FREEDOM OF WILL: MYTH OR REALITY?

"It is particularly important to get to know your weaknesses. They are the main tools of those who try to hack you. Computers are hacked through pre-existing faulty code lines. Humans are hacked through pre-existing fears, hatreds, biases and cravings. Hackers cannot create fear or hatred out of nothing. But when they discover what people already fear and hate it is easy to push the relevant emotional buttons and provoke even greater fury." (Yuval Noah Harari: The Myth of Freedom).

I find these lines particularly poignant.

Those who seek power over Humanity have always known that the quickest way to hijack your soul is via your biases, prejudices, fears, lusts, weaknesses and emotions. It is knowledge of how to manipulate for their own ends these elements of your character that have kept old right politicians such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, in power, and which explains the phenomenal rise of Britain’s Reform UK party, which may well win the UK’s next general election.

A very few people learn (generally via pain, suffering, sickness and loss) that they are weak, riddled with fault lines, and not nearly as good or noble, or “free” (to exercise their supposed freedom of will), as they had once thought they were. However, some of these individuals in turn also learn that they have one great virtue, a virtue which they can use to go to war against these weaknesses. What is that virtue? It is courage. For such people, suffering brings them to a state where - if not quite purified – they are rid of much of the dross that had once corrupted their thoughts and emotions, and which stifled their freedom of will. They come to understand that they now possess the courage to question - even to flout - the group consensus.

Such rare individuals find that they have acquired immunity to the lies and blandishments of those who seek power over Humanity. Some of these people will have harnessed a religious philosophy, such as the Christian faith, to assist in their liberation; others will have found a path to freedom of will via a secular philosophy.   

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and philosopher, in his book, The Myth of Freedom, is correct: the two great illusions peddled by contemporary western society, are (1) that we know ourselves better than anyone else does, and (2) that we are free agents. These premises, for almost all of us, are false.

Do you doubt this? You need only publicly declare your beliefs or thoughts; you need only adopt a contrarian view online on some topical issue, to see how much of the criticism you then receive conforms to patterns of group consciousness which you had anticipated and which you recognise. Your critics each imagine that their response to your declaration or comment is uniquely individual and true. However, you recognise that your critics, each one of them, express only the collective will of a particular group consciousness. (In my own case, the group consciousness most usually expressed by my severest online critics is that of the liberal-progressives. My most savage online critics almost always display no more individual identity, or freedom of will, than worker ants).

Such critics do not possess free will: they participate in a group consciousness; they express the collective will of the group. By the 1920s and 1930s, European power mongers such as Mussolini and Hitler recognised this fact, and they pitched their (generally hate-filled) messages accordingly. Power seekers today (and they include far more than mere "politicians") also recognise this, and they too pitch their messages accordingly.

Each time you respond to a TV or online advertisement with the desire to utilize the service, or possess the product, being advertised, you are permitting your will to be hijacked and manipulated by power mongers. In this case, it is commercial power mongers who manipulate your emotions, for commercial and economic gain. But political power mongers such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, employ an almost identical methodology to hijack your will.   

If (often after having undergone a prolonged period of pain and suffering) you can face with courage the dark, ignorant, weak willed alter ego which has been thus far your active self, and not be so appalled and horrified that you vow never to look the truth of yourself in the face again, but instead you are willing to try to redeem this dark, ignorant and weak side of your nature, then you become far harder for these power mongers to influence than the great mass of Humanity, which is ignorant of the essential ignobility of their natures, and blind to the fact that their wills have been hijacked.

The Christian Church (with its teaching that we are all fallen creatures, imperfect, and needful of salvation) once gave great encouragement to the courageous among us to embark upon painful - but ultimately gainful - self-examination, and to seize back control of our freedom of will. Liberal-progressives, wholly secular in their attitudes, cannot offer anything comparable. They act as members of a group consciousness, and are blind to their loss of individuality and freedom of will.