach the business students about what motivates people, because that’s where the money is.)
It turns out, you can affect another person’s behavior and choices by ensuring that they are exposed to certain kinds of messages in certain ways and at certain times.
Repetition is one key factor. For best results, the person should see or hear the same message at least three times. During the commercial breaks for a TV show, you might see the same advertisement three times in half an hour. This is why. Repetition makes you remember the message. Studies have shown that people even begin to believe an obviously false statement if they hear it enough times. (See also, “Trump supporters.”)
Evocative messages are more effective. Messages with emotional resonance are more memorable. Simply presenting information requires mental processing on the part of the viewer or listener, and thus makes little lasting impression. For example, showing someone charts and data or presenting them with a factual explanation is unlikely to make them change their opinion about politics. (For another example of complex information that requires a lot of mental processing, few people will make it this far through this post; so if you did, congratulations! Pat yourself on the back.) On the other hand, a message that evokes a strong emotional response will be remembered and is more likely to trigger a specific action at a later time.
This is why, for example, a soft drink manufacturer might show ads that feature warm loving family moments, such as a summer cookout. Those sentimental feelings are a strong trigger for memory, which in turn becomes a strong tendency towards a specific purchasing behavior. You might think you chose to purchase Coca-Cola but in reality you have been conditioned to it by a lifetime of advertisements. The ability of marketers to calculatedly manipulate our purchasing habits demonstrates that we as individuals make far fewer choices in our lives than we may think we do.
Can you guess what the other most evocative emotional trigger is? That’s right, you guessed it: fear. Fear is an extremely powerful motivator, as is its close cousin, anger. People have been known to take drastic and at times completely irrational measures to avoid their fears. If an advertisement can arouse enough fear in you then you are much more likely to do what the advertiser wants you to do, whether it’s make a certain purchase or vote a certain way. Frightening messages such as, “Buy this or else you might find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere and unable to start your car,” or “The lizard people are coming to take your jobs,” if they are repeated enough times by sources you trust, have the power to motivate you to behave a certain way. Taken to an extreme, if you spend enough time reading InfoWars, you may end up shooting your gun in a crowded pizza restaurant to teach “the liberals” a lesson.
The source of a message affects how much attention we pay to it. Someone with authority and/or perceived trustworthiness will generally have more of an impact on your memory than some random stranger. This is why celebrity spokespeople are paid for product endorsements.
This point is important to remember if you’re on Twitter. There is a high degree of probability that at least one (and probably many more) of the accounts you follow is either:
a. secretly involved in Dark Marketing (where companies secretly hire influencers or even invent fictitious consumers as spokespeople to persuade you to buy a certain thing), or
b. secretly a political operative: foreign or domestic, official or unofficial. This comes in many forms, but political operatives most commonly either want to persuade you to back a certain position or candidate; or else they want to persuade you not to vote at all, if they happen to disagree with you, to ensure that their preferred candidate or measure will win. And if you don’t think people are that cynical, then you haven’t been looking very hard, lol.
Finally, it will come as no surprise that symbols are very effective recall triggers. Symbols are so powerful that individuals frequently adopt them as expressions of identity: not just flags and religious iconography, but corporate logos and sports branding as well. From the American flag and the Christian cross to Starbucks cups and the latest iPhone, symbols play a powerful role in our core self-expression. People who wish to gain influence over other people sometimes co-opt these most powerful symbols and bend them to their purposes, joining a powerful recall trigger to their unrelated objective. It can be very effective. This is (in part) why extremist ideologies are so often strongly identified with flags and religious symbols.
Conclusion
Before we judge others too harshly, we should remember that many of our life outcomes are the product of circumstances beyond our control. Hard work does not necessarily bring financial rewards. No outcome in life is certain.
We make choices all the time, just as Sartre says. The refusal to make a choice is itself a choice, just as Sartre says. We often make bad choices, just as the Bible says. But the scope of our choices is narrowly limited by circumstances beyond our control, and the outcome of those choices is often not a predictable result of the choices themselves but are once again largely based on circumstances beyond our control. Our freedom of choice is constrained by history, society, previous choices, and circumstances beyond our control. Our decisions are influenced by the power of the ideology that we all have drummed into us every day from the TV and the Internet and the churches and our peers. And our choices are manipulated by corporations for profit, and by political entities for power. Never underestimate the power of marketing and propaganda. Our lives present few major individual decisions of obvious lasting consequence to our own lives; and when we do make important choices, we often feel at the time that we really had little or no choice: it was the only thing we could do at the time.
Acting with forethought, we might be able to harness the power of choice, and engineer a society that can teach people how to recognize opportunities and make better choices for themselves and for the world as a whole: the millions of little momentary choices, the unconscious habits and attitudes and learned behaviors that cascade one upon the other to damage ourselves and other people and our environment and we don’t even notice. But even if we could engineer such a society, people probably still wouldn’t feel like they really had a choice. They will still often feel like there was only one reasonable thing to do.
Paradoxically, the aggregate effect of millions of small choices by individual people may have a tremendous impact on the world in the long term. The most important effects of our choices may not have an obvious effect on our own lives in the short term. The effects of those kinds of choices are so incremental as to be imperceptible on an individual level. We must learn to perceive our place in the world, and find our power by convincing as many other people as possible to make better choices, and encourage them to pass it on, and on down the line.
Now go forth, and decide to decide.
End note aside: Although it’s not exactly part of a series, I wrote this blog post about free will nearly a year and a half after I first thought of writing it.
I ran this poll in mid-March of 2017 to ask my Twitter “followers” which subject I should write about first.
If I had time to write a blog post, would you rather read about:
— Jesse S. Smith, Author (@JesseSmithBooks) March 17, 2017
The “mental health” essay was published as a guest post on the Stigma Fighters blog, and I wrote the “follow-back policies” post at the end of April 2017. The above is my “fate vs. free will” post; so eventually I will have to get around to the “personality tests” post, I suppose. You can see what a high priority this is for me…
Jesse, thank you for taking the time to write such thought provoking material. Now I’m going to read it again!