Spots

Everyone has issues that are near and dear to them, hangups which corner an otherwise sound and sensible intelligence into stubbornly defending inherently indefensible positions; inherently, I say, because any belief which assumes an unchanging, ultimate truth to be in the possession of such limited creatures as we are must inevitably be less than wholly true.  In my own life I call such beliefs blind spots, points of error one is incapable of even noticing due to limitations of perspective.  When such misapprehensions are pointed out to us, we most often react emotionally, in extreme cases shutting down or even fleeing the conversation.

During the two years & change I spent identifying as an atheist, reading atheism-inspired blogs and articles and such, the most common blind spot I was aware of was religion.  Indeed, within a year of my first flame war on the subject, I was very nearly convinced that religion was THE prototypical blind spot, that most if not all the ills of human society could be cured if only those poor misguided people could be talked out of blind faith in their bronze age fairy tales.  Though I like to think I've relaxed in my pretentiousness toward theology and metaphysics (while maintaining that organized religion uses these concepts to exploit those hungry for connection), it still seems that religious identity is a touchy subject to those who maintain one, though I now suspect this is more a matter of identity than religious beliefs themselves.

Another such blind spot I've encountered is faith in reason, the idea that truth is always and only to be arrived at by logical progression through known quantities.  Indeed, it was my disillusion of this idea that ultimately drove me from the atheist movement, which underhandedly seems to equate disbelief in a creator with a purely mechanistic view of reality.  Similar reactions may be observed when challenging any number of issues on which someone may "take a position:" abortion, democracy, racial equality, etc.  The one subject, though, which I feel is most commonly a blind spot for us all is that of free will.

We aren't all sure we have it, of course; some are quite as well convinced that we don't.  What interests me is the startling lack of fence-sitters on this issue; there are plenty of agnostics in the world, extending their perspective into all of the above mentioned subjects, and yet free will tends to be an all-or-nothing position.  Most of us are sure we have it, I think, while some thrive on the novelty of saying that, No, free will is an illusion, your choices are decided before ever you are born, etc.  For my own part, I've usually favored the latter of these positions, with the caveat that our capacity for the insane frees us from the restrictions of rationalism imposed on us by the rational universe; it was only in doing the crazy, I thought, the weird and utterly ridiculous, that one could truly be free.

I still hear the ring of truth in this, freedom through chaos, but what I propose now is a relatively simple, and perhaps more rationally palatable, definition: free will, a matter of degree, exists inasmuch as does awareness of one's options.  Or, in fortune cookie format: You can only make the choices you know you have.  Slavery, then, is imposed, not by restraining one's body, but by restraining their mind; the method of this is imposed ignorance, and its fruits abound in the world today.  Likewise, desisting from the exploration of our abilities is the unconscious surrender of our own innate freedoms.  This can be a difficult process, I admit; if being confronted with our present limitations from without is uncomfortable, what masochism must be necessary to force ourselves to do so from within?  And sometimes, yes, an outside perspective is necessary for us to notice what we can't see, but the choice to actually look at such things must be made for oneself.