WILLING THE WILL THAT WILLS?
What is the “secret” of human behavior, one that’s really so much the saving grace that we may even keep it from ourselves rather than very far into it try to delve? What is it that should be so confidential, classified, and undisclosed—its potential kept under wraps, so very contra; informally: hush-hush; formally: sub rosa?
Well, it’s a revelation of splendor, one that’s often good to surrender, but is also very well to remember. Is the will free to will one’s actions otherwise? Can antecedent conditions be ignored? Can the self be an unmoved mover? Not really, but… and what of those tendencies of evo’s realm that have been imprinted on one’s genetic film—those of temperament, role preferences, emotions, responses, and even one’s most revered moral choices—those invoices from which one rejoices?
Well, these are not choices at all in of any free will voices. In essence, from the basis of one and from all that one has become from life’s total behavioral reactions, there are probabilities of actions—some patterns that are very likely and some patterns highly unlikely. Is free will a necessary fiction, a kind of a religion? No and yes if it’s to provide an essential berth for one’s morality, meaning, and worth.
So, then, with this “free will” become, one might then succumb to systematic deception about one’s causal connection to that of nature, a roadblock, a detour that’s neither possible, necessary, nor desirable. The friends to these “free will” motifs would be the mythical cultural beliefs that explain behaviors and feelings in terms of unknowable forces and beings. But, to protect one’s moral virtues should one still believe oneself’s purview to be as an ultimately responsible agent, lo—a self creation ex nihilo, a god-like, miniature first cause who chooses without it being determined by one’s own muses?
Well, maybe, but, nay, really not, nil, for there is no contra-causal free will. What the good then of this fix we’re in? Such it is then that we can gain a measure of peace rather than the anger of resentment’s crease when someone does or says something ‘bad’, even those close relatives we once had.
For the civil-law-breakers and all those ungiving takers we’ll no longer incarcerate for punishment, being so irate at the jail’s bait, but so that society will be protected and that they might emerge corrected from the swill of a prison mill, fulfilled with a new unfree will that points more toward goodness, or at least away from badness. Thus, the action of metaphysical justification for a total retribution then greatly softens, a relief from the stress, so often, for it’s no longer induced from the abuse produced. Really? Truly.
Indeed, we become less self-conscious, more playful, less noxious, more gracious, less callow, and less likely to wallow in the sorrow that is so hollow and shallow in its excessive self-blame, pride, envy, or resentment; now all put aside. Aren’t we changing the will here as we go? Yes, ever to a new fixed one, yet the fixed will must ever follow what we know. So, then we are learning—the only hope for larger earnings from the will’s then wider yearnings! Yes, overturning.
What if to learning we are averse? What a curse! Might as well call the hearse. So, then, all in all, though a tempt, it is that we humans are not exempt from the laws of physics—a preempt although we’ve been wired to make the attempt—a seeming violation by nature of its own universal law and structure. No, it’s not a violation I would call, for science still did tell us all. It’s all part of the structure; one can never cheat Mother Nature. Hail, then, to the physic.
Well, it’s not so bad, is it? Although we can never will the will, its motives ever our intent do fulfill; but it is that we have no free will. True, plus we can expand the will’s horizoning through our broader learning’s wisening. Yes, learn today, and by tomorrow, say, the will may have a different sway. I wouldn’t want it any other way, for then I wouldn’t be me—my screenplay. What other ways can we improve the play? Well, we have patience and delay, for we don’t have to act right away—until a more creative solution appears.
