Determinism and Emergent Properties

Reducing objects to their mere material properties is truly a reduction to absurdity. Wood is partly composed of carbon atoms, and tables are made of wood – thus because I cannot put my plate on a carbon atom, I cannot put my plate on a table either!

Atoms are mostly space; therefore, I can walk through a wall!

Carbon is the basis of life. However, no carbon atom can be alive; therefore, there is no such thing as life!

Carbon atoms are found in dead things and inert things, as well as living things – therefore, there is no difference between dead things, inert things and living things.

No individual player can win against a professional soccer team –therefore, eleven individual players can never win against a professional soccer team.

Metal cannot float; therefore, a ship made of metal cannot float. You get the idea.

Life is an emergent property of matter. If you get enough particular kinds of matter together, with the right configuration of energy, you get life. A pregnant woman is a wonderful mechanism for converting celery into consciousness. Atoms in a piece of celery end up among the atoms of a growing brain, where – in conjunction with a wide variety of other factors – they achieve consciousness.

No individual celery atom gains consciousness, of course, and no celery is conscious, but through the process of a woman’s pregnancy, each atom in the food she consumes contributes to consciousness. Celery is not human, but it can contribute to and become part of a human being.

No individual atom is alive, yet life exists.

No individual atom or cell is conscious, yet consciousness exists.

No life exists in the absence of atoms, yet no individual atom is alive.

No consciousness exists in the absence of atoms, yet no individual atom is conscious.

Remove one individual atom from a life form and it continues to live. Remove one individual atom from a brain, consciousness continues. Remove enough – up to some biochemical tipping point – and both life and consciousness cease to be.

Thus, life is an emergent property. None of its individual components possess it, yet in combination, life comes into being. Consciousness is also an emergent property. None of its individual components possess it, yet in their combination, we start to think.

Life and consciousness are shared by a wide variety of other creatures – but free will is a uniquely human phenomenon. No other organism that we know of can consciously compare proposed actions to ideal abstract standards.

Accepting that life and consciousness are emergent properties of matter and energy, but denying free will on the basis of physics, is a ridiculously self-contradictory position. No carbon atom can comprehend science, yet human beings can. Using a discipline that is itself an emergent property to deny the existence of an emergent property such as free will is beyond foolish.

No carbon atom can walk, eat, reproduce or die – yet carbon-based life forms exhibit all these characteristics.

No individual atom can see, but our eyes can see.

No individual atom can get cancer, but we certainly can.

Reducing the human mind to mere empty matter and energy denies the reality of the very emergent properties that give us the capacity to commit such a logical fallacy. To make an error, we must be alive and conscious. To deny emergent properties is to deny the very capacities that give rise to our ability to get arguments so spectacularly wrong.

Please understand that this is not definitive proof of free will – however, it is a strong repudiation of the idea that we can judge consciousness on the basis of its merely material components. While it is true that all atoms are subject to the iron laws of physics, this does not tell us anything about their capacities under emergent properties. Carbon atoms cannot initiate their own movement – yet, when aggregated as an animal, they can.

If you prefer a more physical example, no individual atom can arrest the direction of light. However, if you get enough atoms together and compress them enough to form a black hole, then light cannot escape such a gravity well.

Or, no individual atom gives off light, yet the sun, which is composed of atoms, gives off light.

Reducing the complexities of consciousness, life and free will to mere empty materialism is ridiculous and an intellectual embarrassment, to be perfectly frank. To see how ridiculous the position is, all you need to do is remember this basic fact: No individual atom can possess a theory of determinism; therefore, no theory of determinism exists.

If you wish to argue against the proposition that free will can be an emergent property of consciousness – specifically, human consciousness – you are more than welcome to do that, but then you need to explain why free will is different from life, or consciousness itself. Both life and consciousness are emergent properties of matter. So you already accept that new properties emerge from aggregations. You cannot then draw some imaginary line in the sand and say: “Well, life and consciousness are emergent properties that possess characteristics that none of their individual components possess. But free will must be judged outside the bounds of emergent properties and can never be justified, because no individual atom in the human mind possesses free will.”

You cannot have it both ways. If you accept the emergent properties of life and consciousness, you cannot then arbitrarily deny the emergent property of free will.

A Hypothesis of Determinism

All this is elementary logic, not particularly complicated in any way – so why is the deterministic position so prevalent? It would be silly to watch a biologist denying the existence of life, or a psychologist denying the existence of consciousness, or a physicist denying the existence of matter and energy – so why do so many determinists try to convince others that changing minds is impossible?

All this is held up triumphantly by the determinists, who say, “Ahah! People only think they make a choice; therefore, free will is a delusion!”

It certainly is true that people can nimbly navigate through challenging conceptual mazes using their instincts. Think of a prisoner being interrogated by the police, or a family member being confronted about some past immorality – the levels of obfuscation and misdirection can be truly powerful in such situations.

These manipulative instincts arise from deep within the brain, and are not often explainable by the conscious mind.

If you have ever watched a really good jazz quartet, you’ve witnessed when they decide to improvise. No individual musician knows exactly what note they are going to play next, yet the music all works together beautifully.

If you know how to fluently read a second language that you learned as an adult, and you glance at some text in that language, you automatically – or instinctually – comprehend what you are reading.

Would the determinists then say that you have no choice regarding your comprehension? Of course you do – because you made a choice to learn to read that second language.

While it is true that it is hard to look at the text of a language you know and not understand it – you might say impossible – this is not where free will resides.

If I am playing a top-seeded tennis player, I do not have the capacity to will a victory, since his skill and training vastly exceeds my own.

However, if I have been training hard for fifteen years, then my will might come into play – if I decide to grit my teeth and push through some exhaustion.

Do you see? I don’t have the choice to swim to shore if I don’t know how to swim. I don’t have the choice to sing Mozart’s Requiem if I have never studied the music – or I lack the voice.

Sure, it is true that some people lack choices in life – but that is often, or least sometimes, due to their prior choices. If I have practised running for many years, I may have the choice to outrun a fast mugger. If I have spent most of my time sitting on the couch, I don’t have that choice. If I saved my money in the past, I have the choice to spend it in the present – if I did not, I don’t.

This is not to argue that prior choices provide omnipotence, but prior choices either expand or narrow our range of opportunities in the future. If I exercise regularly, I can play sports relatively easily – that gives me more choices. However, while I am exercising, I am not able to play the cello, and therefore my choices are reduced. Some diminished choices in the present create expanded choices in the future – and indeed, all choices in the present diminish other present choices – or eliminate them. Some choices in the present, such as not learning the guitar, reduce choices in the future – playing guitar.

A series of choices – combined with happenstance – may lead to you having only one real course of action. Let us say that you are a drug addict, and a dangerous criminal sees you stealing his drugs. I think it’s fair to say that in such a situation, your plethora of choices is somewhat reduced – run like mad, get someplace safe or get out of town. As you pant down the alleyway, your heart pounding, you may believe you have no free will – and in the moment, it’s hard to argue that you have a lot of options. However, your narrowed opportunities in the present, at least in part, result from your bad choices in the past – the choice to take drugs, the choice to keep taking drugs, the choice to steal the drugs, and so on.

If you jump out of a plane, you don’t have the choice not to fall – your choice to jump has reduced your other choices considerably.

Pointing out that some people have few if any choices does not disprove the concept of free will, any more than pointing out that some people are sick disproves the concept of health. In fact, pointing out that some people have reduced choices only reinforces the concept of free will, just as pointing out that some people are sick only reinforces the concept of health – we only know they are sick because we have the concept of health.

Sure, some choices reduce future choices, but that does not deny free will – it actually makes our examination of our choices all the more important. Some health choices, such as smoking, also reduce future choices. This does not mean that choices do not matter, but that they are actually more important than we sometimes think.

Self-Knowledge Versus Determinism

Generally, it is not enough to disprove a common belief – we must also find a way to explain its prevalence. Determinism is not a valid position, but it certainly feels true to a great number of people, and that is something well worth examining.

A famous “first commandment” in philosophy – often attributed to Socrates – is: Know thyself. What is meant by this, and why is it so important?

We are creatures of reason and self-reflection, to some degree, but we are more specifically – and more importantly – creatures of action.

If you have ever played a sport or an instrument at a very high level, you know the importance of trained instincts – to be able to think something and then achieve it, virtually instantaneously. A tennis player wants to place a ball in a particular place, at a particular speed, with a particular spin – and he has mere milliseconds to achieve this. A pianist jams with a group of experts; they must all think and breathe and play as one.

Anyone can hit a ball with a bat, or pound away noisily on a piano – the question is, how well?

Becoming an expert first requires understanding that you are not an expert, and then understanding how long it takes to become an expert – the enormous difference between being ignorant and competent. Then, countless hours and years of practice are required to achieve expertise.

Some feats involve achieving expertise from a neutral starting place, and others involve achieving normalcy from a negative starting place.

A man with a healthy body may become a gold-medal runner – and a man with a broken body may become a regular walker. Both endeavours may take as much time, blood, sweat and tears – the broken man struggles for years to get to the place that the expert runner started from.

If we were raised rationally, the feats we would be able to achieve with our minds, bodies and spirits would be beyond the comprehension of the world as it stands.

However, we are generally not raised rationally – we are raised anti-rationally. So many of us are deprived of the maternal care, proximity and comfort we deserve and desire as babies. So many of us are dumped in daycare and raised without fathers. We are frightened, bullied and dumbed down in government schools, propagandized in universities, lied to by the media – and programmed by superstition, guilt, rage and shame. It is remarkable that we emerge as adults with the capacity to put one foot in front of the other.

We have no capacity to return to our original, unharmed humanity – any more than a man who struggles for years to get out of a wheelchair can be the same as a man who was never in a wheelchair. Recognizing how broken we were – and often are – by culture, control, coercion and circumstance is a necessary prerequisite for the beginning of wisdom. A three-year-old pounds on a xylophone and turns in pride at the “music” he has created, and we clap, perhaps too indulgently. One of the turning points in parenting is recognizing when our praise is no longer generating enthusiasm, but delusion. We praise a toddler for walking, because the toddler could not walk before. We clap relative to the child’s lack of ability in the past, but if we continue clapping, we strip the enthusiasm for achievement in the future. What originates as a form of motivation becomes a form of paralysis.

Returning to rationality is an arduous, multiyear, painful process. The benefit is that you become a friend to yourself and to the truth, but a stranger to your society. Achieving sanity reveals the insanity of your environment. The light of reason illuminates the madhouse around you.

You are programmed – as I was programmed – to serve the needs of those who rule us. You are raised by the government to praise the government, and to fear freedom. Government schools teach you that the danger in your life comes from your peers, not the school itself, even though you are generally forced to be there. If you are unjustly put in a dangerous prison, the true source of the danger is the corrupt legal system, not your fellow inmates; they are a side effect, not the first cause.

By placing you in age-segregated confinement among a subset of traumatized and aggressive children, schools teach you very quickly that peers are dangerous and that teachers are needed to control bullying.

Thus, we grow up with the perception that we must fear our peers most of all, and run to authority for salvation and protection. We must fear our peers even as they grow into adults.

We are constantly told by the government that we are in danger – not from the state, of course, which taxes and conscripts us, starts wars and buries us in national debts – but from our fellow citizens. Without the state, we are told, we will be overrun by the insanity and evil of those around us – but the state is also somehow legitimized by the votes of the insane and evil around us.

If you do not explore and understand how you have been programmed, you are little more than a machine. You have no free will of any real consequence. You remain a useful idiot serving as an empty soldier in the baying brain-dead army of the masses. The mob clamours for temporary free stuff at the expense of permanent freedoms and attacks anyone who suggests that real freedom and moral responsibility are infinitely better than the soft enslavement of state dependence.

If you lack self-knowledge – if you lack the basic understanding of how you have been turned into a machine that serves the state, into a subspecies of tax livestock that serves politicians – then how can you claim to have any real understanding of freedom, let alone free will?

If you were raised badly, then you were conditioned by your parents to serve their dysfunctional needs, rather than the truth, integrity, honesty or any of the other basic virtues in life. When you are asked to judge the ethics of those in authority – or the ethics of authoritarianism in general – you recoil from the task, for fear of offending the dangerous inner alter egos implanted in your mind by your parents. You were punished for approaching the truth as a child, and so you avoid the truth as an adult – just like any trained animal, just as a puppy avoids pooping inside because it fears the rolled-up magazine.

If you live your life in compliance to internal programming, to avoidance of disapproval – and in fear of the laughable crime of “giving offense” – then you have no real freedom at all, no capacity to make choices independent of, or in opposition to, your programming.

You are little more than a useful robot running around in preprogrammed spirals, spewing polysyllabic nonsense designed to prop up the gallows of power.

If you don’t examine your programming, your programming becomes your physics – as absolute and unchangeable as the laws of material reality.

This is true if you are from what is called the Left, or what is called the Right. This is true if you are religious or an atheist. This is true if you are a Buddhist or a Zoroastrian. If you inherit preprinted ideologies without reference to philosophy, you have no free will to speak of.

Do you think you are free because you have the right to speak and to vote?

You can be consulted only because your responses are determined in advance. You are allowed to vote only because your vote is almost completely predictable. You are allowed the illusion of freedom, only because you will most likely never exercise the real thing.

If you live in a primitive village at the bottom of a volcano and you are told that an angry fire god lives at the top of the volcano, who will destroy anyone who approaches his home, and you believe this with all your heart, are you free to climb the volcano?

If you believe that holding a particular moral position will ensure that you never get a date, are you really free to publicly hold that moral position?

If you believe that the poor will starve and the sick will die without government healthcare and welfare, are you really free to examine free market solutions to charity and healthcare?

If you believe that only evil people believe x, are you free to believe x? Are you free to even dispassionately examine and evaluate x?

If you are told that it is healthy and right for an abused woman to leave her boyfriend, do you think that is a reasonable and good position?

If you are told that it is healthy and right for the adult victim of child abuse to leave his abusive parent, do you think that is a reasonable and good position?

If you are told that you live in a rape culture, where rape is minimized or denied, and then later you are told that the FBI did not even classify rape against men as a crime until 2012, what do you say?2

Are you beginning to see just how fenced in you really are?

At some deep level, we all know this, which is why we avoid the topic of freedom – and in particular philosophical freedom, which is the reality, possibility and opportunity of true free will.

True free will must be earned, because it has been stolen.

When someone says you have free will, but you know you have not done the necessary work to escape your programmed delusions, what they say often seems both outlandish and humiliating to you. It seems outlandish because you know it is not true for you. And it feels humiliating because you know deep down that you should have done that work, the work needed to become free, the work to undo your programming, the work to shatter delusions, and to move from livestock to human, from robot to free mind.

Also, if you become free, what happens to your relationships with your surrounding slaves?

Determinism and a History of Evil

There may be other, more sinister reasons why somebody might be emotionally invested in the position of determinism.

Imagine you have done some truly vile deed – something illegal, or at least deeply immoral. If you believe you had a choice and voluntarily did evil, how do you live with yourself?

² Hanna Rosin. “Men Are Raped Almost as Often as Women in America. We Need to Talk About This.” Slate Magazine. April 29, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reve als_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

Christianity has a lot to say about this, as do many other religions. You must first admit that you chose to do the evil, you must accept your guilt, and finally you must strive with all of your might to make amends.

You must beg for forgiveness, you must pay restitution, you must make the person you wronged whole again. If this means going broke, if this means confessing to the authorities, if this means accepting a prison sentence, then this is what you must do.

However – what if you really, really don’t want to do any of that?

In that case, you have a number of psychological strategies at your disposal to avoid the unpleasant but necessary task of humbling yourself before your wrongdoing.

You can tell yourself that your victims deserved it. If you stole, well, a fool and his money are soon parted. If you assaulted someone, he picked the fight. If you sexually assaulted someone, well, she was just asking for it – the list goes on and on, in dismal descending repetition.

You can tell yourself there is no such thing as right and wrong, that everyone takes what they want, and only fools and weaklings deny the full manifestation of their own desires. You can console yourself with Nietzsche and thoughts of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and other world- striding malefactors. You can become an angry-will nihilist, charging through life in search of diminishing dopamine, and scorning any who deny the full scope of their lusts.

You can read the novel Crime and Punishment and sympathize with the murderer.

If you are a sadist, you can take giggling pleasure in the discomfort, upset and pain you cause others, viewing life as a fun game of extracting giddy agony from idiots.

If you are psychotic, you can believe you are sent on a mission by disembodied voices, aiming to heal some catastrophic world divide with the regretfully necessary brutality of your actions.

Or – or, you can become a determinist.

If you are a determinist, there can be no preferred states in your world view. Determinism is not the establishment of truth, but the destruction of the very concept of truth. Truth is a preferred state – preferable to falsehood – however, if everyone and everything is a machine, there can be no preferred states, since no alternative possibilities can exist. A rock lands where a rock lands – the rock has no preferred state. Everything is the inevitable clockwork unrolling of mere physics – there is no right and wrong, no truth and falsehood, no good and evil – these are all primitive superstitions, akin to a belief not in the geological reality of a volcano, but the imaginary superstition of a volcano god.

I have had countless debates with determinists over the course of my career as a public intellectual, and every single time, I have had the feeling – and yes, this is not an argument – that we are really only dancing around the core issue, which always remains unspoken. The titanic amount of emotional resistance I receive from determinists when exploring these issues is a tragic force of nature. They literally will not let go of their perspectives and positions, and it is impossible for me to shake the feeling that we are never approaching the core of what is really going on.

Think about it – why would someone so desperately need to believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong, truth or falsehood, good or evil, personal responsibility, morality, the capacity for love and respect and courage and integrity? What possible motivation could there be for someone to burn from the universe all that glory and joy and possibility? How much horror must they have experienced – or inflicted – in order to call in an airstrike on everything that makes life worth living, everything that gives us meaning, everything that gives us responsibility and self-respect, pride and love, motivation and responsibility?

I think determinists actually understand deep down how much they are giving up to maintain the position that mankind is a mere bag of meaty mechanized muscle.

My question has always been: Why would they want to give up so much?

The answer cannot be, “Because it is true!” The determinist position denies the very concept of truth or falsehood. If the determinist is right, he believes in determinism involuntarily – and I believe in free will involuntarily. It’s like dropping a boulder on the knife edge of a peaked mountaintop – it breaks, and one half of the boulder falls one way while the other falls the other way. Is there any choice involved? Of course not! Would it make any sense to stand at the open door of the helicopter and scream at one half of the boulder that it was travelling in the wrong direction, that it needed to reverse course, climb back over the mountain and join the other half crashing in that direction? These would be the actions of a crazy person, but in the deterministic universe, there is actually no difference between the split rock and the human mind.

Of course, the determinist can say that he is predetermined to debate with me and to try and change my mind, and therefore he can do nothing about his actions – and here we get to the very heart and crux of the issue.

The determinist essentially says: “Everything I do is right.”

In the deterministic universe, there is no such thing as an incorrect choice, an unpreferred position, or the rational capacity to criticize anyone. If I write a computer program and it fails to compile, I don’t blame the computer, my keyboard or the monitor – that would be ridiculous and immature.

By turning himself into a computer, the determinist renders himself above and beyond any real criticism at all. He is beyond good and evil.

It seems like hard science, but it is in fact “soft snowflake.”

If I prove the determinist wrong, he can just shrug and say, Well, I guess that was predetermined.

If the determinist has acted in an immoral manner, he can just shrug and say, Well, I guess that was predetermined.

The position is one of rank and deep self-hatred – it is a troll’s position. It is a dark dare to join the determinist in an empty universe of clanking machinery, a lack of identity, a lack of meaning, a lack of virtue, a lack of love – it is an invitation to a walking suicide of value.

It is an invitation to free yourself from conscience by destroying your capacity for choice. But – what virtuous person wants to be freed from his own conscience?

Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous. In the deterministic universe, there is no virtue; therefore, there can be no love.

Courage is choosing what is right over what is popular. In the deterministic universe, since there is no such thing as “right,” there can be no such thing as courage.

We could go on and on down the list of virtues, all of which in the deterministic universe would be wiped out, irradiated and erased.

It is a cold, lifeless world empty of value, truth, goodness, compassion, charity or love – it is a world of machines, and you are one of them. Nothing can be changed, nothing can be preferred, and nothing can be won or lost. We are all just lifeless boulders rolling down the side of a mountain into an inevitable grave.

What personal hell must you have experienced – or created – to be even remotely tempted by such a nightmarish position?

Determinism and Emotional Investment

I am fully aware that my charge of “emotional investment” could very easily be turned back on me. I openly accept that and have talked about it publicly many times. If I ask people, “Why are you so emotionally invested in determinism?” they can very fairly ask me the same question – “Why are you so emotionally invested in free will?”

Here we can talk about the unspoken risks of determinism.

Falsely believing in determinism can strip you of love, life, value, enthusiasm, courage – all the most wonderful aspects of human existence – and this risk is rarely talked about when confronting the question of determinism.

If you are a determinist, you will probably do little to protect your values – while those who accept free will strive mightily to advance theirs. If you are an atheist and a determinist, you will lose – your entire belief system will lose – in the endless back-and-forth tussle of physical and intellectual human combat. This helps us understand why less rational belief systems are spreading and growing throughout the world, while the West falters and fails.

Through relentless materialism and secularism, we have created generations of deterministic, nihilistic, socialistic and empty atheists and agnostics – and now we are losing our freedoms. Determinists lose to those who believe in free will, because determinism is a false position, and it undermines our desire to maintain our hard-won freedoms. What is the point of political freedoms, if we don’t even have free will? Would you sign a petition to grant human rights to a rock garden? Would you fight for the right for a statue to do yoga? Would you march and protest to give your smartphone the right to vote?

Bad reason is worse than good faith. A priest who gives you good medicine is better than a doctor who gives you bad medicine.

The danger of the determinist position is that by not believing in free will, our capacity to exercise free will is destroyed.

I am willing to give up deeply held positions if the reasoned arguments are sufficient, and if the evidence overwhelmingly supports the new position. I was a socialist, a Christian, an Objectivist, and now I have moved beyond those positions – although I treasured them greatly at the time – because accumulated reason and evidence have overwhelmed my original beliefs.

However, I cannot rationally change my mind about my capacity to change my mind. I cannot use my capacity to choose to deny my capacity to choose. I cannot use free will to deny free will.

The fact that accepting the determinist position would also strip my life of love, passion, meaning, purpose and joy is a purely emotional argument – I understand that. And such a sandblasting of happiness is not at all a rational counterargument, but I bring it up as something I am emotionally aware of, and to give you, the dear reader and listener, the honesty of a fair evaluation of my emotional state.

I am also fully aware that a deeply religious person could reject arguments for atheism on the same basis – that a cold and godless universe would be emotionally devastating. I would genuinely respect a religious person for making this honest statement, since most arguments – particularly about epistemology and ethics – are mere covers for deeply held emotional preferences. When we admit and discuss our emotional investments in our positions, we do not become less rational, but rather more rational, since honesty is required for productive intellectual debate – and honesty about bias is a confession of a dedication to rationality.

Should determinism be established beyond doubt, I would no longer be able to comprehend my being, my identity, what it means to be human.

Imagine how strange it would be to know that every single thought, every single impulse, every single “decision” was not yours – that you imagined you were the pilot of an aircraft, when it turned out you were not even a passenger, but merely the machinery of the engine.

Can you imagine waking up in a world where everyone was a robot, and no one had a choice – including you?

Can you imagine waking up in a world where there were no such things as a conscience, virtue, love, courage or truth – a world where all these preferred states were mere delusions, and you faced a bleak and listless future, with about as much choice and freedom as a pinball ricocheting between various preprogrammed bumpers?

Can you imagine waking up in a world where no one had any responsibility whatsoever? In an old John Cleese comedy called Fawlty Towers, the main character beats his uncooperative car with a tree branch. This crazed immaturity is funny, because he is basically punishing an inanimate object, a mere machine. His frustration, of course, is with his own preprogrammed reactions – with his expectations of ease, which are constantly violated by an inevitably messy reality – but we do not imagine that the car can do anything to appease such a madman.

Can you imagine waking up in a world where it made about as much sense to correct or punish a wrongdoer as it does to hit a broken car with a tree branch? We do not give a medal to the rock that rolls down the hill the fastest, so why would we give a medal to the fastest runner in a deterministic universe? The rock is indistinguishable from the runner, philosophically speaking.

Can you imagine waking up in a world where accepting determinism caused you to change your behaviour, to advocate different things, to oppose various perspectives – all while accepting that you had no capacity to do any of these things?

Can you imagine being the kind of person, with the kind of history, who would thirst so deeply for such empty salvation?

Can you imagine having done such wrong that you were desperate for absolution, for forgiveness – but still being so corrupt that you would not lift a finger to earn it?

Can you imagine being so guilty that you would destroy love, choice, virtue itself, in order to pretend you did nothing wrong?

Can you imagine being so corrupt that you would spread the nihilistic doctrine of determinism, hoping to gain misery in company, rather than seeking peace through restitution to those you have wronged?

Can you imagine being so solitary, so isolated, so existentially lonely, that you would choose to empty the universe of consciousness rather than seek comfort from another human being?

I can’t, and I never want to.