Peterson Hierarchies

 

Today is 4/6/25; a couple of weeks ago, I saw a short Jordan Peterson clip on YouTube, on a subject he has broached before, and I was familiar with his take on hierarchies, and then and now accept his assertion that hierarchies have been in the human genetic code for 350 million years, a common background we share with lobsters.

 

Peterson is refuting Marxists and other revolutionaries who insist that a caste or class system in society is a human construct, so that evil system needs to be overthrown, and we will construct a utopian-grade classless society to replace it with.

 

Peterson is asserting that caste system, inequities and inequalities have always been here, and are darned need impossible to eradicate and remove.

 

That seems correct. We cannot eradicate the tendency for people over time to divide themselves into haves/oppressor and the majority (have-nots/oppressed), but we can mitigate these natural proclivities.

 

If we set up a social construct, a social contract, agreed to by each generation, that all shall live as individuating supercitizens in a free-market constitutional republic, then people will learn to be free, be roughly equal, oppress none, and be oppressed by none; then, this learned behavior, in which the young are steeled into, will generally disallow for returning to a hierarchical social dispensation.

 

This will only work in any given society if the young are instructed to live as individuating supercitizens in each succeeding generation forever, for the young must know how to love and live, and how not to love and not to live, and accept such self-controlling role-playing as their personal duty, freely accepted, and enthusiastically embraced and self-enforced, then society will not be utopia, but will be close enough to be acceptable.

Schlichter's Take

 

I enjoy Townhall.com on the Internet, daily, as a reliable source of news/ On 4/3/25 I read an editorial there by Kurt Schlicter, which appealed to me, so I copied and pasted the entire article onto a document so that I could comment on his editorial and then post it on my blog site.

Here is that editorial:

 

(Kurt, K after this): “The Globalist Authoritarians Are Playing With Fire

 

Kurt Schlichter | Apr 03, 2025

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

What happened with Marine Le Pen, the most popular politician in France who was just banned from standing for election on the flimsiest of pretenses, is no exception. It’s becoming the rule around the West and in other places, too, where being outside the mainstream of authorized establishment left-leaning globalist politics has become criminalized.”

 

My response: Totalitarian Leftist elites all over the West are using rogue judges acting as kings issuing nation-wide injunctions, and lawfare tactics like the one recently deployed against Le Pen in France to stifle the opposition, taking down their leaders. This is what authoritarian regimes do. The legal system is weaponized by the elite against independent voices and political opponents.

 

K: “In some places, like the UK and Spain, it takes the form of persecuting people for saying things that those in power don’t want to hear. In other places, like Germany, upstart populist parties that earned a significant number of votes are informally, and sometimes formally, marginalized and threatened with being banned. But it’s the criminal persecution of leaders that is becoming the go-to. It happened to Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, Georgescu in Romania, and Le Pen in France. In each of these cases, the establishment authoritarians essentially attempted to frame a politician they couldn’t beat at the ballot box. Of course, their American analogs tried to do the same thing to Donald Trump here, and when that didn’t work, their allies tried to murder him. Thankfully, they failed at both – with the people who instigated these atrocities too dumb to know that they are the ones who should be the most thankful they failed.”

My response: Note Schlichter does not say the Right should beat the Left at their own game, but he thoughtfully notes that the Left are lucky that their opponents do not employ such undemocratic tactics against dissenters and foes, as the Left has done to the Right and conservatives.

K: “These are not the acts of strong and confident leaders who believe in the strength and popularity of their ideology. These are the cowardly acts of authoritarians who differ from Putin not in their nature but only in their extent.”

My response: This must be highlighted: Those that illegally persecute the opposition are cowardly and are like Putin in nature, if not in totally vicious extent, at this time, but they are descending that slippery slope.

 K: “They haven’t thrown anybody out of a fifth-story window yet that we know of, though we don’t know if they actively put the murderer who tried to kill Trump in Butler up to it – the one who tried to ambush him in Florida was an active member of their collective – but they would’ve cheered if either attempt had succeeded. Thankfully, America was not so far gone that the people’s choice could not prevail, though the resisters in the judiciary, the regime media, and elsewhere are doing everything they can to ensure that the man the people elected to govern can’t actually exercise the powers of office.”

 

My response: The Left is ideological and authoritarian, and its elite uses judges, the regime media dictatorially override the popular will and agenda which Trump represents. 

K: “The European authoritarians, however, still have the ability to crush dissent. There are several reasons why, including the fact that most of the good Europeans long ago left for America, and the ones who remain are largely degraded and pathetic people. After all, Europe is an exhausted culture, too weak both morally and spiritually to come to its own defense. Its glorious cathedrals are museums now, and its armies are jokes. They can’t find the will or the courage to defend themselves, and Europeans have turned over their governance to corrupt, globalist fools who invite the Third World in to complete the destruction of what was the mother of civilization. 

and sickened by them.”

 

My response: What a devastating criticism of Europeans and their dying culture!. The culturally Marxist cause and mass movement rules there, and it nearly toppled America under Biden—and they might yet succeed—but all that is totalitarian, sick and corrupt about Europe, bluntly and accurately described by Kurt, are coming to or are already entrenched in Democratic American circles.

 

K: “It’s difficult to explain to Americans why we should spend our treasure and put our blood on the line for nations that oppress their own people and embrace sham democracy. Even the UK, the father of our democracy, has turned into a political deadbeat dad. Why should we have a special relationship with a country that sends cops to the house of parents complaining about school policies? Under the Democrats, they tried to do that here, and we rejected it. We demonstrated at least a modicum of manhood in the face of this petty tyranny. But until the Europeans demonstrate their commitment to doing something about their own enslavement, it’s unclear how we might help. We certainly shouldn’t be protecting them from other European dictatorships – we have no interest in refereeing among oppressors. The fact that they need us to do so reflects their decision to essentially disarm and become pathetic welfare states teaming with foreign parasites and native cowards.

In short, America cannot be expected to – and is not going to – care more about Europe than the Europeans do.”

My response: He is telling the complete, depressing truth about Europeans. They may not be salvageable, and are ripe for Putin to swallow up Ukraine, and then move West with his rearming, 600,00-man army to retake Europe all the way to the beaches of Normandy.

K: “Our response as Americans to fascist acts like the framing of Le Pen should be loud and bold condemnation and contempt. What they are doing is truly disgusting – and dangerous, too. We should say so, especially since their citizens can’t without fear of a knock on the door. The European ruling class hates hearing it, especially when JD Vance goes overseas and tells them the truth to their smug, pale faces. Their fussy fury when he exposes their fake democracy and lies about freedom is hilarious. But all they should get from us is talk. We should let them fend for themselves. They are unworthy of a special relationship, and it’s impossible to frame a coherent or compelling explanation of why a single American paratrooper should die in defense of any country that refuses to allow its most popular politician to run because the establishment dislikes her platform.”

My response: Yes, why should our soldiers die to defend European oligarchs suppressing a popular politician like Le Pen because she is bucking the Establishment., and the people are responding to her?

K: “We should certainly learn the lesson here about what’s going on over there, although, as we’ve seen, the Democrats have tried many of the same tactics. That they’ve been defeated so far is a testament to the fact that Americans are not yet completely broken. We’re not ready to be serfs, and the fact that we have more guns than people provides a powerful backstop against the kind of tyranny the globalist left would love to impose in America as well. 

I shudder to think of what would have happened if Trump had been murdered or if they had succeeded in knocking him off the ballot. But I’m not shuddering for my sake. If the stuff hits the fan, I and those like me will prevail. I’m shuttering over the fate of the morons whose greed, corruption, and stupidity would have sparked a conflict they are utterly unprepared to fight. And I do mean fight. That’s what happens when the ruling class uses a corrupt system to block the expression of the people’s will and leaves no peaceful path for it to be heard. We are very far from that here, but if it came to that, patriots would fight for our Constitution and our freedom. The elite and their minions? Who exactly would do their fighting? Who is willing to die to enact the Green New Deal, to impose DEI, or to allow dudes in girls' toilets? Harry Sisson would flee to Canada to be a sex pest at the local Tim Horton’s before he ever picked up a rifle.”

My response: We must stay alert, armed, and assertive to keep our internal Marxists oppressors from capturing America. If our Le Pens or Trumps cannot through votes and the election process fight their totalitarian madness, then revolution and armed uprising will be the masses only resort, which nobody wants.

K: “Will there be a revolution in Europe? France was once famous for its revolting people. There’s a lot of anger, but there aren’t a lot of weapons left among the citizenry – never, ever, give up your guns and, in fact, go buy guns and ammunition. On the other hand, there aren’t a lot of troops either for the governments to use to suppress their own people and force the people to accept the dictatorship should the Euro masses decide to leave their tiny, squalid apartments and take to the streets. The ugly truth is that civil wars don’t necessarily require guns. Hundreds of thousands of people were butchered in Rwanda with knives and machetes. Maybe Keir Starmer was thinking ahead when he banned ninja swords. 

Civil wars are the least civil kind of wars. They are best avoided.

Or maybe they will just accept a picture of the future that is a wizened EU crone’s Gucci slipper stamping on a human face forever. Maybe manipulating the judicial system to ensure that the supporters of popular leaders are disenfranchised won’t cause any more reaction among the people than some grumbling in their bizarre foreign languages. But, if you’re familiar with history, and most of our elite no longer is, you might remember Julius Caesar and his crossing of the Rubicon. The Rubicon was the border to Italy that a Roman proconsul serving abroad could not cross at the head of his armed troops. Caesar knew that if he laid down his imperium and returned to Rome as a civilian, his political enemies would use the judiciary to destroy him. So, he didn’t lay down his imperium when he returned to Rome. He brought his legionnaires.

Now, one might point out that Caesar’s political enemies did eventually murder him after he essentially became a dictator in fact, if not title. That’s true. Caesar was famously merciful to his enemies. Several of the men who slaughtered him had received his pardon. The guy who came after him didn’t make that mistake. Caesar’s heir hunted down those murderers and killed them, along with a lot of other people. Augustus then made himself emperor, again in fact if not title. 

In the end, the elite probably would have been better off not messing with Caesar and addressing the concerns of the plebs who adored him. Perhaps history is teaching us that today’s popular leaders like Donald Trump and Marine La Pen are not the people’s last chance. They are the globalist’s last chance.”

 

My response: Schlichter is reminding the globalists, the fanatical cultural Marxists, to leave the likes of Trump and Le Pen alone, to allow them to ascend to power peacefully and via the election process.

Otherwise, the masses will reassert their control violently, and elites will be killed. They will cede ruling control one way or the other.

 

Hoffer On Undesirables

 

Eric Hoffer, in his book, The Ordeal of Change, wrote his last chapter of the book, Chapter 16 (The Role of the Undesirables). This chapter runs from Page 137 to Page 150: I will type out the whole chapter and then respond to it where appropriate. Here is the Chapter 16:

 

Hoffer (H after this): “THE ROLE OF THE UNDESIRABLES

 

In the winter of 1934, I spent several weeks in a federal transient camp in California. These camps were originally established by Governor Rolph in the early days of the Depression to care for single homeless unemployed of the state. In 1934 the federal government took charge of the camps for a time and it was the that I first heard of them.

 

How I happened to get into one of the camps is soon told. Like thousands of migrant agricultural workers in California I then followed the crops from one part of the state to the other. Early in 1934 I arrived in the town of El Centro, in the Imperial Valley. I had been given a free ride on a truck from San Diego, and it was midnight when the truck driver dropped me on the outskirts of El Centro. I spread my bedroll by the side of the road and went to sleep. I had hardly dozed off when the rattle of a motorcycle drilled itself into my head and a policeman was bending over me saying, ‘Roll up, mister.’ It looked as if I was in for something; it happens now and then that the police got overzealous and rounded up the freight trains. But this time the cop had no such thought. He said, ‘Better go over to the federal shelter and get yourself a bed and maybe some breakfast.’ He directed me to the place.

 

I found a large hall, obviously a former garage, dimly lit, and packed with cots. A concert of heavy breathing shook the thick air. In a small office near the door, I was registered by a middle-aged clerk. He informed me that this was the ‘receiving shelter’ where I would get one night’s lodging and breakfast. The meal was served in the camp nearby. Those who wished to stay on, he said, had to enroll in the camp. He then gave me three blankets and excused himself for not having a vacant cot. I spread the blankets on the cement floor and went to sleep.

 

I awoke with dawn amid a chorus of coughing, throat clearing, the sound of running water, and the intermittent flushing of toilets in the back of the hall. There were about fifty of us, of all colors and ages, all of us more or less ragged and soiled. The clerk handed out tickets for breakfast, and we filed out to the camp located several blocks away, near the railroad tracks.

 

From the outside the camp looked like a cross between a factory and a prison. A high fence of wire enclosed it, and inside there were three large sheds and a huge boiler topped by a pillar of black smoke. Men in blue shirts and dungarees were strolling across the sandy yard. A ship’s bell in front of one of the buildings announced breakfast. The regular camp members—there was a long line of them—ate first. Then we filed in through the gate, handing our tickets to the guard.

 

It was a good, plentiful meal. After breakfast our crowd dispersed. I heard some say the camps in the northern part of the state were better, that they were going to catch a northbound freight. I decided to try this camp in El Centro.

 

My motives for enrolling were not crystal clear. I wanted to clean up. There were shower baths in the camp and wash tubs and plenty of soap. Of course I could have bathed and washed my clothes in one of the irrigation ditches, but here in the camp I had a chance to rest, get the wrinkles out of my belly, and clean up at leisure. In short, it was the easiest way out.

 

A brief interview at the camp office and a physical examination were all the formalities for enrollment. There were some two hundred men in the camp. They were the kind I had worked and traveled with for years. I even saw familiar faces—men I had worked with in the orchards and fields. Yet my predominant feeling was one of strangeness. It was my first experience of life in intimate contact with a crowd. For it is one thing to work and travel with a gang, and quite another to eat, sleep, and spend the greater part of each day cheek by jowl with two hundred men.”

 

My response: This Chapter reminds of his apparent photographic memory: the rich detail and nuance of living with other men in a dormitory perhaps 20 years before he put pen to paper to retell this experience.

 

Note, that Hoffer, the great-soul and utter loner, felt strange living in intimate contact with a crowd. This was quite atypical for him, and others like him.

 

H: “I found myself speculating on a variety of subjects: the reason for their chronic belly-aching and beefing—it was more a ritual than the expression of a grievance; the amazing orderliness of the men; the comic seriousness with which they took their game of dominoes; the weird manner of reasoning one overheard now and then. Why, I kept wondering, were these men within the enclosure of a federal transient camp? Were they people temporarily hard up? Would jobs solve all their difficulties? Were we indeed like the people outside?

 

Up to then I was not aware of being one of a specific species of humanity. I had considered myself simply a human being—not particularly good or bad, and on the whole harmless. The people I worked with and traveled with I knew as Americans and Mexicans, Whites and Negroes, Northerners and Southerners, etc. It did occur to me that we were a group possessed of peculiar traits, and that there was something—innate or acquired—in our make-up which made us adopt a particular mode of existence.

 

It was a slight thing that started me on a new track.

 

I got talking to a mild-looking, elderly fellow. I liked his soft speech and pleasant manner. We swapped trivial experiences. Then he suggested a game of checkers. As we started to arrange the pieces on the board I was startled by the sight of his crippled right hand. I had not noticed it before. Half of it was chopped off lengthwise, so that the horny stump with its three fingers looked like a hen’s leg. I was mortified that I had not noticed the hand until he dangled it, so to speak, before my eyes. It was, perhaps, to bolster my shaken confidence in my powers of observation that I now began paying close attention to the hands of the people around me. The result was astounding. It seemed as if every other man had been mangled in some way. There was a man with one arm. One young, good-looking fellow had a wooden leg. It was as though the majority of the men had escaped the snapping teeth of a machine and left part of themselves behind.

 

It was, I knew, an exaggerated impression. But I began counting the cripples as men lined up in the yard at mealtime. I found thirty (out of two hundred) crippled either in arms or legs. I immediately sensed where the counting would land me. The simile preceded the statistical deduction: we in the camp were a human junk pile.”

 

My response: Hoffer does not mince words: the fruit tramps and drifters seem in some way to undesirable, losers, a human junk pile. I do not accept any of that. All people are God’s children, and, with proper education and egoist moral training, and a personal willingness to maverize, almost any human being can live a fine, grand life of artistry, intellectual originality, and might accomplishments.

 

H: “I began evaluating my fellow tramps as human material, and for the first time in my life I became face-conscious. Several of the middle-aged and old looked healthy and well-preserved. But the damaged and decayed faces were in the majority. I saw faces that were wrinkled, or bloated, or as raw as the surface of a peeled plum. Some of the noses were purple and swollen, some broken, some pitted with enlarged pores. There were many toothless mouths (I counted seventy-eight). I noticed eyes that were blurred, faded, opaque, or bloodshot. I was struck by the fact that the old men, even the very old, showed their age mainly in the face. Their bodies were still slender and erect. One little man over sixty years of age looked a mere boy when seen from behind. The shriveled face joined to a boyish body made a startling sight.

 

My diffidence had now vanished. I was getting to know everybody in the camp. They were a friendly and talkative lot. Before many weeks I knew some essential fact about practically everyone.

 

And I was continually counting. Of the two hundred men in the camp there were approximately as follows:

 

Cripples . . . . . . 30

Confirmed Drunkards . . . . . . 60

Old men (55 and older) . . . . . . 50

Youths under twenty . . . . . . 10

Men with chronic diseases, heart, asthma, TB . . . . . . 12

Mildly insane . . . . . . 4

Constitutionally lazy . . . . . . 6

Fugitives from justice . . . . . . 4

Apparently normal . . . . . . 70

 

(The numbers do not tally up to two hundred since some of the men were counted twice or even thrice—as cripples and old, or as old and confirmed drunks, etc.)

 

In other words, less than half of the camp inmates (seventy normal, plus ten youths) were unemployed workers whose difficulties would end once jobs were available. The rest (60 percent) had handicaps in addition to unemployment.

 

I also counted fifty war veterans, and eighty skilled workers representing sixteen trades. All the men (including those with chronic diseases) were able to work. The one-armed man was a wizard with a shovel.

 

I did not attempt any definite measurement of character and intelligence. But it seemed to me that the intelligence of the men in the camp was certainly not below average.  And as for character, I found much forbearance and genuine good humor. I never came across one instance of real viciousness. Yet, on the whole, one would hardly say that these men were possessed of strong characters. Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character; and the average tramp is, more or less, a slave to his few appetites. He generally takes the easiest way out.”

 

My response: Hoffer the realist neither glorifies tramps nor looks down upon them with contempt, as a middle-class banker might, or an intellectual, prosperous, snug, complacent in their tight, little berths.

 

The truth is: tramps, of any race or sex, are on average not much smarter or dumber, nor innately more moral or less moral than the respected banker, or highly credentialed egghead.

 

The difference is if one is an ambitious (ambitious more to be good and to individuate than to amass a huge amount of worldly riches—accumulating enough to get by with some surplus for superfluities is handy) individualist, grounded in individuating  and egoist morality, then one likely would not lack the self-discipline, the perseverance and the ability to stay at something for a lifetime, which likely are the deficiencies of a tramp.

 

The maverizer would be more like the steady banker, but an occasion enjoyment of the wander lust life of a bohemian, or intellectual prowess gained by specializing like a professor—while running a bank—might allow the banker to close to all that he can become.

 

H: “The connection between our make-up and our mode of existence as migrant workers presented itself now with some clarity.

 

The majority of us were incapable of holding onto a steady job. We lacked self-discipline and the ability to endure monotonous, leaden hours. We were probably misfits from the very beginning.”

 

My response: Whether one is an innate misfit, or circumstances, mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse or unemployed status trigger this way of living among the misfitted tramps, there are solutions. First, one can discipline oneself to work twenty hours a week, permanently. Second, one can become clean and sober, and discipline the self-enough to get a job, to show up on time, to work hard and not to rebel against the boss all the time, resulting in termination.

 

As the society moves towards a society of individuating anarchists, then we will be used to everyone or near everyone be individualists and individuators, and it will not much matter if people are misfits, or seamlessly fit into the neighborhood or workplace--or not: the eccentrics will be welcome if they are moral, respectful, and nonviolent.

 

Businesses, in other words, will be welcoming places of misfits and tramps, and the tramps realizing they can fit in for a while or permanently, will be more inclined to discipline themselves so that they can fit in—for a while at least, or at least fit in somewhat.

 

If most or all individuate then one can work do art and write symphonies in the evening while working for money during the day, fitting in or misfitting to whatever degree one can and it should be beneficial for all.

 

Nonindividuating misfits, wandering the country and fitting in nowhere, are a potential mob with no or little self-esteem: they are natural candidates to start or join a mass movement, and then can destabilize and overthrow society. We want to make room for misfits and teach them how to find a way to fit in, to change and allow eccentricity without overthrowing society while allow useful needed change to evolve.

 

H: “Our contact with a steady job was like a collision. Some of us were maimed, some got frightened and ran away, and some took to drink. We inevitably drifted in the direction of least resistance—the open road. The life of a migrant worker is varied and demands a minimum of self-discipline. We were now in one of the drainage ditches of ordered society. We could not keep a footing in the ranks of respectability and were washed into the slough of our present existence.

 

Yet, I mused, there must be in this world a task with an appeal to strong that were we to have a taste of it we would hold on and be rid for good of our restlessness.”

 

My response: Perhaps the misfits, quite restless and discontented, need not settle for drifting over into frustration accompanied too often by the desperate seeking after ideological release in a mass movement, a home to escape from the unwanted self.

 

Perhaps, in a Mavellonialist society, whether one fits easily and smoothly into the culture or not, individuating as a way of life, the elders would give each individuators the tools to redirect and rejuvenate the self, so that one fits into the existing world, by innovatively but gently working to alter that world to receive and modify itself to accommodate the misfit’s unique perspective, contribution, and suggestions. We could give tramps the gift of choosing to maverize rather than elect the life of a slave in a mass movement.

 

H: “My stay at the camp lasted about four weeks. Then I found a haying job not far from town, and finally, in April, when the hot winds begin blowing, I shouldered my bedroll and took the highway to San Bernadino.

 

It was the next morning, after I got a lift to Indio by truck, that a new idea began to take hold of me. The highway out of Indio leads through waving date groves, fragrant grapefruit orchards, and lush alfalfa fields; then, abruptly passes into a desert of white sand. The sharp line between the garden and desert is very striking. The turning of the white sand into garden seemed to me an act of magic. This, I thought, was a job one would jump at—even the men in the transient camps. They had the skill and ability of the average American. But their energies, I felt, could be quickened only by a task that was spectacular, that had in it something of the miraculous. The pioneering task of making the desert flower would certainly fill the bill.”

 

My response: This brilliant, original philosopher/fruit tramp and hobo had this flash of insight in 1934 that undesirable transient bums, misfitted or self-excluded from bourgeois society as someone punching the time clock at the same job for decade after decade, could serve a needed and useful historical and societal role as pioneers in a mass movement, one that would help them disappear into the collective cause, would help them field inspired and motivated to work once more; the weak, the misfit, the undesirables of history often serve as change agents, and the mass movements they served are not always as benign as turning the California desert into a garden.

 

H: “Tramps as pioneers? It seemed absurd. Every man and woman in California knows that the pioneers had been giants, men of boundless courage and indomitable spirit. However, as I strode across on the white sand, I kept mulling over the idea.”

 

My response: Hoffer is at it again: setting up a teachable moment for the reader, paradoxically—and intentionally once again shocking the reader into reality, inviting her to abandon her misconceptions: The California myth is that the pioneer were giants, heroic, larger-than-life, near-perfect paragons of boundless energy and indomitable spirit. Hoffer denies that this myth is reality. Rather, he is advising that the (California pioneers or pioneers anywhere for that matter) pioneers were not the strong, the popular, the respectable and established, the prosperous, those functioning and regularly employed, fitting smoothly into their communal lifestyle. Rather, the majority if pioneers, he is speculating, were the weak, the misfit outcasts, the undesirables, running towards the new to escape their loser status and feelings of inadequacy in their old life and setting.

 

Once again, whether someone is fitting in and desirable, or not fitting in and undesirable, these are how people turn out for whatever causal impetuses, but these personal, differing results are not final, unless any person elects and will to make them so. All can individuate and will to improve the self.

 

H: “Who were the pioneer? Who were the men who left their homes and went into the wilderness? A man rarely leaves a soft spot and goes deliberately in search of hardship and privation. People become attached to the places they live in; they drive roots. A change of habit is a painful act of uprooting. A man who has made good and has standing in his community stays put. The successful businessmen, farmers, and workers usually stayed where they were. Who then left for the wilderness and the unknown? Obviously those that had not made good: men who went broke or never amounted to much; men who though possessed of abilities were to impulsive to stand the daily grind; men who were slaves of their appetites—drunkards, gamblers, woman chasers; outcasts—fugitives from justice and ex-jailbirds. There were no doubt some who went in search of health—some were suffering TB, asthma, heart trouble. Finally there was a sprinkling of young and middle-aged in search of adventure.

 

All these people craved change, some probably actuated by the naïve belief that a change in place brings with it a change luck. Many wanted go to a place where they were not known and there make  a new beginning. Certainly they did not go out deliberately in search of hare work and suffering. If in the end they shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships, and accomplished the impossible, it was because they had to. They became men of action on the run. They acquired strength and skill in the inescapable struggle for existence. It was a question of do or die. And once they tasted the joy of achievement, they craved for more.

 

Clearly the same types of people which now swelled the ranks of migratory workers and tramps had probably in former times made up the bulk of pioneers.”

 

My response:  I would classify Hoffer and myself as essentialists regarding human nature, if I could define essential human nature as being those identifiable, verbally expressivle, hereditary or spiritual features shared by all people everywhere, which make us more or less created equal, with all bursting with an amazing array and depth of talents to be mined and demonstrated to the world with dazzling effect. Any tramp could be a banker, and every banker could be a tramp.

 

My message is ultimately optimistic, that people anywhere can thrive and even be brilliant if they apply themselves and actualize their individual potential.

 

H: “As a group the pioneers were probably as unlike the present-day ‘native sons’—their descendants—as one could well imagine. Indeed, were there to be today an new influx of typical pioneers, twin brothers of the forty-niners, only in modern garb, the citizens of California would consider it a menace to health, wealth, and morals. Exiles and convicts settled Siberia.

 

With few exceptions, this seems to be the case in the settlement of all new countries. Ex-convicts were the vanguard in the settling of Australia. Exiles and convicts settled Siberia. In this country, a large portion of our earlier and later. In this country, a large portion of our earlier and later settlers were failures, fugitives, and felons. The exceptions seemed to be those who were motivated by religious fervor, such as the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mormons.

 

Although quite logical, the train of thought seemed to me then a wonderful joke. In my exhilaration I was eating up the road in long strides, and I reached the oasis in Elim in what seemed almost no time. A passing empty truck picked me up just then and we thundered through Banning and Beaumont, all the way to Riverside. From there I walked the seven miles to San Bernadino.

 

Somehow, this discovery of a family likeness between tramps and pioneers took a firm hold in my mind. For years afterward it kept intertwining itself with a mass of observations which on the face of them had no relation to either tramps or pioneers. And it moved me to speculate on subjects in which, up to then, I had had no real interest, and of which I knew very little.

 

I talked with several old-timers—one of them over eighty and a native son—in Sacramento, Placerville, Auburn, and Fresno. It was not easy, at first, to obtain the information I was after. I could not make my questions specific enough. ‘What kind of people were the early settlers and miners?” I asked. They were a hard-working, tough lot I was told. They drank, fought, gambled, and wenched. They wallowed in luxury, or lived on next to nothing with equal ease. They were the salt of the earth.

 

Still it was not clear what manner of people they were.

 

If I asked what they looked like, I was told of whiskers, broad-brimmed hats, high boots, shirts of many colors, sun-tanned faces, horny hands. Finally I asked: ‘What group of people in present-day California most closely resembles the pioneers?’ The answer, after some hesitation, was invariably the same: ‘The Okies and the fruit tramps.’

 

I tried to evaluate the tramps as potential pioneers by watching them in action. I saw them fell timber, clear firebreaks, build rock walls, put up barracks, build dams and roads, handle steam shovels, bulldozers, tractors, and concrete mixers. I saw them put in a hard day’s work after a night of steady drinking. They sweated and growled, but they did the work. I saw tramps elevated to positions of authority as foremen and superintendents. Then I could notice a remarkable physical transformation: a seamed face gradually smoothed out and the skin showed a healthy hue; an indifferent mouth became firm and expressive; dulls eyes cleared and brightened; voices actually changed; there was even an apparent increase in stature. In almost no time these promoted tramps looked as if they had been on top all their lives. Yet sooner or later I would meet up with them again in a railroad yard, on some skid row, or in the fields—tramps again. It was usually the same story; they would get drunk or lost their temper and were fired, or they got fed up with a steady job and quit. Usually, when a tramp becomes a foreman he is careful in his treatment of the tramps under him; he knows the day of reckoning is never far off.”

 

My response: It is a heartwarming confirmation of my theory that anyone can make good if they apply themselves, but, the tramps went from rags to riches and back again, often in less of a five year period, for reasons of bad habits, addiction, or an inability to follow rules, or put up with the daily grind, and these results are character-driven, not a statement of differing ability between the desired and desirable haves and the undesired and undesirable tramps, or have-nots.

 

H: “In short it was not difficult to visualize the tramps as pioneers. I reflected that if they were to find themselves in a single-handed life-and-death struggle with nature, they would undoubtedly display persistence. For the pressure of responsibility and the heat of battle steel a character. The inadaptable would perish, and those who survived would be the equal of the successful pioneers.

 

I also considered the few instances of pioneering engineered from above—that is to say, by settlers possessed of lavish means, who were classed with the best where they came from. In these instances, it seemed to me, the resulting social structure was inevitably precarious. For pioneering de luxe results in a plantation society, made up largely of landowners and peon labor, either native or imported. The colonizing activities of the Teutonic barons in the Baltic, the Hungarian nobles in Transylvania, the English in Ireland, the planters in our South, and the present-day plantation societies in Kenya and other British and Dutch colonies are cases in point. Whatever their merits, they are characterized by poor adaptability. They are likely eventually to be broken up by a peon revolution or by an influx of typical pioneers—who are usually of the same race or nation as the landowners. The adjustment is not necessarily implemented by war. Even our old South, had it not been for the complication of secession, might eventually have attained stability without war: namely by the activity of its own poor whites or by an influx of the indigent from other states.”

 

My response: Hoffer’s intuition that deluxe pioneering instituted, inaugurated and ruled from above will lead a a severe caste system, which would disallow adaptability and social or technological advancing because the masses were so suppressed and beaten-down and fatalistic.

 

Hoffer indicates that the motley masses, set loose helter-skelter to come and get it, stand a greater chance of growing and improving in all kinds of ways, and that intuition seems right to me.

 

H: “There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation, or an organization by its least worthy members.”

 

My response: This innate, prevalent human tendency to stereotype an individual by their group affiliations is both unfair and unproductive. Each person needs to be judged based on his merit and initiative, not characterized in a way presumed to be locked in stone, be the members of his groups judged by its most worthy or least worthy members.

 

H: “The tendency is manifestly perverse and unfair; yet it has some justification. For the quality and destiny of a nation are determined to a considerable extent by the nature and potentialities of its inferior elements.”

 

My response: This may be one of Hoffer’s most original and significant insights which we have ignored at our peril: that the quality and destiny of a nation are determined to a considerable extend by the nature and potentialities of its inferior elements. All elements in any society, I avow, are inferior not due to racial or genetic inferiority, but instead are due to weak character self-development chosen by each nonindividuator as her lifestyle, a choice made by each member of that inferior element: their inferiority is earned by the lack of hard work, a grand personal vision to maverize as their telos. To be a great people, a really great people, we need to inspire and educate a majority of youths to live as individuators.

 

H: “The inert mass of a nation is its middle section. The industrious, decent, well-to-do, and satisfied middle classes—whether in cities or on the land—are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both extremes: the best and the worst.

 

The superior individual, whether in politics, business, industry, science, literature, or religion, undoubtedly plays a major role in shaping the nation. But so do the individuals at the other extreme: the poor, the outcasts, the misfits, and those who are in grip of some overpowering passion. The importance of these inferior elements as formative factors lies in the readiness with which they are swayed in any direction. This peculiarity is due to their inclination to take risks (‘not giving a damn’) and their propensity for united action. They crave to merge their drab, wasted lives into something grand and complete. Thus they are first and most fervent adherents of new religions, political upheavals, patriotic hysteria, gangs, and mass rushes to new lands.

 

And the quality of a nation—its innermost worth—is made manifest by its dregs as they rise to the top: by how brave they are, how humane, how orderly, how skilled, how generous, how independent or servile; by the bounds they will not transgress in their dealings with a man’s soul, with truth and with honor.

 

The average American of today bristles with indignation when he is told that this country was built, largely, by the hordes of undesirables from Europe. Yet, far from being derogatory, this statement, if true, should be a cause for rejoicing, should fortify our pride in the stock from which we have sprung.

 

This vast continent with its towns, farms, factories, dams, aqueducts, docks, railroads, highways, powerhouses, schools, and parks is the handiwork of common folk from the Old World, where for centuries men of their kind had been beasts of burden, the property of their masters—kings, nobles, and priests—and with no will and no aspirations of their own. When on rare occasions one of the lowly had reached the top in Europe he had kept the pattern intact and, if anything, tightened the screws. The stuffy little corporal from Corsica harnessed the lusty forces released by the French Revolution to a gilded state coach, and could think of nothing grander than mixing his blood with that of the Hapsburg masters and establishing a new dynasty. In our day a bricklayer in Italy, a housepainter in Germany, and a shoemaker’s son in Russia have made themselves masters of their nations; and what they did was to re-establish and reinforce the old pattern.”

 

My response: Revolutionaries may seem revolutionary or even believe they are revolutionary by overthrowing the corrupt, oppressive status quo, but they really just repeat the old pattern, and settle into the new authoritarian order. For example, in 1917 Lenin brought Communist revolution to Russia, but, in 2025, Putin the neo-czar is but the lastest generation of the old Russian pattern.

 

H: “Only here, in America, were the common folk of the Old World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master to push and order them about.”

 

My response: The masses rule and ruled in America, and the is the true revolution, so rare in human history, so precious, enviable, easy to destroy, but desperately in need of saving, preserving, and extending as a capitalist constitutional republic of upper middle-class masses, a rather classless society of individuating supercitizens.

 

H: “History contrived an earth-shaking joke when it lifted by the nape of the neck lowly peasant, shopkeepers, laborers, paupers, jailbirds, and drunks from the midst of Europe, dumped them on a vast, virgin continent and said: ‘Go to it; it is yours!’

 

And the lowly were not awed by the magnitude of the task. A hunger for action, pent up for centuries, found an outlet. They went to it with ax, pick, shovel, plow, and rifle; on foot, on horse, in wagons, and on flatboats. They went to it praying, howling, brawling, drinking, and fighting. Make way for the people. This is how I read the statement that this country was built by hordes of undesirables from the Old World.

 

Small wonder that we in this country have a deeply ingrained faith in human regeneration.”

 

My response: It seems to me that this American attitude of faith in human regeneration is a realistic optimism about human potential, which at its best, would be expressed in action by each American, the individuators, underway on his personal adventure to be excellence itself.

 

He is to cast off his old self and be reborn, born again, with his new unnatural self, the individuators coming alive, and this role adoption and artificially assumed personal transformation can be a Christian readjustment, or following one of the good deities instead.

 

H: “We believe, that given a chance, even the degraded and apparently worthless are capable of constructive action and great deeds. It is a faith founded on experience, not on some idealistic theory. And no matter what some anthropologists, sociologists, and geneticists may tell us, we shall go on believing that man, unlike other forms of life, is not a captive of his past—but is possessed of infinite plasticity, and his potentialities for good and for evil are never wholly exhausted.”

 

My response: It appears that Hoffer concludes that the masses can run their own affairs, that they are talented enough and free-willing sufficient to justify their running their own affairs, if elites would but leave them be so they can demonstrate how they will run things well most of the time.

 

 

 

Atlas Society, Free Will

 

Below is The Atlas Society Article online, expressing their view on free will, and I copied the article in full, and will comment on it.

 

Here is the article (A for Atlas): “

 

 

What is the Objectivist View of Free Will?

June 29, 2010

Question: What Is the Objectivist view of free will?

Answer: Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally well have chosen to do something else. Within the sphere of actions that are open to choice, what we do is up to us and is not just the inescapable outcome of causes outside our control. And this capacity for free choice is the foundation of morality. Because we are free to choose, we need moral standards to guide our actions and we can be held morally responsible for what we do.

 

Today, people who want to fly from responsibility are greatly aided by a view of man that attributes our actions to factors beyond our control. For example, a recent New York Times Magazine article absolved obese individuals from moral blame by accusing abundant and cheap food of causing people to overeat. But to take such a position seriously, one has to deny free will and accept its contrary, determinism. Determinism is the view that ultimately we don't control our actions, that the causes operating in us and on us compel us to act in one and only one way. You say you choose what to eat? For a determinist, you can't help yourself.”

 

My response: We all have free will, and as and if we maverize, we seek to strengthen our naturally existent but puny free will transforming it and us into a powerful, vibrant free will, a good will, morally virtuous in line with egoist morality and self-realization as a life plan.

 

A: “Determinism dominates social science, and it is popular with natural scientists and philosophers as well. Though the particular doctrines that embody it come and go, the basic outlook remains the same. In psychology, for example, we have seen a parade from Freudianism through behaviorism to computationalism and evolutionary psychology. Freud sought to explain human action on the basis of subconscious dispositions or urges. The conscious mind merely rationalizes what subconscious urges impel us to do. Behaviorism sought to explain human action on the basis of external stimuli and physical responses. Computationalism regards the mind as a computer, running an algorithmic program, no more choosing than does a random-number program on a PC. Evolutionary psychology holds that our genes dictate our patterns of thought and behavior. In none of these theories does any person choose anything by his own will.

Deterministic explanation dominates the social sciences because it dominates the natural sciences. The physical mechanics of Newton and Einstein, for example, provides us with laws that let us predict the motion of a galaxy, or of a ray of light, or of a ball. In biology, the discovery of DNA showed how, other things equal, an organism must develop into the forms it does. The laws of chemistry admit of no alternative events. Even the laws of sub-atomic physics, which reflect the apparently random behavior of the smallest entities yet known, do not propose choosing, purposeful agents as causes. This is powerful science, and it exerts a powerful influence as a model.

 

Many determinists see themselves as hard-minded advocates of the scientific worldview. But actually there is nothing scientific about rejecting free will. Science is, first and foremost, a set of objective explanations of observable facts. Science explains observable facts; it does not explain them away. And free will is, indubitably, an observable fact.

 

We observe it through introspection, the inward perception of our own conscious processes. As Ayn Rand explained, our free will resides, most basically, in our ability to direct our conscious attention. Rand called this ability "focus" and called the choice to focus "the choice to think." All of us can observe our ability to focus in operation.”

 

My response: If one is rational, conscious and deliberative, one must focus one’s conscious attention, and the thinking individuator transcends the determinism which much rules his bodily functioning.

 

A: “Consider your visual awareness of these words: You can examine the page or screen more closely, focusing your perceptual attention on the typeface or the spelling of a particular word. Or you can reduce your visual attention, gazing blankly as your mind wanders elsewhere. You choose which to do. You control your level of focus.

 

We can observe our choices to focus against the background of automatic mental functions. We don't choose whether to see the price of a new car, but we do choose whether to focus on the relation of that price to our budget. We don't choose to have emotional impulses, we choose whether to let them dominate our decision-making. We can raise or lower our focus on conceptual tasks, and broaden or narrow our range of awareness. One may focus on a narrow set of problem-solving techniques to pass a test. One may zero in on a ball to hit or catch it. Or one may imagine or "brainstorm," creatively extending one's imagination and seeing what the subconscious can generate.

 

Our ability to focus allows us to choose to some degree which antecedent factors have the most weight in our decision-making. Suppose someone rudely insults you. How will you react? If you were brought up to defend your honor, that could be a factor in your decision. If you see the need to avoid confrontation, that could be a factor. If you are surrounded by friends, that could be a factor. Which factors do you focus on? Which guide your response? Are you violent or peaceful, cutting or conciliatory? That depends, ultimately, on you.

 

Thinking is not a choice we have to make, however. In fact, many people avoid thinking by failing to focus on facts and on consequences. We can evade the truth, evade our needs, evade moral responsibility.

 

Free will is not only an observable fact, it is also inescapable. Whenever we use our minds, we are presupposing that we have the capacity to control our minds—to think about one thing rather than another, to go by the evidence and not be swayed by bias, to seek information when we need it, to examine our beliefs and weigh them against the facts. So it is self-refuting to argue against free will. After all, if free will is false, how can anyone choose to change his mind on an issue? Anyone convinced of determinism presupposes he has accepted his conclusion because it was true, not because he happened to be caused to accept it. Anyone trying to convince you of determinism presupposes you can focus your mind on his cogent logic and the facts in his favor.

But what about causality?”

 

My response Free will is an observable, objective fact at work in the community, as well as an internal, subjective perspective.

 

A: “Free will exists. Like all things, it cannot be causeless or literally magical. Yet how could it be subject to causality and remain free? This can seem like a big problem if one accepts the determinist model of causality as a relationship among events. Consider the action on a pool table. The blow of a cue stick on a billiard ball (event 1) causes the motion of the ball (event 2), which causes the ball to reach the pocket (event 3), where it falls into the netting (event 4). In this model, given the properties of the objects to be acted upon and a set of initial actions, the changes in the system that follow are a matter of actions and reactions, or in other words, a chain of events. To trace causes is to trace the chain. An event that cannot be traced back to preceding events is, in this view, an event without a cause.

 

And there's the rub for free will. After all, if a human being really acts by his own will, deciding his own course of action, then preceding events do not fully explain the course chosen. On this model, free will seems anomalous, sui generis, bizarre, unscientific. Hence determinism.

Event causation is a useful model for analyzing some kinds of actions, but it is not a satisfactory philosophical account. What is causality, after all? It is the way in which entities act. There are no events without entities, the underlying objects that do the acting. There is no explosion without the bomb that explodes. There is no breathing without the body that breathes and the air that is breathed. A causal explanation is an explanation of action in terms of the entity's capacities for action, arising from its properties and relations. Free will is simply a human capacity for action, one that we will understand better in time. A choice is not uncaused. It is caused by the person who chooses.”

 

My response: I like this characterization that free will is simply a human capacity for action—and choice I add—and it is not uncaused, but is caused by the agent exercising his free will.

 

A: “Ignoring free will has proven to be bad science. No scientist today would own endorse Freud's or Marx's literal theories, for example, and in this respect currently trendy determinisms like evolutionary psychology will have their day of shame as well. This is not to say that antecedent factors cannot influence our choices. People may be affected to varying degrees by subconscious urges, as Freud argues. Class does affect the way many people treat others, though not as rigidly as Marx would have it. Even social science firmly premised on free will would need to continue identifying such factors. But good science cannot avoid addressing the fact that antecedent factors are only part of the story in explaining human action. Indeed, by identifying such factors, we better enable ourselves to take account of them in making choices.

 

Determinist philosophers have also become wary of suffering embarrassment for denying the obvious. To avoid this, some have attempted to offer a third alternative to free will and determinism. This is "compatibilism," which holds that an action should be called "free" if it has mental causes, even if all mental factors have antecedent causes. Mental freedom is thus "compatible" with the event-causation model and deterministic science. Compatibilists don't deny that humans make choices. They just deny that our choices could turn out differently than they do

 

But the basic issue remains inescapable. If our actions are not up to us, then we have no moral responsibility for them. Compatibilism wants to shelter in a house whose foundations it has knocked aside. There can be no effective guidance of human action, nor a satisfactory scientific account of human behavior, without taking into account the inescapable fact of free will.”

 

Free Will Britannica

 

 

 

On 3/25/25 I copied and pasted the entire article from Encyclopedia Britannica onto an electronic page; I have done some minor editing to hold the piece together, and will comment on it when appropriate. The article is entitled: free will and moral responsibility—Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is the article:

 

Britannica (B after this): “

 

 

 

free will and moral responsibility

 

Article History

Also called:

problem of moral responsibility

free will and moral responsibility, the problem of reconciling the belief that people are morally responsible for what they do with the apparent fact that humans do not have free will because their actions are causally determined. It is an ancient and enduring philosophical puzzle.”

 

My response: We are overawed by the powerful, impressive and ever increasing evidence from neuroscientists like Robert Sapolsky that free will is an illusion, that as Robert suggests, we are controlled by nature and nurture and the interactions between the two.

My confident rejection of all of this very daunting, amassing evidence is that yes, you scientists are factually proving that so many factors studied do indicates that humans are externally controlled, but that that soley is amassing empirical evidence on the physical part of our existence: the angelic or spiritual side of our emerged consciousness, especially when it emerges as the individuated self, is infinitely rich and immaterially sourced, so all their fancy experiments, and sweeping claims, though interesting and rich, cannot capture the incalculable richness, the infinite possibilities latent within the consciousness of the simplest human soul out there.

 

We are both-determined and self-determined at the same time and in the same person, so the free consciousness of the creative individuator does field a free will that is not absolutely, limitlessly free, but it is quite far advanced along such lines. Physical facts, neuroscientfically gathered, do not apply to the human soul. The physicalist is not able to detect let alone disprove the metaphysical fact that one is free, a little as a nonindividuator, and almost totally of free will, if she were an impressive individuators, an artistic great soul long practicing her craft.

B: “Freedom and responsibility

Historically, most proposed solutions to the problem of free will and moral responsibility have attempted to establish that humans do have free will. But what does free will consist of? When people make decisions or perform actions, they usually feel as though they are choosing or acting freely. A person may decide, for example, to buy apples instead of oranges, to vacation in France rather than in Italy, or to call a sister in Nebraska instead of a brother in Florida. On the other hand, there are at least some situations in which people seem not to act freely, as when they are physically coerced or mentally or emotionally manipulated. One way to formalize the intuitive idea of free action is to say that people act freely if it is true that they could have acted otherwise. Buying apples is ordinarily a free action because in ordinary circumstances one can buy oranges instead; nothing forces one to buy apples or prevents one from buying oranges.

Yet the decisions people make are the result of their desires, and their desires are determined by their circumstances, past experiences, and psychological and personality traits—their dispositions, tastes, temperaments, levels of intelligence, and so on. Circumstances, experiences, and traits in this sense are obviously the result of many factors outside the individual’s control, including upbringing and perhaps even genetic makeup. If this is correct, then one’s actions may ultimately be no more the result of free will than one’s eye colour is.”

 

My response: Our natural and nurtured influences from inside and outside of us, our unconscious, our desires, luck, indeterminism, causal determinism, chance, and sheer randomness—they all influence us, but the self can and does still choose freely alternative options based solely on changing one’s mind at this particular moment, for sound reasons, for some whim, or by some instinct to change.

B: “The existence of free will seems to be presupposed by the notion of moral responsibility. Most people would agree that one cannot be morally responsible for actions that one could not help but perform. Moreover, moral praise and blame, or reward and punishment, seem to make sense only on the assumption that the agent in question is morally responsible. These considerations seem to imply a choice between two implausible alternatives: either (1) people have free will, in which case their actions are not determined by their circumstances, past experiences, and psychological and personality traits, or (2) people do not have free will, in which case they are never morally responsible for what they do. This dilemma is the problem of free will and moral responsibility.”

 

My response: I detect no dilemma: we have free will and accompanying moral responsibility, though we can sympathize and empathize, and try to understand and give the benefit of the doubt where possible. Extenuating circumstances do apply, but that does not absolve almost any of us for some, most or near complete blame for our sins and crimes committed.

B: “Determinism

Determinism is the view that, given the state of the universe (the complete physical properties of all its parts) at a certain time and the laws of nature operative in the universe at that time, the state of the universe at any subsequent time is completely determined. No subsequent state of the universe can be other than what it is. Since human actions, at an appropriate level of description, are part of the universe, it follows that humans cannot act otherwise than they do; free will is impossible. (It is important to distinguish determinism from mere causation. Determinism is not the thesis that every event has a cause, since causes do not always necessitate their effects. It is, rather, the thesis that every event is causally inevitable. If an event has occurred, then it is impossible that it could not have occurred, given the previous state of the universe and the laws of nature.)

Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is deterministic and that determinism is incompatible with free will are called “hard” determinists. Since moral responsibility seems to require free will, hard determinism implies that people are not morally responsible for their actions. Although the conclusion is strongly counterintuitive, some hard determinists have insisted that the weight of philosophical argument requires that it be accepted. There is no alternative but to reform the intuitive beliefs in freedom and moral responsibility. Other hard determinists, acknowledging that such reform is scarcely feasible, hold that there may be social benefits to feeling and exhibiting moral emotions, even though the emotions themselves are based on a fiction. Such benefits are reason enough for holding fast to pre-philosophical beliefs about the existence of both free will and moral responsibility, according to these thinkers.”

My response: There are of course social benefits to be maintained if we assume people are free and morally responsible for their choices and actions, though they are robots, but I fear that if we tell people they are robots, they, still fielding free wills however undisciplined by self-restraint, will not develop into morally and spiritually good persons, knowing God is keeping a list, checking it twice to see who is naughty or nice.

To teach the young that they are robots is to teach them a lie, and it is to set loose these basically evil monsters upon society with no moral prohibition, self-enforced, to curb their misbehavior. There is no quicker way to set up hell on earth and treating people like robots or pieces of clay as Eric Hoffer warned, is to set up authoritarian dispensations in every country, and that is to increase needless suffering in the world.

B: “The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random).”

.

B: “Libertarianism

Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school of political philosophy called libertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.

Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection. This objection points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist.”

My response: One can take a peripatetic gendering through all the natural factors (indeterminism, chance, quantum theory, chaos theory and luck), and these generally could be considered as evidence in favor of human free will existing and being operative in each agent, but, still this intelligibility objection shared shows that  even these “favorable” conditions—perhaps necessary but not sufficient conditions for free will to exist—are not enough to prove we have free will, but, ultimately, as a epistemic moderate and as a metaphysical moderate, I deny that humans can prove for sure that we have free will, or that determinism or randomness are our only behavioral outcomes possible.

That the majority of humans subjective feel that they are free, and that God exists, and I propose that the near universality of these beliefs is empirical if subjective evidence that God, free will, and the spiritual world are axiomatic concepts to be accepted on faith at face value, and such a resolution will help clear up this thorny issue of human free will.

How do molecules and subatomic particles come together as primitive cells, lead to the introduction of life in the world? It seems miraculous or magical to me that life is sparked purely from an accidental or chance mixing of elementary particles, but I cannot say for sure that it did not happen that way, or that it did, or that God exists or does not exist.

I view human consciousness as the ghost in the machine, and the skeptical neuroscientist can pile up all the daunting, impressive, perhaps irrefutable evidence that we have no free will, but these experiments, tests and observations with very fancy technology does not study the nature of the individual soul, our divine spark accompanied by God’s grace, and that is affiliated with though separated from God’s consciousness, which is infinite,. Thus, I am neither rattled nor too concerned scientific tests disproving free will, for our consciousnesses are connected to infinite power and infinite spiritual power and life force, and that cannot be pushed aside by materialistic, mechanistic, reductionist experimenting, no matter how impressive and substantiated by other independent tests.

 

B: “The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), one of the earliest defenders of libertarianism, attempted to overcome the intelligibility objection, and thereby to make room for moral responsibility, by proposing a kind of dualism in human nature. In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant claimed that humans are free when their actions are governed by reason. Reason (what he sometimes called the “noumenal self”) is in some sense independent of the rest of the agent, allowing the agent to choose morally. Kant’s theory requires that reason be disconnected from the causal order in such a way as to be capable of choosing or acting on its own and, at the same time, that it be connected to the causal order in such a way as to be an integral determinant of human actions. The details of Kant’s view have been the subject of much debate, and it remains unclear whether it is coherent.”

My response: As a staunch defender of Objectivist epistemology, I have some real reservations about Kant generally, but I like what is said about his dualism—interactionist dualism?—in human nature. We are, at the same time, half-beast and half-angel, so we are biological, material animals, and rational/angelic spirits in our consciousness, and that depiction of human nature may not be pat, simple or even coherent, but it is the human reality, no more, no less.

B: “Although libertarianism was not popular among 19th-century philosophers, it enjoyed a revival in the mid-20th century. The most influential of the new libertarian accounts were the so-called “agent-causation” theories. First proposed by the American philosopher Roderick Chisholm (1916–99) in his seminal paper “Human Freedom and the Self” (1964), these theories hold that free actions are caused by agents themselves rather than by some prior event or state of affairs. Although Chisholm’s theory preserves the intuition that the ultimate origin of an action—and thus the ultimate moral responsibility for it—lies with the agent, it does not explain the details or mechanism of agent-causation. Agent-causation is a primitive, unanalyzable notion; it cannot be reduced to anything more basic. Not surprisingly, many philosophers found Chisholm’s theory unsatisfactory. What is wanted, they objected, is a theory that explains what freedom is and how it is possible, not one that simply posits freedom. Agent-causation theories, they maintained, leave a blank space where an explanation ought to be.”

My response: We cannot explain what freedom is or what it is to the satisfaction of the mechanistic determinist because these ontological facts about human nature are primary, and just are, so concepts and words cannot capture their essence. If they are infinitely expansive in the properties they are comprised of, and in how the soul-in-the-body interacts with others in the world is not explanatory (at least for now) I think there is enough evidence provided by Objectivists that we do wield free will as we focus our rational abilities to make sense of the world.

B: “Compatibilism

Ancient and medieval compatibilism

Compatibilism, as the name suggests, is the view that the existence of free will and moral responsibility is compatible with the truth of determinism. In most cases, compatibilists (also called “soft” determinists) attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.”

Objectivists from The Atlas Society by 2010 had firmly refuted compatibilism, because it disallows robust, libertarian properties to a free will, accepted and experienced by each agent, in her personal life, and billions of people subjectively experiencing this commonsense notion of free will as operating in their minds is powerful reminded that reality is not what the neuroscientists claim that it is counterfactually and counterintuitively.

I know we are part determined and part-free naturally, but as we individuate, our intelligence, language and concept-wielding grows and expands, and we can focus our minds so we become more and more free willing, while the automatic and more instinctually functioning systems in our bodies and minds still govern themselves unconsciously by rules we may not understand or identity, but exist in and operate beneficially inside us. This moderate compatibilism exists, I believe as we go from being mostly caused by deterministic events, to increasingly and then mostly are self-determining as the causal agent and originator of our choices and actions as individuators.

The Objectivist dislike more typical compatibilism as unnecessarily restrictive of human enjoyment of their free willing possibilities and ends, and discount it as true or realistic, as not being how humans think, choose or act.”

 

B: “Compatibilism has an ancient history, and many philosophers have endorsed it in one form or another. In Book III of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384–322 bce) wrote that humans are responsible for the actions they freely choose to do—i.e., for their voluntary actions. While acknowledging that “our dispositions are not voluntary in the same sense that our actions are,” Aristotle believed that humans have free will because they are free to choose their actions within the confines of their natures. In other words, humans are free to choose between the (limited) alternatives presented to them by their dispositions. Moreover, humans also have the special ability to mold their dispositions and to develop their moral characters. Thus, humans have freedom in two senses: they can choose between the alternatives that result from their dispositions, and they can change or develop the dispositions that present them with these alternatives. One might object that the capacity for self-examination and reflection presupposed by this kind of freedom implies the existence of something in humans that is outside the causal order. If this is so, then Aristotle’s compatibilism is really a disguised form of libertarianism.”

My response: This weird libertarian compatibilism that the writers at Britannica are attributing to Aristotle seems attractive and plausible to me, and it might be the kind of compatibilism that would appeal to a metaphysical libertarian such as I am.

We are born determined and enslaved by reality and our natures more than we are born free and/or self-determining and free-willing, so the telos for human maturation is to individuate and live as a free-willing maverick, as fully and best as one can, so we can strengthen our shrunken free will to make it robust, not unlike how a puny 20-year old can lift weights to become powerful and bulked up. We were born other-caused, and as we maverize, increasingly are we the originator and source of our will choices, so we grow in self-causation.

 

B:   “For medieval Scholastic philosophers, free will was a theological problem. If God is the prime mover—the first cause of all things and events in the universe, including human actions—and if the universe is deterministic, then it seems to follow that humans never act freely. How can humans do other than what God has caused them to do? How then can they be morally responsible for their actions? An analogous problem obtains regarding God’s omniscience: if God, being omniscient, has foreknowledge of every choice that humans make, how can humans choose other than what God knows they will choose?”

 

My response: God is square with us, and would not deceive us, lie to us, or torture us. Based on these presuppositions, I must take it on faith that God has foreknowledge and omniscience, but not where his smart beings are given the gift of free will by De so that they are free and make moral choices, so they are responsible for their actions. How this contradiction be justified, I know not, but this is how the world sems to work.

 

It could be that God made the world so that those with free will, that their part of reality remains unknown to God who is otherwise omniscient, and that God places this imposition upon Deself as a gift to humanity that they are free to choose how to choose live and which way to turn, without divine foreknowledge wiping out their free will or responsibility. To be free is a gift of love, and God may play dice sometimes with the universe, but God is faithful and trustworthy and allows people a zone of privacy wherein their choices are made by people and not known in advance by anyone. I accept this on faith in God’s kindness, square-dealing, and sense of fairness.

 

 

B: “In the late 4th and early 5th centuries, St. Augustine played a key role in combining Greek philosophy with Christianity; his attempts to reconcile human freedom with Christian notions such as divine foreknowledge are still cited by theologians. According to Augustine, God—a perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient being—exists outside the realm of time. Temporal directionality does not exist for God, as it does for humans. Hence, it makes no sense to attribute foreknowledge of human choices to God.:’’

 

My response Perhaps St. Augustine was correct, that God’s foreknowledge does not apply to the temporal human world.

B: “Nearly a millennium later, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) grappled with the same problems. Like Augustine, he lived during a major turning point in Western intellectual history, when the relationship between philosophy and religion was being freshly examined and recast. In his Summa theologiae (1265/66–73), Aquinas wrote that if humans do not have free will, all “counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain”; such a conclusion is simply inconceivable. In response to the apparent conflict between freedom and God’s role as the prime mover of human wills, Aquinas claimed that God is in fact the source of human freedom. This is because God moves humans “in accordance with our voluntary natures.” “

 

My response: God is the source of human freedom because there can be no spiritual, moral or ontological goodness without conscious entities possessing free will, so they may extend God’s realm in the world, extending God’s rule as far as possible, so humans therein possess freedom of will, freedom of action, freedom of conscience, free speech and free thinking; these godly freedoms are not absolute, but are close enough, for God does move us in accordance with our human natures.

B: “Just as by moving natural causes God does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary.

Because humans are created by God, their wills are naturally in harmony with his. Thus, God’s role as prime mover need not get in the way of free agency.”

My response: I disagree with Aquinas when he states that because humans are created by God, their wills are naturally in harmony with his. God created us with natural depravity built into us, so there is no automatic, easy way for our wills to be in harmony with God’s will. The harmony can be achieved but not without persistent, tough human effort. That harmony is an achieved harmony established between humans and Gld. This harmony is and unstable fragile and unstable pact, rebuilt and honored daily.

B: “Modern compatibilism

Following the rediscovery of Classical learning during the Renaissance, philosophers sympathetic to compatibilism shifted their focus from the divine back to the individual. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued that the only condition necessary for free will and moral responsibility is that there be a connection between one’s choices and one’s actions. In his Leviathan (1651), he asserted that free will is “the liberty of the man [to do] what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do.” If people are able to do the things they choose, then they are free.”

My response: Free will is freedom of mental choice, not ensuing freedom of action to take action.

B: “The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–76), another staunch compatibilist, maintained that the apparent incompatibility between determinism and free will rests on a confusion about the nature of causation. Causation is a phenomenon that humans project onto the world, he believed. To say that one thing (A) is the cause of another thing (B) is nothing more than to say that things like A have been constantly conjoined with things like B in experience and that an observation of a thing like A inevitably brings to mind the idea or expectation of a thing like B. There is nothing in nature itself that corresponds to the “necessary connection” thought to exist between two things that are causally related. Since there is just this kind of regularity between human choices on the one hand and human actions on the other, it follows that human actions are caused by human choices, and this is all that is needed for free will. As Hume claimed in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), “By liberty we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will.” “

 

My response: Causal relations may be a necessary connection between causal events and object effected events, or but a weaker relationship.

B: “The British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was the major champion of compatibilism in the 19th century. He proposed that a person is free when “his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs.” Unfree people, in contrast, are those who obey their desires even when they have good reasons not to. Mill’s position is situated at an interesting turning point in compatibilist thinking. It echoes Kant in its reliance on reason as the vehicle of freedom, but it also anticipates contemporary compatibilism in its notion that a free person is one whose internal desires are not at odds with reason.”

 

My response: There is a free will to choose alternate choices and there is living in a state of political, moral, or spiritual freedom, free from sin and tyranny, tyranny imposed by oneself, externally by a political oligarchy, or if the Devil is calling the shots for one.

One has free will to decide if his desires, his habits,or his temptations rule his choice selection, or if he rationally firmly decide how to choose or act in line with his moral code, to preserve his honor, his state of virtue, his reputation, his good will, his good character and his standing with the good deity whom he worships.

My recommendation that the wise and moral person would be more guided by her right reason than her sentiments or moral sense, but she would listen to both sources of suggestion before rationally, consciously making her choice between alternative routes of action.

Her internal desires or external pressure may or may not coincide with her enlightened best interest, but she normally will listen or enforce only those desires consistent with her moral standard. This she wields freely, this power to choose among alternatives.

B: “In his Ethical Studies (1876), Mill’s countryman F.H. Bradley (1846–1924) argued that neither compatibilism nor libertarianism comes close to justifying what he called the “vulgar notion” of moral responsibility. Determinism does not allow for free will because it implies that humans are never the ultimate originators of their actions. Indeterminism does no better, for it can imply only that human decisions are completely random. Yet it is intuitively obvious, according to Bradley, that humans have free will, and no philosophical argument in the world will convince anyone otherwise. He thus advocated a return to common sense. Given that the philosophical theory of determinism necessarily conflicts with people’s deep-rooted moral intuitions, it is better to abandon the former rather than the latter.”

My response: I would suppose that libertarianism would be the proper stance for Bradley on free will, because we intuitively or subjectively know we are free willing, and thus it is common sense that the strong but not absolute personal capacity of free willing is the coin of the realm.

B: “Contemporary compatibilism . . .”

 

B: “Notwithstanding Bradley’s argument, compatibilism remained popular among 20th-century thinkers. The Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958) attempted to reconcile determinism and free will through a conditional analysis of freedom. To say that one has acted freely, according to Moore, is simply to say that “I should” have acted otherwise “if I had chosen” to do so, or “if I had performed a certain act of will, I should have done something which I did not do.” The fact that one may not have been in a position to choose otherwise does not undermine one’s free agency. But what does it mean to say that one could have done otherwise? In “Freedom and Necessity” (1946), A.J. Ayer (1910–89) maintained that “to say that I could have acted otherwise is to say that I should have acted otherwise if I had so chosen.” The ability to do otherwise means only that if the past had been different, one might have chosen differently. This is obviously a very weak notion of freedom, for it implies that a choice or action can be free even though it is completely determined by the past. It is an open question whether Ayer’s account provides a satisfactory explanation of the intuitive notion of free will. Supporters maintain that this is the only type of freedom worth wanting, while detractors believe it does not come close to providing the kind of free agency that humans desire, in part because it does not imply that humans are morally responsible for their “free” actions.”

 

My response Again, this is weak tea. We have an intuitive sense of free will, and it is ontologically real, and is so universal among people that that is an objective fact that the universal experience of the same subjective intuition renders having free will actual, and thus people are responsible for what they do and choose.

B: “Other contemporary compatibilists have attacked the hard determinist’s argument at a different juncture. In an influential paper, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (1969), the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt questioned whether the ability to do otherwise is truly necessary for freedom. Suppose that John is on his way to a voting booth and is undecided about whether to vote for candidate A or candidate B. Unbeknownst to him, an evil neuroscientist has implanted in John’s brain a device that will, if required, fire a signal that forces John to vote for candidate B. But John decides to vote for candidate B on his own, so the device turns out to be unnecessary. The device does not fire, so John acts freely. But John could not have acted otherwise: if he had shown the slightest inclination toward candidate A, the neuroscientist’s device would have made him change his mind. This “Frankfurt-style” counterexample has proved to be quite powerful in contemporary debates about free will. It demonstrates that being able to do otherwise is not necessary for free agency.”

My response: Really? we have the ability to do and choose otherwise, though nomological determinism much dictates how our body functions.

B: “If the ability to do otherwise is not necessary, what is? Like Hobbes and Hume, Frankfurt locates freedom solely within the self. In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (1971), he proposed that having free will is a matter of identifying with one’s desires in a certain sense. Suppose that Jack is a drug addict who wants to reform. He has a first-order desire for a certain drug, but he also has a second-order desire not to desire the drug. Although Jack does not want his first-order desire to be effective, he acts on it all the same. Because of this inner conflict, Jack is not a free agent. Now consider Jack’s friend Jill, who is also a drug addict. Unlike Jack, Jill has no desire to reform. She has a first-order desire for a certain drug and a second-order desire that her first-order desire be effective. She feels no ambivalence at all about her drug addiction; not only does she want the drug, but she also wants to want the drug. Jill identifies with her first-order desire in a way that Jack does not, and therein lies her freedom.”

My response: Free will is the ability to do otherwise, and is located in the self: self-origination, but I like Frankfurt’s idea that we have 1^st order desires (often temptations), and we on a 2^nd order of willing, give in to them or withstand them. I see this as a sign of libertarianism not compatibilism.

B: “In “Freedom and Resentment” (1962), the British philosopher P.F. Strawson (1919–2006) introduced an influential version of compatibilism grounded in human psychology. Strawson observed that people display emotions such as resentment, anger, gratitude, and so on in response to the actions of others. He argued that holding agents morally responsible for their actions is nothing more than having such feelings, or “reactive attitudes,” toward them. The question of whether the agents act freely matters only insofar as it affects the feelings toward them that others may have; apart from this, freedom is beside the point. Moreover, because people cannot help but feel reactive attitudes, no matter how much they may try not to, they are justified in having them, whatever the truth or falsity of determinism. (This is not to say that the specific reactive attitude a person may have on a given occasion—of blind rage as opposed to mere annoyance, for example—is always justified.)

Yet it is far from clear that people are always justified in having reactive attitudes. Pertinent information can drastically change one’s feelings toward an agent. For example, one might become less angry with a driver who ran over a cat if one discovers that the driver was rushing to the hospital with a desperately ill child. One may even lose the anger altogether. Given the enormous influence that everyday factual information has over what reactive attitudes people have and whether they even have them, it seems unwise to treat them as accurate barometers of moral responsibility.

Conclusion

Although the central issues involved in the problem of free will and moral responsibility have remained the same since ancient times, the emphasis of the debate has changed greatly. Contemporary compatibilists in the vein of Frankfurt and Strawson tend to argue that moral responsibility has little if anything to do with determinism, since it arises from people’s desires and attitudes rather than from the causal origins of their actions. Humans may not be free to as great an extent as the intuitive notion of free will suggests, but there is no other freedom to be had. Addressing the problem of free will and moral responsibility requires establishing guidelines for holding people accountable, not lunging after some impossible notion of free will.”

My response: I do not find the arguments of Frankfurt and Strawson to be appealing or convincing. People are free-willed so the deterministic but real, impactful force impinging upon them, and people’s desires and attitudes also influence choice, but, despite all prior causal inputs, the person retains to the power, at least in part, to choose to do otherwise, and this is when and how his free will comes into play.

B: “Contemporary libertarians in the vein of Chisholm, on the other hand, continue to maintain that moral responsibility requires a certain kind of robust free will that compatibilism does not allow for. Their prime concern is to untangle the metaphysical issues underlying the intelligibility objection and to make room for free will in an indeterministic world.”

My response: As a near-zombie sort of second-hander existence (Ayn Rand’s term) as a selfless, groupist nonindiviudator, even that sleepy robot has a modicum of residual, stunted free will, but robust free will is had, needed, own and demanded by an accomplished individuators cooking on all burners.

If the monists and atheists deterministically or even indeterministically deny that free will is the reality for each human being, give me a chance to train 5 million children to maverize, and that would be powerful, transformative, empirical proof that they are free, choosing otherwise as they wish, and are robustly free.

It is easy for the skeptics about free will to deny its existence, and the existence of God, when 94% of people stumble around sleepily and incoherently every day as nonindividuators, barely able to put two sentences together let alone plan and run their own individual lives.

B: “How much of human behaviour is determined by past events, and how much does this matter—if it does matter—for free will and moral responsibility? In the end, the important question may be not whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic but whether one is willing to accept a definition of free will that is much weaker than intuition demands . . . .

 

G.E. Moore G.E. Moore, detail of a pencil drawing by William Orpen; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.”

 

My response: As a dualistic and free will anti-skeptic, I renounced any attempt to offer a water-down version of free will, which exists in the life on joiner/nonindividuator with a stunted personal consciousness, but, robust free will is her potential and telos if she wills it to be made creative, original, brilliant, artistic and powerful--if she elects to actuate her potential and an individuating loner, with her consciousness made smart, strong, vibrant and ever-developing, and she cares not, as an individuator, brushing aside any flimsy intelligibility objection, that both determinism, indeterminism, chance and luck all rule her, that her will is never free not matter the preceding or current inputs. Her life of successful, self-directed beautiful personhood as a great soul gives the lie to all this nonsense. She is free because she knows that natural and social forces, some deterministic in nature and some indeterministic in nature, some forces without cause, some that are stochastic and some that are lucky for her, they all influence her, but she as she grows as a living angel, is a moral, powerful consciousness in the world, and she is the source of her choices and actions, and she is willful enough to be causal and make her intentions heard, all inputs to the contrary.

B: “determinism

determinism, in philosophy and science, the thesis that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.

Determinism in this sense is usually understood to be incompatible with free will, or the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Philosophers and scientists who deny the existence of free will on this basis are known as “hard” determinists.

In contrast, so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.”

 

My response: Determinism and free will are never entirely incompatible, but they are proportionately incompatible with the human child (at birth, being mostly other willed in natural and social inputs, but latently, modestly free-willing from birth); the child or nonindividuating, group-living, altruist morality driven, group-identifying adult submersed in the herd is determined mostly. His latent, robust free will remains suppressed under the weight of all the forces holding him back an down in darkness, slavery, superstition, evil and self-loathing.

Free will and determinism and free will and indeterminism (His will gets freer, stronger, and faster as he maverizes.) can all be made compatible, but his will gets freer, faster and deeper under indeterminism than under the pressure exerted upon him by deterministic forces.

Both deterministic and indeterministic stimuli can become more compatible as he individuates (His strengthened free will, so self-determining and powerful now, takes the lead as he molds deterministic inputs to suit his will and free choices. His consciousness/soul/mind grows and gets smarter and more original thinking and self-causal; his free will is now compatible with the deterministic indeterministic and random influences bombarding him as he reacts to them as they influence him. He chooses how he will react, live and what goal he shall creatively, morally forcefully impose upon reality in response to all these felt influences.

 Robust free will becomes compatible with determinism, as the individuator comes to control his influences. He shapes, redirects, and unnaturally repositions such inputs to make the world, as far as he can, be how he wants it to be—he does alter reality that is always altering him, and the sometimes cooperative and often competitive clash of opposing forces allows him to create love grow and innovate and that is his response and action in reaction against incoming deterministic and random influences.

 

 

 B: “Contemporary soft determinists have included the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958), who held that acting freely means only that one would have acted otherwise had one decided to do so (even if, in fact, one could not have decided to do so), and the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who argued that acting freely amounts to identifying with or approving of one’s own desires (even if those desires are such that one cannot help but act on them).

 

The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random). Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school of political philosophy called libertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.

Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection, which points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist.”

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

Philosophy & Religion Philosophical Issues . . . “

 

B: ‘free will

free will, in philosophy and science, the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe. Arguments for free will have been based on the subjective experience of freedom, on sentiments of guilt, on revealed religion, and on the common assumption of individual moral responsibility that underlies the concepts of law, reward, punishment, and incentive. In theology, the existence of free will must be reconciled with God’s omniscience and benevolence and with divine grace, which allegedly is necessary for any meritorious act.”

 

My response: Free will is the power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions sometimes independently of any prior event or state of the universe—especially if individuating agent displays an impressively powerful, ingenious free-willing ability--, sometimes the power is weaker and less free if the person is less individuated or self-causal, and sometimes the person is so insensate and low-functioning as a primitive, conformist nonindividuator that  her free-willing capacity is reduced right down to the minimal free will spark which she and all have at birth, a spark never developed any farther by her, though it is not utterly snuffed out in theory or practice, but the next thing to it. As a blighted zombie, she will react to more than interject her will upon incoming inputs.

 

 

 

 

B: “A prominent feature of existentialism is the concept of a radical, perpetual, and frequently agonizing freedom of choice. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), for example, spoke of the individual “condemned to be free.””

 

My response: I like this exceptionally robust or radical freedom of choice so popular among existentialists, but it is likely only or usually possessed and wielded by rational individuators.

B: “The existence of free will is denied by some proponents of determinism, the thesis that every event in the universe is causally inevitable. Determinism entails that, in a situation in which people make a certain decision or perform a certain action, it is impossible that they could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did. Philosophers and scientists who believe that determinism in this sense is incompatible with free will are known as “hard” determinists.

In contrast, so-called “soft” determinists, also called compatibilists, believe that determinism and free will are compatible after all. In most cases, soft determinists attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.”

My response: I will call myself a libertarian compatibilist. My first presupposition is that human nature is dual: part material/biological/determined (we are mostly determined, especially in our nonindividuated state, our natural state at birth) and part spiritual/mental consciousness, free or self-determining (mostly an achieved status of a robustly held and fielded free will, acting upon the world while it acts upon oneself).

The soft determinists promote a misleading compatibilism in which they reconcile a pathetic, wimpy personal free made compatible with nomological determinism by weakening the commonsense notion of free will.

I retain the powerful sense of free will, and make determinism/indeterminism/chance compatible with the free will by having the self-consciously, innovatively, deliberately and fearlessly receive and acknowledge these incoming influences and then self-determine how to respond in new new and meaningful ways so choices taken and actions undertaken reveal the will of the responder as he operates in the world, remaking it in his own image—as long as this image is coherent with God’s image of Deself and how the world should evolve.

B: “Contemporary soft determinists have included the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958), who held that acting freely means only that one would have acted otherwise had one decided to do so (even if, in fact, one could not have decided to do so), and the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt (born 1929), who has argued that acting freely amounts to identifying with or approving of one’s own desires (even if those desires are such that one cannot help but act on them). . . . “

 

B: “The extreme alternative to determinism is indeterminism, the view that at least some events have no deterministic cause but occur randomly, or by chance. Indeterminism is supported to some extent by research in quantum mechanics, which suggests that some events at the quantum level are in principle unpredictable (and therefore random). Philosophers and scientists who believe that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will are known as “libertarians” (libertarianism in this sense is not to be confused with the school of political philosophy called libertarianism). Although it is possible to hold that the universe is indeterministic and that human actions are nevertheless determined, few contemporary philosophers defend this view.

Libertarianism is vulnerable to what is called the “intelligibility” objection, which points out that people can have no more control over a purely random action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable; in neither case does free will enter the picture. Hence, if human actions are indeterministic, free will does not exist. See also free will and moral responsibility.”

 

My response: My response: God made each of us in De’s image, so this divine spark in us is our hint from God to emulate God by assuming the godly role and responsibility of living as a Creator/Individuator/Self-Determining Cosmos Builder and Maintainer—that is our God-given telos on earth. Such an accomplished winner human being is rather robustly free willing and adept at dealing with and sublimating her determinants into love, art, logic, invention, and mathematics, expressing her reaction to all indeterministic and deterministic nudges. It matters not whether the intelligibility objection holds water or not, she as a developing maverick dominates or strenuously, atavistically strives or does imposes her will upon all incoming influences, not vice versa, be they necessitated or random.

 

 

B: “The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

Philosophy & Religion Religious Beliefs . . .”

B: “problem of evil

theology

Written by

 

problem of evil, problem in theology and the philosophy of religion that arises for any view that affirms the following three propositions: God is almighty, God is perfectly good, and evil exists.

The problem

An important statement of the problem of evil, attributed to Epicurus, was cited by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779): “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” Since well before Hume’s time, the problem has been the basis of a positive argument for atheism: If God exists, then he is omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being would eliminate evil as far as it could; there is no limit to what an omnipotent being can do; therefore, if God exists, there would be no evil in the world; there is evil in the world; therefore, God does not exist. In this argument and in the problem of evil itself, evil is understood to encompass both moral evil (caused by free human actions) and natural evil (caused by natural phenomena such as disease, earthquakes, and floods).

Most thinkers, however, have found this argument too simple, since it does not recognize cases in which eliminating one evil causes another to arise or in which the existence of a particular evil entails some good state of affairs that morally outweighs it. Moreover, there may be logical limits to what an omnipotent being can or cannot do. Most skeptics, therefore, have taken the reality of evil as evidence that God’s existence is unlikely rather than impossible. Often the reality of evil is treated as canceling out whatever evidence there may be that God exists—e.g., as set forth in the argument from design, which is based on an analogy between the apparent design discerned in the cosmos and the design involved in human artifacts. Thus, Hume devotes much of the earlier parts of his Dialogues to attacking the argument from design, which was popular in the 18th century. In later parts of the work, he discusses the problem of evil and concludes by arguing after all that the mixed evidence available supports the existence of a divine designer of the world, but only one who is morally neutral and not the God of traditional theistic religions.”

My response: I confess that if God is all-powerful, all-loving, all-good, all-knowing, and omnipresent, it is hard to explain why evil exists, and yet people have free will and are responsible for their sins.

Part of the answer is that there may be logical limits to what an omnipotent being can or cannot do as listed above. I could argue that Fate is all good and all evil, all-knowing and all-evil; consequently, that is the source of that evil exists (It may not satisfactorily explain why evil exists.); despite suffering in the world, somehow people  are more responsible than not for their choices and actions.

I believe we are free, and that that is not just a subjective, mass hysteria of self-deluding by 7 billion human puppets. I know we are free but I cannot prove it—this mystery is what I say it is-- and the free will skeptics cannot disprove it, so I will act as if God exists, and does not play games with humans, and that we are free, accountable and will be held to account in this world and the next for how we choose and act. That we are free and that God allows us to be free with no tricks and no mind-games going on is an article of faith for me; that is the best I can construe of the ancient paradoxes, and I may not every make any headway beyond this dissatisfying conclusion It would be rewarding to know for sure if people have free will or not, but I feel quite deeply that they are.

B: “. . .

Theistic responses

Religious believers have had recourse to two main strategies. One approach is to offer a theodicy, an account of why God chooses to permit evil in the world (and why he is morally justified in so choosing)—e.g., that it is a necessary consequence of sin or that, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claimed, this is the “best of all possible worlds.” The other approach is to attempt a more limited “defense,” which does not aim to explain God’s purposes but merely to show that the existence of at least some evil in the world is logically compatible with God’s goodness, power, and wisdom. Many philosophers and theologians have rejected accounts of the first kind as inherently implausible or as foolhardy attempts to go beyond the bounds of human knowledge to discern God’s inscrutable purposes.”

 

My response: The Father and Mother encourage us to speculate about wildly open-ended metaphysical questions, including devising theodicies of various degrees of plausibility.

I caution that people should be respectful and good deities and not blasphemous when trying to create a story that explains these ultimate issues.

It seems as if God’s purposes remain somewhat inscrutable to us, and somehow that the presence of evil in the world is compatible with God love of goodness, moral and spiritual goodness/

B: “A variety of arguments have been offered in response to the problem of evil, and some of them have been used in both theodicies and defenses. One argument, known as the free will defense, claims that evil is caused not by God but by human beings, who must be allowed to choose evil if they are to have free will.”

My response: It is silly to think that humans, a created and sinful creature by nature, could create or cause evil in the world, though when sinning and filled with malice, we do often create, cause, and expand evil in the world during our short lives, but evil is a primeval, eternal force which was here before humans were created, and will be here to belabor future intelligent beings with free wills and moral accountability burdens long after humans have vanished from the face of the earth.

Either evil always was, or it was created by a powerful gods, and that may be Satan and Lera, but Fate is the world and chief deity beyond good (The Father and The Mother) and beyond evil (Satan and Lera). These deep metaphysical questions are such that we cannot atomistically or collectively or definitively answer at this point.

 

 

 B: “This response presupposes that humans are indeed free, and it fails to reckon with natural evil, except insofar as the latter is increased by human factors such as greed or thoughtlessness. Another argument, developed by the English philosopher Richard Swinburne, is that natural evils can be the means of learning and maturing. Natural evils, in other words, can help cultivate virtues such as courage and generosity by forcing humans to confront danger, hardship, and need. Such arguments are commonly supplemented by appeals to belief in a life after death, not just as reward or compensation but as the state in which the point of human suffering and the way in which God brings good out of evil will be made clear.”

 

My response: It seems as if both the presence of natural evil and malevolent evil in the world do teach the good and just be better themselves morally and spiritually, if they stay at it, but beyond that simple beneficial presence of these evil, they grow violence, suffering hatred and destruction in the world, and benefit no one.

 

 

B: “ Since many theodicies seem limited (because one can easily imagine a better world), and since many thinkers have not been convinced by the argument that the reality of evil establishes atheism, it is likely that future discussions will attempt to balance the reality of evil against evidence in favour of the existence of God.”