In a thread on F-book the other day, stimulated by this image:
The protestations of one correspondent about the confusing love of "god" drew from me the following reply:
"Free will" is a mind-game the Oligarchs introduced into the public mind a couple of milennia ago as a way to get people to accept their fates and blame themselves for failing to negotiate the traps and snares the Bosses set before them to hold them in durance.
You may reliably know when they're pulling that crap when somebody's excoriating you, piously, yet ferociously: "You HAD choices. YOU just made the wrong ones."
One may gauze it up with such trappings as suit one's exalted sense of value or purpose, as much as one might wish; it does not change the fact that, in reality, the best anyone can HOPE to achieve is a limited amount of local, private autonomy. With "when to end it" being the ultimate act. That is, or ought to be, enough, and it is or ought to be unnecessary--and unbecoming--to bedeck it with some sort of quasi-spiritual, but trans-material 'will-to-power.'
Free will, the advocates/believers will always say, is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals, thererby willfully (?) ignoring the fact that THAT--the whole "Us" versus "them" thing with the rest of the living world--basically IS the problem.
Folks in that space have a really annoying way of belittling their contradictors, imputing to themselves "levels" of "development" unavailable to or "beyond" those held by the unenlightened. My interrogator deprecated MY "limited view."
Using "limited" as if it were a bad, or diminished or reduced, inferior thing. It's to laugh!
Ed Abbey, legendary, proto-environmentalist/advocate/warrior thought 'endless growth' at the cellular level was the 'ideology of the cancer cell.'
I am increasingly of the opinion that "limitlessness" with respect to human aspiration echoes that same mortal, debilitating, ultimately self-destructive trope.
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