Imaginary do-overs
development, restless minds, freedom, and some other shit
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow, and as knowledge grows, grief increases.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18
Been working on the black history piece (I promise I’ll finish before the end of March [well, broke that promise . . . sorry]), and, of course, it’s undergoing successive bifurcations, like that penny that doubles its value every day and turns into $5 million at the end of the year. In fantasizing about that penny, I did a glide into another well-worn daydream, that one where you get to go back in time and make different choices. I could have stuck with those piano lessons, and now I’d be able impress people with surprise Willie Dixon riffs. I should have taken more French classes; and we could move to Quebec. I might’ve saved my money instead of buying all that marijuana and invested in T-Bills in the seventies. What if someone had talked me out of joining the Army?
Encroaching on such thoughts—if you’re an overthinker like moi (I remembered some of that French)—is the reality that time’s arrow flies in only one direction, and that even if it didn’t, there’s that “sensitivity to initial conditions” issue. Also known as the butterfly effect, it means that minor changes at point-A on time’s continuum means that by point-Z, your whole family born after point-B disappears, and maybe by point-C, you’re already dead . . . and this post doesn’t exist (Whoa! or maybe the butterfly flies all the way to Pretoria, cock-blocks Errol Musk on that critical September day of conception in 1971, and Elon doesn’t now exist . . . not all bad, eh?).
Okay, so I had to dispense with the ignis fatui of time travel—ah, the incessant conflicts of the mind (sigh)—but consciousness abhors a vacuum; and so, rather than rest my psyche, I start to grind away on the next epistemic agitation: free will. That is, could I have actually made these “choices” (note the scare quotes that just crawled onto the page, like a spider into your bed).
It occurred to me while I was—what? I can’t remember, but these thoughts run riot while I’m doing perfectly normal-looking things, like dicing onions, or walking the dog, or taking a dump, or re-spooling a fishing reel . . . It occurred to me that an independent will is something developmental. Taking the plane off nature’s auto-pilot requires the skill and experience to fly on manual override. A ten-year-old has more potential “free” will than a three-year-old, and a fifty-year-old should have greater capacity in this field than an eighteen-year-old. Ah, but there’s the hitch!
Along the biological succession of neuro-development, nurture increasingly supplants nature—and our nature is one in which nurture “naturally” plays the greater role (stop! make it stop!)—and the whole question of independent will leaves simple-minded shit like libertarian “freedom” in the sandbox with the plastic buckets-and-spades. The greatest impediment to any actual “freedom” of the will is that which has been internalized . . . yeah, where the person really, phenomenologically exists (with all that invisible restlessness).
A hopeless meth-head, in other words, even if he or she is fifty-years-old, is far less free, in the sense of independence of the will, than a serious eighteen-year-old student, or carpenter’s assistant, or basic trainee. There is a direct correspondence between self-discipline and independent will; but there’s no language of transmissibility between phenomenology and politics (which is where libertarianism along with every other ideology resides), so everyone above the age of seventeen can vote (making a choice). Enough of that, though. (Look, Mommy, I’m making a choice!) Let’s put mind and will together (mind/will), and see where it goes.
The mind/will, it turns out, even after the physical neurological architecture is fully realized, can be colonized. The ease with which this mind/will or that mind/will can be thus colonized is determined by things general, particular, and singular. Social organization, culture, community, family, unique personal experience . . . these all play their parts, whichever the many rivulets and streams pouring into the whole current of influences on one person’s psyche. The general corrals the particular, and the particular corrals the singular. (Shit, here I go again! Back up!)
Which things that are internalized qualify as these mind/will colonizers? These enemies of the will’s independence? These usurpers of the careful discernment, prudence, and good judgement that underwrite any semblance of “free will”?
In the general sense, I’d have to say, infantilization. In the specific sense, our various dependencies upon infantilizing technological grids. In the particular sense (okay here we are again in the restless phenomenological territory of ceaseless mental turmoil), financial desperation, addictions, the cloaked figure of death standing always in the wings, legitimate and induced anxieties, manufactured compulsions, real physical damage, digitally streamed obsessions . . . one could go on here for quite some time; but these are all experienced as desires (built upon more deeply unknown and unacknowledged desires). And will is always aimed at some desire, no? Well, which one, at which depth?
One could say that even the “free-est” will is always circumscribed by these real and unreal realities; and on the other hand, a pretty good argument can be made that this very circumscription, taken as a premise, will lead one to conclude that the circumscription of desire is the precondition of what’s left by now of any notion of “freedom.” Freedom of choice, we can all see, is kind of a bullshit idea; but so is determinism. Everybody missing the fucking point.
We won’t even ask the question about the ramifications and repercussions of choosing based on inaccurate and-or incomplete understanding of the context in which a decision is made; but if an entire mass of people is convinced of the truth of some falsehood, well . . . we’ve moved into Clustefuck County, haven’t we?
God, I’ve gone ten miles afield here! Back, then, to those imaginary time-traveling choices.
Did I have the self-discipline (discipline over my desires) at age 12 to make a meaningful choice? Probably not! At age 32? Honestly, I remember being just as driven then—albeit with a more complicated configuration of desire. I still can’t honestly say I had the wherewithal to have made different choices, but then my memory of these things is untrustworthy. Age 62? I was doing better, for sure. Now, at 73? Working on it, but my desires now are disciplined not only by awareness and experience, but by that relentlessly unidirectional arrow of time, and my daily experience of all the ways life is increasingly leaving my body. A twenty-year-old fantasizes twenty years into the future. Septuagenarians don’t. Not about themselves anyway. Against a shortened horizon, we update our wills.
I’m feeling compelled here to take a writing run at some other shit, but I’m choosing to stop myself right here, passing the baton, so to speak, to the reader, where he or she can deal with it in his or her own phenomenological cage fight.
Peace.