Not sure if it’s an age thing or I’ve just finally found a smidgen of self awareness, beyond just dipping a toe under the surface level. Recently I’ve been trying to interrogate what really drives my decisions, how I’ve come to land on the positions and opinions that I hold. Am I driven by my cultural upbringing, my religious background, herd mentality, or just the back to back crises of our time?
Friction feels like one of those words that you could use a thousand different ways, and people would still know what you meant. I have been investigating an internal friction in my sense of autonomy. Ego as a word though, it’s fairly encapsulating. Some small wiggle room, but mostly it pins the context quite directly to the desiring selfish parts of ourselves. But is this biologically driven, pure nature as it were? This seems to be what the determinists think, we have no agency outside of our environment, everything is external; even internal biological needs and impulses are classed as external to the conscious mind and rob it of agency restricting it to one singular course of action under the deterministic lens. To me, this is a thought-terminating cliché. It isn’t helpful to think you are just a leaf floating on a river of circumstance and nothing you do can change what is preordained.
My personal feeling is the nurture of our upbringing and the miles we put on our bones throughout our lives, begin to be the main force driving us. But how can we really know drives us? If it’s wholly our conscious choices, how do the subconscious feelings and insecurities that drive us to act against our own best interest fit in? Another side of the spectrum is the faithful, who believe there is a divine plan but we still have the blessed free will to go against it. Are the faithful, good because they choose to be morally righteous and align with the divine plan? Or because they believe in the visceral agony, forever torture and unending excruciating shredding of their immortal souls for all eternity; and it’s that underlying fear drives them along subconsciously? While I lost such eternal convictions long ago, I do still question how much this has informed my positions versus what are really my ideas from first principles. how much of what’s is my opinions, especially around: is what’s “right”, what’s acceptable, what’s for the “good”; are based on something that I have fully chosen?
Personally, my hottest take – and the fact that it’s even remotely controversial is an inditement of the current state of the world – is that I think that ensuring everyone’s basic needs are met should be the paramount concern of a society. This is because I think that all humans regardless of race, creed or station, deserve dignity and to thrive not just survive. While this is a firmly held belief that I have slowly come to overtime, moving passed individualism and the façade of a meritocratic basis of allocation; I feel intently, how close I could be to falling from the social ladder and needing those safety nets for me & mine personally. So this begs the question, while I consciously choose to want a better world for all, is that choice really just being driven by my self preservation. Is there a part of me that is playing game theory and thinking that if I choose to have these beliefs, and enough other people come along with me, then we can at least rely on each other to pick up those that have fallen off the wheel.
This is a disquieting notion, that nothing has it’s provenance or genesis from my conscious mind and thoughts specifically, there is always some sort of inception from subconscious or biological or external pressures. Bringing us around to something akin to the deterministic, but divergent from the die hard determinists, it’s clearly moulded by the conscious self – there is agency, there is choice that moves the needle quite appreciably. I guess this is my round about way of saying I’m noticing my biases, my cultural blind spots and detrimental tendencies. And, I’m starting on the path to shift and claim my actual decisions and opinions. Sure my thoughts and feelings are based on lived experience and may even be driven by my deepest fears, but that doesn’t mean that I can shirk away from the responsibilities of applying them in the world, showing up and standing on my chosen beliefs.