Freedom is usually thought of as the ability to make choices independent of external influences, instead being able to apply your own principles and personal standards. For instance, worshiping the deity you believe in or voting for a representative that supports your ideals are decisions that are made based on a personal code of ethics. But where do these morals come from?
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Perhaps you are genetically a very weak person, and you've had to avoid fighting all your life. This has made you a pacifist, because avoiding conflict is how you survive. But after a certain point, pacifism is no longer a trait that is routinely supported by your physical frailty. Instead, it is just a behavioral pattern that is comfortable because it is familiar. You tried to avoid fighting on the playground as a child, and as the idea of fighting became increasingly frightening to you, it affected you in other ways. Perhaps you are afraid of operating a gun. Still, in this scenario, your physical weakness is something you were born with, not a choice you ever made.
Let's take another genetic example. Suppose you have a very high extroversion factor (of the Big Five personality traits.) Talking to people has always been easy to you, so you played to your strengths. You might have been in debate team in high school, or in student council. You perfected your natural talent and went on to do work where your charisma made you successful. Did you choose this? Perhaps not, because if you had no particular talent as a child, every activity you had undertaken might have been roughly the same difficulty. Playing to your strengths might not have given you a sense of direction, and you could have gone into art or engineering.
Perhaps you or a close friend of yours was sexually assaulted at some point. There is nothing you can do to reverse the effects, yet your mind resolves that there must be, so you decide to channel your frustration into some social organization. Such a strong bias exists against sexual violence, and yet the assault that motivated you to take this stance was not of your choosing. Once again, a moral code has been determined based on something you did not control.
Perhaps you were raised in a strict religious household. From a very early age you were told fantastic stories and lore, but also about certain forbidden behaviors. You may have been told that abortion is murder, and murder is wrong. You assimilated this information, and now feel upset whenever you think about it. At its conception, the word abortion meant extracting a fetus which meant murder which meant you felt bad. But over time this neural pattern took a shortcut, and now the word abortion makes you feel bad. And still, the inception of this pattern was not of your choosing.
There are tons of these that I could list, but I think you get the point. Both genetics and environment influence who we are, yet both of these are outside of our control. Even if you were to argue that you assimilated a piece of information differently than you could have, there is no good explanation as to why things affect you the way they do. Most likely some existing personality traits affected how you perceived what happened around you, and where did THOSE traits come from? Even if you were to believe in a soul, and that your soul carries some kind of information or personal credo, your soul is just a pre-existing set of biases as well. If your soul has information from a past life, it's no different from an environmental influence. If your soul is "how God made you" then it's no different from genetics. At no point do we get to choose who we are. Logically speaking, the idea of freedom does not even make sense.
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Looking at my own experience I can see how my personality has been formed. I have never felt jealous over a girl, even at an early age, despite living in a monogamous culture. But if you look at avian behavior, it's clear that jealousy can be a genetic trait as well as something that is taught. I also identify as a nihilist. Why? Numerous events, both positive and negative, have happened completely independent of the influence I attempted to exert on them. In short, very few things in my life have been under my control, and this has turned me into a shoulder shrugger. With life being such a passive experience, what use would I have to believe that things matter or have significance?
The funny thing is that knowing this doesn't "free" me from these stupid labels. I am a creature of habit, so I don't like change. Even if I recognize that my beliefs aren't really important, I'm not going to deviate from them because that would make me uncomfortable. As I discussed earlier, this is because behaviors that are repeated lose meaning and become simple associations. This can happen after one event, but sinks in best over time.
I see a blonde person -> The blonde person hurts me -> I am afraid
turns into
I see a blonde person -> I am afraid
So even if I recognize the lack of reason in my own behavior, I have no reason to change this pattern. Trying to overcome said pattern makes me uncomfortable. If there is no benefit to this behavior changing, there is no reason for it to. If there is a good reason to change it (suppose your boss is a blonde) then that reason, and your determination, must be greater than the discomfort you feel. And still, after all this, none of the behaviors discussed can be considered free or original, because no decision is truly free and no dogma is truly original.
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