Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Jun 04, 2021 6:33 pm
So which choices
count?
I know this is going to be tough for you.
Every choice counts.
I'm sorry life is not what you'd like it to be. It's not a matter of getting one big answer right or getting some particular choices right, like having the right religion or embracing the right ideology, and everything else just falls into place. Life is demanding and ruthless, like reality itself.
Every choice of every day for as long as one lives requires one to make the best informed choice they possibly can without let up. Since all human behavior is chosen, that means everything one thinks and does must be the best of which they are capable. Whatever one is, whatever success or failure they have in life, their very existence and happiness, are the sum of
all their choices.
To ask anyone how they happen to be who and what they are, (as you have about Mencken and me), has only one answer for every human being. Whoever and whatever they are is what they chose to be. It is the sum of all the choices they have ever made.
What you cannot ask is, why individuals choose what they choose. It cannot be known. It is one of the things that is wrong with every social theory. Why do people do what they do? There is no answer to such a question, because every human is a volitional being. Everything every human ever thinks or does has only one, "cause," the conscious choice of that individual.
Every individual is different. The answer to why any individual does what they do will be different. Only the individual himself can tell you why he made the choices he made, which may or may not be true, depending on whether he chooses to tell the truth or even knows his own mind. One thing is certain, nothing makes any individual think or do anything they have not chosen to think or do, which is why every individual is totally responsible for every aspect of their own life.
The fact that you even ask the questions you ask indicates you do not really believe human beings are volitional beings. No matter how much you claim to believe in what you call, "free will," it's not volition you believe in. To ask why anyone chooses what they choose assume something makes people do what they do, that what people are is something other than what they choose to be.
It's one way or the other. No one choice or collection of choices, determines all of one's other choices (although some choices are so disastrous they limit the scope of future choices). Anyone can choose to stop being gullible, stop allowing their feelings, or fears, or desires, or whims and wishes to interfere with their reason, stop relying on what they have been taught, or others say and believe, or what some authority teaches and choose to think for themselves, refusing to accept any contradiction or believe anything for which there is no evidence they can themselves examine and understand. Why most people do not do that, I have no idea. It's their choice. You'll have to ask them.
I know why those are the choices I make. I make them because it is the only way a human being can live successfully and happily in this world and fully enjoy one's life, because it is what reality and human nature require. It is very difficult, demanding, sometimes almost cruelly so, but it's the only way a human being can be truly fulfilled and worth every difficulty and pain, because it is the only way to achieve and be all one can be and enjoy the only kind of life worth living.
Anyone can have that kind of joyous satisfying life, if they choose to, but most, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, have chosen to grovel in the depressing morass of superstition, wishing and waiting for something else to provide them meaning and fulfillment.
