The last few months have made me realize how little control we have over our lives than we think.
We can all rave about living in a democracy, exercising our right of speech and expression and the ability to lead life as we want to. But did the following have the free will to prevent or control what happened to them? Victims of the Mumbai terror attack , serial blasts in Delhi, Bangalore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad or Guwahati, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings or passengers of the hijacked planes that crashed into WTC towers on 9/11 and even the girls who were beaten up at the Mangalore pub. And why restrict to man made terror. How about those who have fallen prey to natural disasters -- the 2004 tsunami, earthquakes or even Titanic, the ship that could never sink.
The future seems to be equally bleak for 'free will'. There are fears of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, global warming has only just begun, super volcanoes threaten to plunge the world into an ice age, an asteroid might collide with earth. Apart from these there are the usual chances of accidents, plane crashes and natural phenomenon like floods and earthquakes.
So, is there no such thing as free will? Yes, there IS. Although we cannot control the above events, we can mitigate the effects of their outcomes by the choices we make. Switching to green energy, judicious use of electricity and water and planting more trees can mitigate the effects of global warming. More than this, we have the choice to be good or bad. We can choose to spread love or destruct ourselves with hate. Live and let live can go a far way in reducing the futile conflicts that men get into for superficial matters like race, religion, gender, caste, nationality etc.
Ayn Rand sums it the best:
Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be
We can all rave about living in a democracy, exercising our right of speech and expression and the ability to lead life as we want to. But did the following have the free will to prevent or control what happened to them? Victims of the Mumbai terror attack , serial blasts in Delhi, Bangalore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad or Guwahati, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings or passengers of the hijacked planes that crashed into WTC towers on 9/11 and even the girls who were beaten up at the Mangalore pub. And why restrict to man made terror. How about those who have fallen prey to natural disasters -- the 2004 tsunami, earthquakes or even Titanic, the ship that could never sink.
The future seems to be equally bleak for 'free will'. There are fears of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, global warming has only just begun, super volcanoes threaten to plunge the world into an ice age, an asteroid might collide with earth. Apart from these there are the usual chances of accidents, plane crashes and natural phenomenon like floods and earthquakes.
So, is there no such thing as free will? Yes, there IS. Although we cannot control the above events, we can mitigate the effects of their outcomes by the choices we make. Switching to green energy, judicious use of electricity and water and planting more trees can mitigate the effects of global warming. More than this, we have the choice to be good or bad. We can choose to spread love or destruct ourselves with hate. Live and let live can go a far way in reducing the futile conflicts that men get into for superficial matters like race, religion, gender, caste, nationality etc.
Ayn Rand sums it the best:
Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be
A very good post, indeed. Welcome to the blogosphere:)
ReplyDeleteThe choice of good or evil are both within capacity and reach of individual ( kind of borrowed from Chomsky's lecture). But can one exercise to choose evil, if its going to hurt others. When talking about environment both scientific and scoiological studies have proven that damage to environmnet hurts the poorest communites like people living in sunderban deltas, who might get submerged one fine day. Needless to say the countless species that are moving towards extinction. In this scenario the matter of choice does not exist in my opinion. Just like one cannot make claim of having choice of hurting someboday, there cannot be a choice one can make that would hurt environment, when it could atleast be minimized if not totally avioded.
ReplyDeleteMatter of choice can only exist only over things which just effect oneself and nobosy else.
Anand Chandolu