Free Will and How To Enforce It

Clever, right? Imagine the market for a book with this title! What parent would NOT buy it when raising a teenager? Or yourself for example... say you were watching your dearest friend spiral down a path of self distruction... wouldn't you buy it to learn the secret of helping someone grow a brain before they mess up their lives forever? The thing is... people make their own decisions and we cannot FORCE them to behave the way WE want them to. If we did have this power indefinately over our children, they would never understand WHY they do what they do, or have a genuine opinion about what is right or wrong. They would not discover what is trully important to them. In short, we would all be someone elses Will in action... a robot.

Even Einstein realized that in order for his Theories of Relativity to work.. he had to add an uncertainty factor. Obviously we do have agency, it becomes a question of how much. Perhaps excersizing agency is a fine tuned skill! Many of us wander through life blindly without using it much. Have you considered how often your own agency has been affected by the manipulative tactics of others? With even more pointed observation... consider the the ways in wich YOU may impose personal pressure on someone elses agency without necessarily even realizing it... to acheive your own agendas.

I value my freedom!!! I want to protect it and keep it forever and yet I also recognize that in many ways I am not free.

Many variables contribute to making us unfree. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to determine if anyone elses FreeWill is being enforced upon you:

1) Are you living life, or is it living you?

-a Do you struggle to fit in someone elses standard, or do you make your own?
-b Are you living beyond your means financially? ( a.k.a In dept and BROKE!?!)
-c Is your day packed with appointment after appointment, so much that if you WANTED
to linger longer anywhere in the day... you CAN'T?
-d Are people telling you where you need to be and when, or are you telling them?
-e Do you have time to do the things you love to do, or is there a pile of it somewhere
getting lost and forgotton?

2) Do you fear being exposed?

-a Many people live their lives with an imposter complex. Perhaps they were dishonest
about their credentials when applying for a certain position. A person can feel they got
something too easily. Some of us fear we are not as talented as others think we are, and we
wonder when they will actually realize this..

-b Doing something that will hurt others has many humanbeings fearing exposure.
Fearing that a moment of truth will surely catch up to them. Harboring a secret
is always burdensome to your freedom. Revealing a secret may change other peoples
lives.. and KEEPING it may change YOURS...

-b Telling a lie! Supporting an untruth can keep a person pretty busy sometimes,
and has a tendency to get bigger.

All of these things contribute to a loss of freedom.

Another thing to consider...

ABILITY (or making things happen):

Are we free to do as we wish? How about playing the piano? You may want to, but if you have never had a lesson, you are not free to sit down and tickle the ivory keys making Bach and Mozart come to life. Ballet dancers train meticulously to fly across the stage with grace and ease. You are not physically free to do so just because you put on a leotard.. am I right? (been there, done that... doesn't work, even when you FEEL the music) If you want to go on an elaborate vacation, and do not have the time, money or sponsor to do so.. you are not free to experience that either. Certainly if you PLAN for any of these things... there is a possibility it can happen for you... provided you have the necessary body parts to do so. Add to the equation the appropriate uncertainty factor (healthy competative variables) and we realize that agency is certainly a key eliment to MAKING things happen.

Now.. there are other things we may 'want'... what if you want to take someones money from them so you can have it for yourself... or their car... or maybe it would be nice if they just no longer 'annoyed' you...? These things are crimes and if you DO them.. you take an enormous risk of being discovered and will be punished, thereby loosing freedom. If you get away with the crime you have a secret.. a lie to protect.. and you are less free.

So... with the things I have listed it seems that there are choices that we make every minute of every day that will increase our oppertunities and abilities... or diminish them.

Who then is enforcing freewill? Each individual to their own life. You are either living it.. or it is living you, because you allow that to happen. You are either making things happen.. or you are robbing yourself of oppertunities and freedoms you can only feel bad about not having.