Take back control, or at least try to

Knowledge is truly power if one is interested in moving towards free will and away from unconscious choice. I’ve given up the fantasy of making it all the way to pure free will, but I can certainly move myself closer to it along the spectrum.“Making the unconscious conscious” has been an area of great interest for me for many years, and I consider it to be incredibly liberating each time a new awareness can be brought into the light of consciousness. “Fate” can be transformed into identifiable behaviour patterns, that once recognised, can be embraced or abandoned at will.

Surely not though. If that were true, smoking would have disappeared overnight. Self-knowledge can be imperfect, but even if you do know the reason why you did something, that doesn't mean you'll have more control over it in the future. Knowing things and desiring things are not the same thing, and habitual behaviour can override all conscious knowledge; you might be able to act against your desires, but hardly "at will".

Of course, that's not to say that self knowledge is unimportant or that being consciously aware of why you're doing something doesn't bring you an element of self-control : it most certainly does, as in the example below.

An important part of my progress resulted with the discovery that it’s possible to partially immunise myself to the dopamine-hijacking methods employed by advertisers and social media.  In some cases,  I’ve determined that I’m simply unable to resist, that my wiring is fixed and ‘they’ are simply too adept at juicing the pathways, and so my best defence is to limit my exposure.  Similarly, I’m currently wrestling with admitting my biological limitations and giving up my smartphone in favour of reverting to a much more basic flip phone. 

Huge benefits have also resulted from understanding the ways in which emotionally manipulative language (a.k.a. “propaganda” or most of what passes for mainstream news) operates.  Once you’re able to spot it, you’ll see it everywhere and it will no longer sway you. In fact, it might even elicit the opposite reaction. 

Fair enough that manipulation is an area where knowing the specific tactics can be enlightening and really does give you control you wouldn't otherwise have. It's less obvious how much of a difference this really makes. I distinctly recall one of the best school lessons of all being an analysis of adverts, but I cannot honestly say if I already hated adverts by this point or not. Certainly I was susceptible to them as a child - who hasn't persuaded their parents to buy the cereal that comes with the coolest free toy ?

Now I would hope that a lot of this - that advertisers are trying to sell you stuff and don't mind embellishing the truth or telling outright lies - becomes pretty obvious as you get older, even if the specific techniques need to be taught. Unfortunately this doesn't solve the "fire is hot" problem : the propensity for politicians to tell absolutely brazen lies and get away with it. So are their gormless devotees really taken in, or is it more subtle ? Do they know the lies but don't see them as relevant to a politician's fundamental honesty ? Can they simply not understand that someone telling obvious lies is hardly likely to have anyone else's best interests in mind ? "It's very hard to trust a man who wants to borrow a picklock", as the old saying goes...

The thing is, knowing what's going on doesn't always help. Sometimes it will only make you rationalise your actions by some bullshit excuse that you probably even really believe. Knowing why I like chocolate doesn't stop me liking chocolate, even though I also know that it's not the healthiest of snacks. And sometimes it can be extremely dangerous to pretend that lack of self-knowledge made you a villain :

As a topical reference, the current Epstein sexual predator case just reminds us that many men often live out their lives thoroughly subject to the biology of sexual hormones and the drive to reproduce, with about as much free will as a rutting elk during mating season.

I don't think I could even begin to properly analyse what's going on there and I'd be a bit skeptical of anyone who did. Suffice to say that I find it fantastically unlikely that anyone becomes a sexual predator just because they're uncontrollably horny. It's hardly as though they're unaware of the immorality of what they're doing either - one suggestion is that they are genuinely unable to empathise with their victims. Anyway, choosing the worst sort of criminal as an example of how we sometimes lack control was probably not the most sensible move here; it brings in moral dimensions that are best tackled only once we've decided on the degree of free will people have. Otherwise we risk biasing the judgement.

I do strongly agree with the sentiment though :

I now more broadly interpret “unconscious” to mean anything that you aren’t aware of that’s causing you to respond with certain actions, or experience things in a certain way.  It could be something from your past long buried (nurture) or it could be hard-wired into your neurochemical response set (nature). Similarly, as long as it’s operating undetected by your conscious mind, yet resulting in certain responses, I’m calling that the “unconscious”, too. Simply knowing that such scripts are running in your brain is truly life changing once you become aware of them.

You can only be said to be making a free choice if you're conscious of it. An alternative philosophical definition of "free" to mean "unhindered" is useful in some contexts, but not when it comes to the more fundamental aspects. And though there are indeed some aspects of our nature we can't control, that doesn't mean we don't have any free will at all - we're just constrained by physics, biology, and information.

Trying to be more self-aware is a perfectly worthy goal - Epictetus described ignorance as a form of slavery, since you can't make a full, free choice if you don't have complete information. It's just that their are a lot of important caveats to this, most notably that knowledge does not automatically equate with desire, let alone behaviour.

Do You Truly Have Free Will?

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com, How we're constantly at war with our biological programming... Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ~ Carl Jung I love that Jung quote. I've used it generously in conversation, seminars and writings throughout the years.