Free Will and the Self: Fulfilling Prophecy

Free Will and the Self: Fulfilling Prophecy

Have you noticed how the boundary between free will and predeterminism blur over time? We're free to choose to act, to think, to believe, to do, to not do... and yet, we still feel the subconscious pull of forces beyond our awareness. Why do many people choose to stay in their comfort zones when it comes to exploring the unknown? Is that predeterminism? A passive exercise in free will? What if I complicate things by enquiring about the nature of self-fulfilling prophecy? If I was abused as a child and I grow up and get involved in a string of relationships that all resemble the emotional battle between my parents and me, how free am I? Do evolution and psychology root us in predeterminism? If we erase all memory, are we then truly free to act unprecedentedly? Hmm. Give that some thought while I add some more cream to my coffee.

What are your summations? Are we damned, I mean doomed, to predict the future by repeating the past? I watched the movie, "Premonition" with Sandra Bullock a few nights ago. The end was quite disturbing, particularly because the movie and the special features did not address the glaring reality (warning: spoiler coming!) that Bullock's character undoubtedly, yet inadvertently, took part in her husband's death. If you haven't seen the flick, rent it for the good conversation stimulant that the ending provides. I was quite disppointed because movies with a tragic and self-condemning ending should not waste time trying to console us with sentimental horseradish. Bullock's character was either a neurotic meddler who got the maximum result of her "interventions", or there was nothing she could have done to prevent her husband's death save tie him up in the house for several days. Yet still, the movie presumes that death will summon in spite of our preventive measures.

Which camp do you fall in? The predeterministic or the free will camp? Rationally, I tend toward the belief that destiny cannot be eradicated, only modified, and the outcome, the end result, will still be the same, particularly in the realm of private and universal eschatology. Experientially perhaps, predeterminism appears to be the most reliable way to understand our actions and events in the cosmos. How do you explain prophecies, premonitions, predictions, speculative theories, the development of the arts and behavioral "sciences"? Everything that depends on a precedent in some way biases our perceptions toward predeterminism. Let me just add that my ramblings are half-formed ideas. I'm still kicking around the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy and whether it is a misnomer, a salve for our fear that we really have no control over the future. Self-fulfilling prophecy, paradoxically, suggests that we can control events to the point that they appear predetermined.

Come again?

On so many levels, and in large part by our need or desire for order and control, man has defined and organized reality to the point that much of it seems quite predetermined, which renders the question practically moot: is free will a reality, inherent?

As recently as the early to mid-19th century, in many of the United States, a white male, with or without financial backing, could educate himself through vigorous private study and achieve a rewarding profession which one less motivated would not have obtained. We could hypothesize that free will, in the past, was a pretty popular idea outside most religious halls. Has free will lost much of its footing over time? Are we more prone to believe in predeterminism in our era?

Much argument for free will, we might predict, would come from the wealthier classes whose private resources allow for greater choices, or perhaps, only different sets of limited choices. Today in the U.S., anyone desirous of achieving greater professional success through self-education, if one is wont to live subsistently, will find those doors ajar, if not closed and locked. Limited to work resembling one's parents', seeking mediocre and unprofitable jobs similar to those of one’s unskilled class and environment, life appears to be cut in jaded stone; one just hasn't found the map yet.

The example above is by no means extrapolative, but when one considers the encroaching nature of laws, regulations and policy that structure and limit the extent of our freedoms to navigate and expand outside of our familiar environment, one can intuit that free will, if it ever was a force or truth in the world, is fast approaching extinction.

Thus, here we ponder the contemporary philosopher’s quandary: is free will a fact of life or does free will govern our choices only to the extent that we are unchained by evolution, psychology, laws, mores, norms and the like? If this is the case, perhaps we are forever predetermined to debate this issue without conclusive evidence, all the while every presently aware that free will, were it not for our cosmic constraints, would be tangibly obvious and exercised.