What is Free Will

[nashwan]

What is Free Will
By Nashwan Hamza

Free Willy is a movie about a boy trying to free a whale from living in mind-numbing, dorsal fin sagging, environmental captivity. Free will is a reality show about a creator giving his greatest creation - humans - the ability to free themselves from living a life governed completely by pre-ordained destiny. Free will is the gift that enables us to envision a future event or lifestyle and act to make it happen. It gives us the ability to make daily choices about the way we live. It even allows us to choose not to live at all. Free will is a package deal- that also comes complete with a volume of grey matter called a conscience, which if we are lucky, we get to fill with any set of life “values” we wish, so long as there is enough room for them after the “values” our parents, society and environment have placed first. The conscience is a gauge we use to guide us in our free will decision making. Most often the values handed down to us through family and society trumps our free will ability, making individual free will, well, less free. We do have many choices in our lives but those choices are often buffered by economic realities and accepted cultural behaviors. Most societies have cultural structure rightly set up for the smooth functioning and interaction of its people. Culture can also allow for free thinking, and the creation of new ideas to help advance itself. More often however, societal structure is stifling and imposed without the ability for the people to easily question its structure and correct its flaws, because the exercise of free will and free thinking would affect the status quo and undermine the advantages of those that covet their established power or dogma. I’m thinking of cultures in places like Saudi Arabia, China, Africa, much of Texas and Washington D.C.
Few people realize the true power and value of this gift. I believe that human free will can lift us to choose to act in ways that will make life individually an ecstatic experience, and collectively move us to paradise. Speaking plainly, the human default setting in our brain is understandably set for self awareness and self preservation. And our societies are structured to reflect that value. We rightly use free will to make choices that help us move towards prosperity and happiness, yet sometimes we are unaware that these choices negatively impact others. Often we are aware, and because of the strength of our self preservation default setting, we choose them anyway. We believe that this is the way of the world and defend it with the justification that it is the “survival of the fittest”. After all, we only have to look to nature to see that this is a universal law created by the creator itself. What most of us fail to see and only some have achieved is that when we turn off this default setting, seek knowledge about the interconnectedness of life, and using our free will choose to make other humans and our planet the focus of our existence rather than ourselves (which will be sustained in the process), we will then feel a happiness and fulfillment unlike anything we can imagine. Even though I myself have not been entirely successful in turning off my default setting, I truly believe of its possibility. I also believe it is very difficult and unlikely to have an individual achieve this state when the society around us is set in this current default mode. The help and momentum of a like- minded society is important, in the same way that it would be difficult for each generation to maintain our scientific progress without access to the structure and educational records of the previous generation’s achievements. Similarly, societies can use their collective free will to slowly develop and hand down a culture that over time reaches a tipping point in which our collective default mode can be reset to one in which individuals needs and desires are met simply as a by-product in the pursuit of meeting the needs of others.