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A tedious old hippy with chronic TDS says we shouldn’t hate Trump. Yes, I’m as confused as you are.
In his latest book, Determined, Robert Sapolsky argues that we are not, in fact, masters of our own destiny. Everything we think and do is beyond our control and caused by a combination of biology and environment.
The Stanford University professor was just 14 when one “very revelatory night”, he realised that humans have no free will at all.
“Suddenly, I woke up at two in the morning and said, ‘Ah, I get it. There’s no free will. And there’s no God. And there’s no purpose in the universe whatsoever.’ It all just evaporated right then and hasn’t been back since.”
Many of us have a “very, very strong” intuition that we do have free will because we know ourselves to make choices all the time and are aware that we could have made different ones, Sapolsky says. But for him, this argument is “missing 99 per cent of what’s going on”.
“It never asks the question, how did you become the sort of person who would choose regular coffee over decaf? How did you wind up being somebody who would be standing in that coffee shop at that time? How do you wind up being employed enough so you had money in your pocket to pay for it? How did you arrive at this moment?”
Um, choices?
“When you look at all the things that brought you to that instant – brain and hormones and genes and early environment – and throw all of that stuff in there, there’s simply no room in there for you to have made a decision completely free of your biology and the environment that it interacted with.”
Well, we know that children with hearing difficulties have a higher chance of ending up in prison. We also know that children who go through traumatic childhoods have a much greater chance of becoming heroin addicts. And we know that those on the autism spectrum have a much, much, greater chance of having difficulty finding work.
But all three still involve making choices.
[…] It’s not your fault. You didn’t choose your genes. You didn’t choose how your brain wired up. You didn’t choose your adolescent experiences.
Once you really believe there’s no free will, it makes no sense, intellectually or ethically, to blame, punish, praise or reward another person, he says.
“It also makes the entire criminal justice system irrelevant and irrational – the whole legal system is built on a notion of free will that doesn’t exist.”
So punishing someone for, say, going on a killing spree is unjust? But wait, if there’s no free will then sending someone to prison isn’t a choice a judge makes. Being sent to prison was predestined. Just like being killed by someone on a killing spree was predestined. To take it further our justice system was something that was predetermined.
[…] Hating an individual person who was unlucky in their combination of biology and upbringing, even destructive people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, makes as much sense as hating a virus for getting into your lungs or hating an earthquake, he says.
And there you have it. It always amazes me how sufferers of TDS are able to bring Trump into any conversation, even conversations about free will.
“I spent a lot of the last 10 years now having to think through why it’s not okay for me to hate Donald Trump. He had an awful upbringing. His father was a nightmare. His mother was ice-cold. He spent his whole life having to pay people to pretend that they love him. No wonder he turned out this way.”
Ten years? I’d definitely call that not having a life.
"Does that mean you shouldn't be very activated in trying to keep him from doing what he’s doing to destroy our democracy? No. He sure as hell needs to be stopped, but he had nothing to do with it. Putin had nothing to do with it … but you recognise, nonetheless, they turned out to be very, very damaging people.”
Does the professor offer any evidence that Trump is trying to destroy American democracy? Of course not. The whole point of the article is ‘Orange man bad’… but it’s not his fault (the latter being in very small letters.)
(Also notice the subtle contradiction in the quote above.)
The thing about no free will is that you don’t have to feel guilty about anything you do. If you happen to hurt someone, no need to feel guilty – it was predestined. Steal millions of dollars from somebody? Predestined.
The idea of no free will is the ultimate get out of jail free card for psychopaths and sociopaths. Hell, you can even use it to bitch about Trump without any evidence and end it with ‘… but it’s not his fault’.
