“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man” Aristotle was quoted to say. Children are totally reliant on the family environment to survive and thrive. Early life experiences have a huge impact on the way we perceive the world as adults.
Did you choose your parents, genetics, place of birth and those very formative early life experiences? If the answer is no, maybe there are other things in life you don’t really choose.
Determinism, in simple terms not dissimilar to destiny and even karma, implies that everything happening today is determined by things that have already happened in the past.
The feeling of having free will and being in control of your own life is a powerful one. When I stumbled upon the notion of determinism, it initially affected me negatively, before I learnt to live with this life enhancing and liberating philosophy.
Oh, she’s so lovely, a feeling of heart sinking meets with butterflies sensations in the solar plexus. If you feel attracted to a person, did you choose this attraction? Why do you love Jane and not Mary, given both are intelligent, good looking and capable human beings?
Some people are into watching football, others prefer to play it. If you feel shy or want to be the centre of attention, tend to be grounded or airy, like lemon drizzle but not chocolate cake, it’s not really your conscious self choosing your personality, taste and attractions.
What we like and dislike is very mysterious, if you think about it. Celebrity endorsement and advertising, peer group behaviour (keeping up with the Joneses) and general culture determine what is hot and what is not and that’s a good place to start. It’s clear and obvious the right thing to do is to buy Apple, but then, why would I choose a silver macbook over the space grey one?
Maybe attraction is led from the unconscious, the conscious self rationalises the choice once it’s made. Is there really a rational reason why I love orange sorbet and dislike pistachio ice-cream? Me includes my subconscious which knows, just knows what’s good and bad.
When I think of good and bad I think of culture and this changes depending on where you live and evolves all the time. Ancient Japan’s samurai moral values and ethical code include sincerity, frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery and honour until death. Frugality is a value I personally love, when many of my fellow Europeans live immersed in consumerism. As for honour until death…
In some religious cultures, an icon can be turned into a deity through a ceremony and believed to become sentient, alive, capable of listening to the petition of the devotee. This might work as a powerful placebo. Do we choose to be sent to church, temple or mosque, believe in god or be sceptical? Would you really profess yourself as atheist if you lived in Kabul?
I am fully aware I am trying to condense a very complex subject into a short blog post. Determinism is a philosophy I personally keep on learning about, further developing this notion in my mind, trying to make sense of it more and more, not just intellectually, but practically, in my day to day life. This post helps me on this quest and I’d love to discuss it, in person, with anyone who has a predisposition for inquiry and speculation on the mysteries of life.
At this stage of my understanding, I think together with relativism, determinism is life enhancing when balanced and moderated in practical terms and when combined with a deeply felt sense of meaning. If everything is predetermined, personal responsibility can easily be discounted as an arbitrary societal restriction and thrown away. This obviously is dangerous in the sense that one can easily fall into unbridled hedonism or, devoid of a sense of purpose, destructive nihilism.
If everything’s meant to happen the way it happens, it’s not me choosing, what stops me from giving up initiative, or worse, let the Freudian id go besek and satisfy all basic urges and desires? Let’s have a party, eat a whole cake, drink all the wine and then more. If I am not free to choose, whatever comes comes anyway, the boundaries of common ethics and etiquette don’t matter anymore. Maybe nothing matters anymore.
Self-destruction and, possibly, destruction of important relationships and connections with family, friends and community is meant to bring pain and disease. Once all pursuits, deeds and projects are abandoned, (who needs to plan when everything is already planned by faith), a fundamental sense of meaning can disappear and a depressive form of nihilism might ensue.
If nothing is good or bad, even feeling hungover and alone falls into that category, yet I rather not feel sick and lonely as some emotions or states of mind are definitely preferable to others. Not because it’s culturally so, just because I am a human being that prefers feeling well-being over pain, serotonin over cortisol. If that’s true for most people across cultures and generations, maybe that’s predetermined, we are born with this ability, at a very basic and primal level, to discern positive vs negative emotions and that’s a useful place to start, to develop a sense of priority and a value system.
A pitfall I certainly don’t want to fall into is seeing myself as a victim of circumstances. Given the set of cards I were handed at birth, it’s useful to believe there’s always a way to experience some positive emotions, have a good life.
Even if I might be convinced intellectually that I am an actor in this movie that is life, not the director or the producer of the film itself, that doesn’t mean I behave irresponsibly or I let myself go. I naturally moderate this notion in the context of practicality and what I think might be present and long term well-being. I balance the pleasure of the moment with the responsibility for my future self, as well as the relationship with people I love or that matter to me.
Hedonism might be great in the short term but it probably is a recipe for misery in the long run. As social animals, humans need some sort of cooperation, support and even love from others. Others who consciously or unconsciously, in a predetermined or free willed manner, behave according to a matrix of values and conventions that also end up conditioning my behaviour, both unconsciously and consciously, as we are interconnected.
Do you have faith that things are going to work out OK? If you love mindset motivational speakers and believe all or most of what happens in life is the result of your free will, you might act differently to people who go with the flow, inshallah.
This cultural difference might be applied to different historical heritages, where the Western civilization represented by the American dream, recognise material success as the fruit of individual hard work and entrepreneurship, rather than the result of a set of predisposed characteristics.
A western belief in pure free will makes you work, act and behave as a materially successful person and if you act as a billionaire, work all the time, take bold and confident financial risks, you might end up becoming a multimillionaire at least. If the billionaire gets a rare condition or ends up in a fatal car accident though, is this free will or bad luck?
In Eastern cultures, the concepts of fortune, destiny and karma somewhat mitigate this blind faith in the ability of any individual to achieve great glory and fame purely based on their own free-willed intention and rational behaviour. A winner in the West wasn’t predisposed, lucky or destined to become so, they just put in the right effort. A loser could have been a winner of course, if only they raised up to the challenge and weren’t so lazy.
Might it all be written in the stars? Spiritually, I think Eastern cultures are somewhat more developed and life enhancing. Materially, the West has proven to be more successful.
What this notion of determinism is doing to me is quite interesting. I behave as if I have free will, with plans and intentions that provide a sense of meaning and a useful vision of the future. I don’t think I could do otherwise, given my conscious decisions are, at least very often, met, changed or manipulated by the higher will of my subsconscious.
When I encounter a setback or obstacle in life, I now have the ability to bring myself consolation and positive emotions considering whatever is happening, is somewhat at least, meant to be happening. This, scientifically speaking, means more serotonin and less cortisol.
How this, in the longer run, is going to affect my level of material achievement, I don’t know. Spiritually and philosophically, the notion of determinism is useful as it allows some detachment and acceptance of circumstances. I am cultivating a certain appreciation of life as a mysterious, difficult at times but often beautiful game I get to discover day by day, as it comes. Were you destined for greatness and glory?
I ended up living on a beautiful tropical island and had an interesting life so far, for which I am grateful, most of the times.