Last night I dreamt I was a Germanic medicine man, warrior kicking Roman ass in the Teutoburger Wald (my tribe’s version of the Little Bighorn). Dying in agony I was annoyed to discover that my wife was not tending my wounds, but merely nudging me in the ribs so I’d stop moaning in my sleep.

Despite my battlefield injuries, despite lying face-down in the swampy woods screaming in pain, I was not relieved to find myself back in this cold, bureaucratic, technological culture, although word processing is a nice addition.

We’re all born mid-highway, spewing gas out the tailpipe, decimating forests for school projects, eating animals penned in concentration camps, privileged or lacking privilege, praying to the local deity, before we have a moment to reflect, through no choice of our own.

I just appeared here as a newborn in this historical timeline like a Chomsky Martian, and was quickly covered in all these decals and rooting for the team I got saddled with, no matter how often they lose.

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Do I Choose or Merely React Automatically?

Do I “choose” the team I like? Or have I already learned to like the team I choose? I think we can look at it either way, which is a little disturbing at first. I think it’s more coherent to see choice as a wildly convincing illusion. But in order to see choice as an illusion you’d have to drop any automatic resistance to the idea first. And I’m not sure if casual readers will be able to do that, because this turn of the prism is a genuine threat to a typical sense of Self.

In other words, am I free to look in directions that undermine my stability? Am I free to entertain an idea that feels like an insult, even an erasure of myself as the chooser in chief?

Let’s take choosing food or clothing. What do I mean by “weighing my options”? Is the choice “free”? Do I choose “anything I want”? Or is what I want already established, so that I follow the dictates of my own pre-established interests as if it were a free choice?

I could, however, choose to utterly betray my usual likes and dislikes and try something radically new. However, what is the motive for selecting something new? Boredom maybe? But I don’t choose to be bored. I’m responding automatically to an automatic discontent.

I’m not arguing that humans are lacking freedom. I’m saying that choice isn’t the source of freedom. I’m saying that freedom might lie in a different mode of response.

I think this is one of the most fascinating reversals of the prism of perception that a person can undertake, but it’s difficult because it feels disturbing. See, even here, I’m not free to choose being interested in this question. The disturbance is automatic. I’m either interested spontaneously (freely) through no choice of my own, or I’m automatically disinclined to even consider it. I can’t generate a motive by an act of will. And this fact alone indicates that the act of “choosing” is not free.

And yet I claim to be able to “do anything I want.” But what I want has already been established by previous experience. So I can’t freely choose to want something I don’t already want.

Again, I’m not saying we’re not free. I’m saying that choice is not the vehicle of freedom. Something else is, which we’ll come to.

Is Lying a Choice?

Am I implying that a liar has no choice in lying? That would infuriate me, because I KNOW that liars are responsible for their actions. If we dispensed with this philosophy of “being responsible” the world would self-destruct even more quickly.

I wonder if there is a way to conceive of responsibility in a different light. Lying looks like a freely chosen behavior, because I seem so obviously conscious of manipulating others. But is it possible that a congenital liar has never experienced any non-manipulative environment? Liars would seem to be a product of a lying and manipulative family and cultural dynamic. If nothing feels honest anyway, if we’re all being played, then it’s easy to justify lies as a necessity, not a wrong. Might as well play the predatorial game better than others, and at least quit the self-deception of phony ass piety. Being on the make leaves a person prone to admiring successful examples of themselves, preening in the mirror of the beloved anti-hero.

It’s only those of us who have known non-manipulative love who can “choose love” and honesty. Am I free to respond without wanting to punish them? I can’t help but respond from the vantage point I already have, unless I’m challenged to spin the prism of perception and stand in another’s shoes. And even then, I’m not going to choose to stand there because I don’t yet know what it’s like from that perspective. It’s only after I’m confronted against my will with a different perspective that I change my behavior. I can’t “choose” to change that behavior.

Now that may not sit well with any of you, but it’s a challenge. And being challenged is the same as taking reponsibility. We don’t choose to be responsible; responsibility awakens in us spontaneously as a form of extended empathy.

If we’re ignorant of empathy, then it’s my ignorance that determines how I behave, not my choice.

Can you see the radical consistency in this spin of the prism, or is it something that you, dear reader, can’t choose to see? It’s a challenge.

True Freedom May Awaken When We Realize We’re Trapped

Waking to our choiceless predicament isn’t a choice, it’s an insight. We can’t choose to have insights. My stupidity exposes itself when I’m receptive. That’s all an insight really is, receptivity to stupidity. But receptivity is also not an action I can choose. Its a fundamental change in attitude that has already occurred out of nowhere, as an insight of its own.

I want to be able to blame the racists and murderers for what they do. “It’s their choice to murder someone” is the constant justification for the death penalty and war and every other brutality WE commit, which WE can’t seem to stop committing, because WE remain ignorant through no choice of our own.

Yes, we have to stop the murderers and brutes and put them someplace apart. They have to learn to see themselves in a wider context that engenders an alteration in the way they spontaneously relate to the world. But if they have never experienced any real parental love, only the fake, conditional love of the sociopathic style of parenting rampant in school, business, culture and in more family dynamics than we care to admit, then how in hell can they “choose” a form of being they don’t even think is possible, which they dismiss as a ploy? And then we murder them in turn for their “chosen” crimes, a brutality we don’t even recognize because we feel so righteous when we act in retribution. And our own automatic harshness confirms and reinforces the fake, sociopathic vision that choicelessly and invisibly limits everyone’s options.

No, my will is not free so long as willfulness merely means anything I want. Of the available imaginary choices, I’d “want” to live in a world of wild forests and mountains, where villages are scarce, bears are Gods and being killed in a battle is all the rage (I’m overheating, hand me a towel). That’s a peculiar want, admittedly, a momentary counter-image I automatically deploy as revenge fantasy against all the forces that are hurting the earth and leaving only this trapped, diminished way of life — mechanical, automatic, sociopathic, childish, and without spiritual value. So I long for the Old Old days, prior to Rome, and this deluded regression is not my free will either. It’s stupidity expressing itself by habit. There’s nothing free in “me.”

Free Choice and Free Will As Mere Metaphors for Something Truly Free

We might use the phrases as metaphors still, but we’ll have to excise the portion of the definition that is Not like the usual meaning of “choosing between.” We could say, this moment “seems to” present us with a choice between staying in the ruts of warmaking or leaping into a radical new relationship to the world. But it’s not really a choice, after all, it’s only a half-formed vision, an incomplete insight, until the new possibility dawns. And then it wasn’t a choice we “made”, but only an impossibility until (out of nowhere) it was realized. There’s no choice in any of that.

Likewise, if the word “will” isn’t scrubbed clean of its association with willful domination, and the narrow ambitions of a selfish seeker of gratification (gratifications that are already indoctrinated), then the phrase “free will” suggests a sharply curtailed form of freedom that will cause more confusion than it’s worth.

At best, describing something having “free will” is the same as describing a walnut “willing itself” to become an oak tree. It’s a metaphorical way of imagining “something vaguely like” will in some ways, but which doesn’t involve rational decision-making as will implies. Until we have thoroughly seen why it’s NOT the same as typical “will” or “choice” the metaphor is not functioning coherently.

Freedom

I’m never free to select an option that lies beyond my comprehension. And the moment of comprehension or realization can’t be forced or chosen.

I may know the word for “freedom” but this mapped knowledge isn’t the territory itself. I can’t choose freedom, because the word alone doesn’t open up that option. It only provokes a tired image imprisoned in a hackneyed sentiment.

Free actions happen without preconceived expectations. There is a world of difference between spontaneity and automation, though both are immediate. The one is free, the other isn’t. Freedom emerges out of the ruts of automated knowledge as a spontaneous insight when I am unexpectedly receptive. It emerges as something previously unknown to me and unfettered by precedent. It’s a creative Big Bang of a hitherto unimaginable dimension, where I had previously only known patterns of left and right, yes or no, fight or flight, one’s and zero’s.

Freedom erupts from nothingness, not from what already exists.