In the light of the present general lockdown without mentioning its purpose we could ask a few questions regarding “free will” and a few philosophical attitudes, when faced by interferences such as war and diseases. 

Are we in the five per cent who refuse to obey orders? or can we become enraged like the people revolting in Philadelphia and now around the world? Was the death of an innocent black man, the last drop in a bucket of hidden grievances to make us flip, or are we like The Donald/Nero oblivious of the City in flame, while playing the wrong notes, including demanding that Seneca drank the Kool-Aid? 

At which level of poverty — or richness — do we become opportunistic and steal some of the loot? What moral excuses will we invent in order to justify the destruction of our own house? Or the destruction of someone else's house for that matter? Or are we little bourgeois who delegate the dirty work to the meatworks and army generals?

Are circumstances determining our actions? Are our behaviour like the weather? That is to say dependant of circumstances, but we don’t have all the data to make accurate predictions beyond a certain short timeframe? Are the intensities of events predetermined as to predetermine our behaviour? Is our moral compass steady enough to make us avoid becoming the torturers and/or invaders of others?

These are questions that have plagued the top thinkers for millennium. While most of us toil without having to know, because we are told so, religion, sciences and politics have evolved mostly to protect our ability to reproduce in a variety of conflicting and conflicted systems that tried to plunder each others. In general, we are thieves in waiting, with a stop sign in from of us.

On the BBC, there is a short video three-part series about Free Will, by Melissa Hogenboom and Pierangelo Pirak. 

The strange idea that we are not in control of our minds

There are many forces behind our everyday decisions. In a three part series we look at the hidden powers behind the choices we make.


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The physics that suggests we have no free will

The laws of physics suggest the future is predetermined, leading some physicists to say that it is impossible for free will to exist.


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The surprisingly dark world of having free will

Whether we have free will or not, what’s the point of asking these questions in the first place?

Philosophers argue that there are real world implications of our understanding of free will, that force us to reflect on the societies we wish to build.


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And so far the quest is not new and the answers are quite unsettled and beg more questions. In the long run, what we do, free will or not, needs to have the relative purpose of providing us with pain minimisation and a level of contentment — unless we are masochists in search of pleasure or righteousness through pain…

Don’t laugh. This ability to create joy through pain is often used by leaders of soldiers and athletes. "No pain, no gain…" they say. We have already commented on this a fair while back, on this site. This was also the world of martyrs. The more you suffer, the closer to god you become. 

But in these “uncertain” times, the notion of fear becomes an extended motivator, including becoming fearless looters, bypassing our already trembling moral compass because of added grievances.

For the thinker, the need to stabilise the mind and find serenity becomes urgent.

Undeniably, the society in which we are born will give us a structure in which we act. For example if Oedipus, also mentioned recently here, had not killed his father accidentally, he would never had married his own mother. But the story tends to avoid the discrepancy in the age of people, though we can accept that his mother was still of child bearing age. By the time I was born my mother was already “an old woman”. By the time I was active, she was already a wrinkled grandmother several times over.

The internet is full of sites and articles where we’re invited to gawk at 50+ old women as if still attractive in their birthday suit. But Oedipus’s fate had been planned by the gods, thus there was no escape from this. So, was the resultant of him banishing himself to expiate his actions, also part of the gods’ plans, or was it free will in self-punishment? The story is no clear about this.

Should I had been born in a poor social context would have I had similar choices to be made in my life? Unlikely…. Like born in the favelas of Rio or in the cut-throat areas of voodoo Haiti? Would I still have found happiness in fighting for my existence? The point here is not so much the choice that are on offer, but the choices that are made by others and the random encounters in the environment we’re in, versus the one we might seek. 

Would the daughter of religious friends of my parents had been more attractive made a difference in my philosophical choices, including accept religious brainwashing? Thus end up like Candide with an ugly wife anyway? Or was I destined to have a good time, and question the existence of god, a question hidden from view by my upbringing, in which the only explanation, for life in paradise lost, hid all the scientific realities? 

Or is our free will determined like an errant ant choosing to go this way because of the scent of other ants, leading to a food source? And is my position 275th in line to the dead worm dictating the amount I can bring back to the nest or will I choose to bring twice as much as possible, because of greed?

So be it. My destination has been to be an annoying rabid atheistic cartoonist… What has happened has happened and I cannot change this great time I already had. But can I change what comes next? Why not, if I choose to, unless the weather is crap for too many days in a row?

Take this, you democratic bastards: In countries with authoritarian governments, state-controlled media have been highlighting the chaos and violence of the US demonstrations, "in part to undermine American officials' criticism of their own nations".

In China — a country whose rulers have previously overseen the massacre of pro-democracy protesters and presently stands accused of carrying out the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the holocaust — the unrest is being used to support Beijing's repeated demands that other countries not interfere in its affairs.

Hu Xijin, the editor of the state-owned tabloid Global Times, used the unrest to condemn Washington's criticism of Beijing's crackdown on Hong Kong's anti-government protests. 

"I want to ask Speaker Pelosi and Secretary Pompeo: Should Beijing support protests in the US, like you glorified rioters in Hong Kong?" Mr Hu wrote.
Fair enough. The stupid answer would be to consider that people in Hong Kong are not free to revolt while in the USA they are free to fight the police...

So in this time of isolation, it seems that many people turn to the ancients…

"Don't act like you have to live for thousands of years! The inevitable is on you suspended… ", meditated Marcus Aurelius (Antoninus) in his Thoughts, written between 170 and 180 AD, at the time of the epidemic which bears the name of his dynasty, the Antonine plague (this illness, which was smallpox, may have killed him). 


Apparently, sales of the classic of ancient philosophy increased by 28% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to last year, and the Letters to Lucilius, from Seneca, are also experiencing a great boom, especially in digital format. 

Author of a popular work on stoicism, A Guide to The Good Life (Oxford University Press, translated into nine languages), American philosophy professor William B. Irvine says that he has already granted half a dozen interviews on the applicability of stoicism to the current pandemic.… "For me, it's a lot”(of interviews). His visit to the podcast "The Happiness Lab" of Professor Laurie Santos, one of the stars of the psychology department at Yale University, on March 23, attracted more than 300,000 listeners.

This is what William B. Irvine has to say about the concept:

Ideally, a Stoic won’t have many negative emotions to deal with, inasmuch as he will routinely take steps to prevent them from arising in the first place. If he does find himself experiencing a negative emotion, though, he will start applying Stoic advice on how to deal with it. If he is experiencing grief, for example, he will call to mind the advice given by Seneca in his Consolations. And after doing this, he will study the episode in an attempt to prevent it from recurring.

On the other hand, a Stoic will embrace positive emotions. Because he engages in negative visualization, he will likely experience many little moments of delight in the course of an ordinary day. He will also likely have an unusual capacity for the experience of joy.

I like all the Roman Stoics, but for different reasons. When I am dealing on an ongoing basis with annoying people, I turn to Marcus Aurelius. As Roman emperor, he had lots of experience dealing with annoying people. When I have an important decision to make, I turn to Epictetus and remind my self that there are things I can control and things I can’t. When I find myself lusting for consumer goods, I turn to Musonius Rufus, who managed quite well on being banished to the desolate island of Gyaros. And when I am feeling sorry for myself, I turn to Seneca. He reminds us that no matter how bad things are, they could be much worse.
As far as favorite quotes are concerned, I have a hundred of them. The Roman Stoics are wonderfully quotable. This one comes from Marcus Aurelius: “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.”

But does this help us in fighting the enemy, the virus? Or do we let the “experts” fight it on our behalf while they sell (give) us the idea of confinement? Is this going to change the future? 

In the BBC series, one of the participants is Emilie Caspar, PhD, who explored how coercion impacts the sense of agency in the human brain, thus revisiting the famous Milgram experiment (also used by Jeff Mosley in his series) with a totally new and ethical paradigm. Here free will is being eliminated by the coercion of “orders”. This is where the “five per cent” of those who refuse orders come from, while all the others will (virtually) kill. It is to be noted here that during WW1, quite a few soldiers did not “shoot to kill” but aimed in the air... But beyond this we need to analyse the power of the mob, the power of belonging to a mob, where orders aren’t military-like but more like “following example” of others and that we may be excluding from the mob should we refuse to loot.

So we need to make sure that at anyone time, we are as much as possible free not to be like the others, while being part of the group… Not as easy as it looks and in our present devastation, we need to know the stats. In the time of Aurelius, small pox stats were that EVERYONE could be affected. 

Pasteur, the noble man whom we owe “pasteurised milk” and other stuff, observed that “cow girls” milking cows, never caught small pox, though they, from time to time, caught a very mild infection called “cow pox” from the cows themselves. Pasteur saw a link. He thus somehow found a way to “inoculate” people with cow-pox to protect them from small pox. Hence the name Vaccin in French (from "cow" — “vache" in French), now vaccine in English. That’s the story anyway. 

In other culture, so to speak, the young were initiated with inflicting wounds on the chests and often sent on errands in the desert. Those who survived were deemed  fit to reproduce. Those who died from the possible infections were obviously not.

The Chinese had a similar practice to vaccination in the 10 century by deliberate exposure to diseases. 

When old and decrepit, like Gus, isolation is a boon… and one does not need the government decrees, as long as we have enough provisions for food and toilet paper — and tons of illusions about free will...

GL.
Free wheeling....


Note: according to William B. Irvine, is there any stoic woman? ... His use of he, his and him is a bit embarrassingly sexist, but there is no common article to singularly define "him and her" together in English (and in many other languages), apart from the plural "they"... Using "they" has been a way around the problem in most dissertations by Gus, unless chosing to be deliberately differentially sexist or genderist.