We are our own masterminds

I posted this on my Facebook wall a few months ago:

"“I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free.” (Anne Frank, 1943)

I’m fortunate to be living in a part of the modern world that gives us tremendous freedom to act in our private sphere. It's so much so that we are ignorant of how to grasp it to the extent of letting it slip through our hands.

There exists a significant number of people who cast their ability to discern aside and ride the popular wave blindly, despite having the cognitive capacities to rationalise matters. As Kant aptly puts, “it is so convenient to be immature!” Immaturity, as he explains, is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. I couldn’t agree with him more that “laziness” and “cowardice” are reasons why most men remain gladly immature for life. It’s always easier for people to “guide” you to a certain decision rather than having to weigh the pros and cons by yourself. It’s always easier to blame the leader who makes the decisions on your behalf than to reprimand yourself. When you have the freedom to choose, you end up not choosing by reason at all. The paradox of choice is such.

What people fail to realise is, we are free to make decisions on a variety of issues from education to religion to marriage and most importantly, to think for ourselves. We have absolute sovereignty over our mind and body. I'm not claiming that our actions are not constrained by the society we live in. Sometimes, they are, under unfortunate circumstances. Freedom to act can be curtailed by external forces and that the agent-structure relationship is precarious. But, our mind should never be bounded in the same way. After all, it is the mind of a revolutionary group that pushes for the materialisation of social change. I subscribe to the belief that we are only truly unfree if our will, and not our actions, is constrained.

“I know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions, a religion and love.”

Anne Frank’s diary is a sound reminder that we should never take our freedom for granted. A little girl like her was passionate about life, yet she did not have the freedom to live the life she had envisioned. “All her would-haves are our opportunities.” Therefore, Sapere Aude! “Have the courage to use your own understanding” and take charge of your own life. Freedom from responsibility is at best temporary. Since everyone has to suffer consequences anyway, why not suffer them from the decisions you've made for yourself?

Carpe Diem."

The recent conversations I have had on decision-making reminded me of these thoughts that I penned down on exchange. I discovered that people in general are unaware of how much control and power they actually have over their own lives. A lot of them behave as if they are trapped in a conspiracy wherein they are mere pawns of a higher being in a game of chess. They confuse opinions with facts, feelings with logic, and uncertainty with impossibility. They buy into the saying that "it's okay to not know what you want, as long as you know what you don't want." Is it really? 

I doubt so. 

Not wanting to be fat does not mean you want to be fit. Not wanting to fail does not mean you want to excel. Not wanting to be in pain does not mean you want to be happy. When you spend your time focusing on what you don't want, you never really get to start acting. You remain stuck in the same place and live your life running on the treadmill. The important point here is to really start sorting out your thoughts, figure out what you want and take advantage of the immense freedom you have to invest in this life you only live once. If you spend your time making decisions based on what you don't want, you will never become better. 

Of course, I am not ruling out situations where we can be subjected to the control by external forces. We are always going to be helpless about the things we can't control. But as humans, we are highly adaptative and inventive creatures. We always come up with ways to overcome problems and get around systems. We cannot fly, so we invent planes. We cannot breathe under water, so we invent oxygen tank. We cannot determine the sex assigned to us at birth, but we can create our own gender identities. So, as you can see, we as humans do have a lot of freedom, control and power concentrated in our hands. There is no such thing as 'no time'. There is only such thing as 'no discipline'. 

At the end of the day, when you are done struggling with your inner voice, logic always prevails over emotions.

Today, or rather, these days, my head is taking charge.