May 22, 2003 (idea)

Maybe predestination is a good thing. Think about it. What if you had the perfect life all planned out for you? What if your happiness was assurred? Would you throw it all away in favor of free will? How do you know you even have free will in the first place? And isn't happiness what it's all about? You could argue that you'd never be happy knowing that you couldn't make your decisions freely, but let's say you could be happy. Would you choose that over free will? You could say that free will is a higher pure thing, a right deserved by all human beings, but you're parroting someone else. You're taking their word for it. Have you ever thought about it by yourself? What really makes free will so valuable? Does it make you happy? Will it comfort you when you are down? Will it sleep with you? Or is it a famous man who you barely know who stars in movies and has lots of money and all the girls and everything you never had, a man who will have millions of people who never met him attend his funeral, all of them weeping as if they'd just been told their significant other has cancer? Why do you love him? What has he ever done for you? What makes free will so great?

Perhaps we need an application to real life. Perhaps my monologue is unwitty and poorly written. We need a story. Gather round; I'm not going to tell you a story but I've got the next best thing: nostalgia. Think about the best moment of your life. Perhaps it was your first love, perhaps it was you first kiss, perhaps it was your first sexual experience. Perhaps it was birth. Would you give that moment away if you found out you did not commit it out of free will, that instead you were a pawn in some game of intergalactic chess? I bet you wouldn't. You'd fight it for a while, and then realize it still was the best moment you ever had.

The mind is a funny thing. It will try to destroy itself for an ideal just because. But it always eventually gives in. It has to. It's programmed that way.