i get really angry when i see these high-and-mighty people who sneer at anyone worse off than them, thinking their own success is based 100% on their delusion that they’re some immaculate genius. while free will definitely plays a part, i think that the luck of the draw is the biggest factor of all. people need to stop being so damn smug, and realize this.

/derail over

I agree with you Donna. Well-written.

Like I said — I’m not a full believer of the transfer argument (thanks, Erin!) but very few people fuck up their lives utterly and completely on purpose. How are we any different because we got lucky with the results of our choices?

However, in re “your choices are based on your environment, your history, your family,” and “we are products of our surroundings,” I think that’s taking it a bit far. We are not merely computers which have been programmed, and are continually programmed; we have a tremendous self-governed, self-modifying capacity, which begins on day one and continually revises the OS.

At the very basic level, this will involve a change such as “liver tastes bad — I don’t like liver,” which traces directly from experience. But the more sophisticated we become as thinkers on our own self-determined paths, the more subtle and abstract our self-modification can become, and the contribution of the world around us to that kind of thing is… doubtful.

When Darwin dethroned humanity as Nature’s last word, developed an accurate explanation of the genesis of species, flatly contradicted his society’s religious norms and spat in the face of public approval by suggesting we are related to all other forms of life including shit-hurling apes, it seems to me his actions were governed or even significantly influenced not by the world around him, but instead by his personal interests, insights, conclusions, and deliberate actions.

Similarly, Newton was not exactly cooperative with his mother’s plan to take him out of school and turn him into a farmer; instead he overturned the best wisdom of his day, discovered the calculus, established fundamental laws of physics, and laid the groundwork for the scientific method.

Free will seems very clearly demonstrated in all such examples, and therefore, in my opinion, the personal choices of junkies in becoming junkies is not a weensy factor (though it’s not the only one, either).