First of all what is it
we call free will? Basically, the capacity for one individual to make
decisions freely, so that each decision, lets say: “Should I turn
left, or right?”, could have been equally one or the other. I
decided to turn left freely, but could have decided also to turn
right, there is nothing that has made me turn left. The belief in
free will is the unbelief of any kind of destiny that you wouldn’t
be able to escape from. And because we are so fond of freedom, most
of us believe free will exists.
Maybe free will got so
popular because it was the negation of the inevitable destiny that
many religions exposed as the only truth, leaving man with no hope to
escape a difficult life, it was your destiny, you could just accept
it. Christianity developed a crumb of comfort: the hope of a better
existence in death… But even within the Christian church the
question of free will was present because if it didn’t exist it
meant that man couldn’t be taken responsible for his bad actions.
And the religions of the book quite like to make you feel guilty, it
is their best stock-in-trade.
So, apart from having
read Schopenhauer’s essay, in which he demonstrates that free will
isn’t free, I experienced life, and for as much as I look into it
there hasn’t been anything close to free will. I find particularly
representative of his essay (and of my experience) a short sentence
he wrote: “Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what
he wants”.
But after all who
cares? Everybody should believe what they want! How can that
particular belief in free will have a negative effect?
So now let’s just
consider what precisely motivates this article: the example of
domestic violence. Haven’t you ever heard someone say that they
didn’t understand why a person stayed in a visibly toxic
relationship? Because there is no reason a human would freely choose
to live in hell, is there? Would you?
In
the most recent researches on trauma consequences, namely PTSD and
Complex PTSD, what comes to light is that it conditions one’s
future choices in life, one’s reaction to different life stimuli.
Even neuroscience seems to point out against any possible free will
as Donald Hebb theorised in his book: The
Organisation of Behaviour: a Neuropsychological Theory.
So here is one of the
perverse effects of believing in free will: free will implies that a
person living in a toxic relationship chooses to do so, and they do,
but was that choice free? Or was it a choice conditioned by past
experiences?
And when people judge
another based on this belief in free will, they turn a victim into a
willing accomplice, when that person was just following the path that
their past created. Sometimes a conjecture of events makes it
possible for someone to untie the bonds that kept them in the hell
they were. And sometimes there is no such conjecture. Does that make
one better than the other?
Free will is just
another of those nice ideas that people who have had an easier path
like to sustain, because it flatters their ego to believe that they
made good choices in life. It is perverse because it compromises the
idea that we were all born equal, because it prevents a more empathic
society. We are what our life made us, and we should be at least
empathic with the people that have had a different path.
Alice S. Dransfield
Further
reading – A Schopenhauer essay:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/human/chapter3.html
