Fatalism
Listening to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack has lost most my inspiration to write this diddy, but I shall try nonetheless. I am half motivated by being up since 3am (only getting 3 hours of sleep) and having a restless mind before I spend an entire (final) day at the faire. In a large way, this is inspired by Nightmare Before Christmas, since Fatalism is a large undercurrent theme in the movie. So I pose a question, Do I believe in fate and if so how ‘hard’ of fatalism?
Fatalism, tied in with the previous incoherent blog about evil, weighs heavily on my mind of late. After having an encounter with a storm goddess, you tend to question your own mortal self and destiny.
Fate can be broken down (lets hope I can remember them all) into several basic beliefs and outlooks. First is the easiest decision, do I believe in fate yay or nay?
I resist the urge not to believe in fate, but I find myself more and more believing in it, but not from an egotistical ‘im special’ human perspective. I digress though. Hard fatalist will believe that everything is predestined to happen. Honestly, I am almost a hard fatalist which is funny considering I have professed for some time not be a fatalist at all but I cannot get myself out of the trap of hard fatalism.
A hard fatalist will believe that all things, either through god or not, are predestined and there is no free will or even the will of god that can change things.
This is very appealing to me because the ulterior to hard fatalism leave, in my mind, too many questions. Like most people though, hard fatalism is very hard to grasp and fully realize your own insignificance to the great picture. (something I profess with a decent amount of foolish wonton-ness to begin to grasp) To really emerse yourself in this idea, you have to think that no matter what you think, no matter what you have done or will do, how much willpower you have, or how much you think you can make a difference, it has ALL been setup already. This does not limit at all your power of changing the world, you can still invent TNT and start wars like Peter Nobel, but your actions and non-actions have been allotted for you. So every thought, every action, every pause you ever have is entirely ‘planned’ already. You do not have to believe in a god for this, science answers most of this through nature’s laws, but if you do God has already judged you and given you your destiny. So if you believe in hell and heaven, you are already saved or not and eternity for your soul is already happening.
This is simply depressing on a massive level for me, but I cannot find a way out of hard fatalism. Seemingly you have no options, no choices, no chance at change but when you really analyze it you do. There is nothing saying that you will not have all of those thoughts, all of those ‘appeared’ decisions, you will have dilemmas, regrets, and wishes and hopes. To realize hard fatalism is to know that you have a path and sadly, that path might end very abruptly ALL for the purpose of something else to happen. It gives you the greatest meaning and yet the most insignificant meaning to your life. Just like the lives of 300,000 citizens of Darfur who are dead, some at a young age, you question their life’s worth and your own. How crappy is it if your life meaning was to die at age 3, or your parents before you had known them? With hard fatalism, to look at yourself as a unique individual with a loving god that is good looking after you and your salvation is very hard indeed. Because there is obvious evil and if fatalism is true, regardless of a deity, that fatalism is prone to more ‘apparent evil’ than it is good. And that my friends, is utterly depressing.
The common bridging grounds between hard fatalism and ‘free will’ or an open destiny is something called ‘compatibleism’. In general, or to the best of my memory, there is what is called ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ compatibleism or soft determinism. I will use compatibleism instead of determinism as my phrase but I hate saying compatibleism and spelling it… This is just because soft determinism I think leads to false assumptions.
Compatibleist can range from being more fatalistic to less fatalistic but there general concept is this; there are points in our lives when we do in fact make decisions that change the course of the future. For a hard compatibleist there are only a few pivotal moments (truly life altering), and for a soft compatibleist there might be hundreds but still an overall ‘river of fate’ that cannot be altered too much. If there is a deity or not, mortals are granted a option at their own fate. For a religious person, these moments might be the moments of judgment or belief in one’s god. For non-religious people these moments might just be life altering decisions that subtly or drastically change the course of the future.
This gets really complicated really fast and I will only dwell into the more obvious and contradictory factors that become problematic for me. With any sort of will in opposition to fate, there arises the general question about the river of time and if it has branches of ‘alternative’, possible, or probable futures. Time is generally viewed as a strait line from point A(creation) to point B(who knows?). When any amount of free will is put into this simplistic view of time, branches begin to ebb out from the strait line and there would exist either ‘possible’ futures or probable futures. This is not to say that the course of time changes, it could remain a strait line with only one ACTUAL possible future, but instead it leaves the argument that ‘Sally might have done P’ instead of ‘Sally did P”. That is a slight of hand not easily seen and ‘P’ stands for any action or non-action. It is simply looking in the past and realizing that you may have done something else than what you did, which leaves at least one fork in time. This creates the possibility of having alternative worlds in which you exist but something is different about you because you either had a Major life decision in which you acted differently like you married someone different (Hard compatibleism) or a minor one like falling down and getting a scar (soft compatibleism).
Needless to say, there are many other philosophies that cover these grey areas and try to resolve them but that is the basic groundwork. With either case, I have not read nor heard philosophy that allows for only ‘chance’ opportunities to be allowed for free will. Either you have it or you don’t, right? It does not make sense to me that only a few times in a persons life they are ‘allowed’ free will and at other times in daily routine are restricted that. Pivotal moments are pivotal moments, saying yes or know to a proposal is almost as drastic as deciding whether or not to eat that sandwich with mustard or mayo when you think about it. Heartburn anyone? It could kill you! I exaggerate a bit, but you understand my point (I hope… if you are still reading this shite).
Simply summed up, I think if we are granted free will at all, then we have it all the time and it CANNOT be restricted, either by the course of time or by a deity.
Free will… *shudder* I am not sure how to begin with my utter hatred for the phrase and the concept of ‘free will’. FOR ME… and most likely not 95% of the rest of the world, in order to have a ‘free will’ one must have more powers than a mortal has. Will enacts powers that draw from within and are put forth to action which can be performed following the restrictions of the laws of nature and of the creature performing the ‘willing’. (This needs to be flowered up a bit, but I like my definition here : ) ‘Free’ for me is almost contradictory to will, it would enable something that already has a will to perform functions (aka willing” that go beyond its own restrictions as a material creature and the laws of nature. This is because how can one have a will if it is not free to act as it chooses within its own means?
But I banter over semantics so I will default upon what I just said and use the common term applied to free will and say that free will is the “power to make free choices unconstrained by external agencies.”- wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn. This is the best definition I could find online and still I am pivoted against it with every fiber of my being.
We are constantly bombarded with constraints by other agencies/beings. From the moment we are born, others shape our thoughts and we are molded into a specific type of thinking thing. The most drastic is the difference of western to eastern thinking and mentality, especially before globalization. So are there or can there be moments in our lives in which we are unrestrained and ‘free’? In a solitary room of course we can pick orange juice or milk, but have not all the previous decisions in our lives lead up to this moment and are we not destined to always pick one or the other? To put it another way, that time in 5th grade when I spilled yoohoo inside my backpack restricted my freedom in choosing yoohoo over milk for the next 10 years of my life. All decisions have been inhibited upon and we are never left to truly make a free decision. There are always agents acting upon our decisions, either from our minds past experiences (although that could be arguably not external… but I think not) to actual other agents acting for us. So when are we free to make a choice? Are not shrinks and therapist able to predict with good accuracy the actions of their subjects? We are not mystical creatures, we are predictable and we have patterns as does the rest of life. *Unless you get into quantum theory which then my theory goes to SHITE! But so do most theories…)
So if we have free will, isn’t it always somehow restricted in some way? Again this leads me to believe that only a deity could have free will, being unrestrained from external agencies. Mortals, encountered with a second of time and a memory of the past cannot possibly chuse anything without being restricted someway, thus inhibiting free will. And that returns us to compatibleism.
So am I a hard fatalist? I do not see any other option amass the possibilities. HAHAHA double pun! GENIOUS!
