On leveling the playing field.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how we get to where we are in life.

If you've been with me for a while, you know that I tend to see life through a deterministic lens. I see the human body, including the human mind, as a glorified computer that does what its software tells it to do at any given moment, depending also on the behavioral modifications inflicted by circumstances—i.e. software updates. (But the external events are also, of course, predetermined, in my view. Every stone that sits on your lawn is in the exact position it had to be in at that moment, year-of-our-lord 2012. To riff on the chilling mini-mart coin-flip scene from No Country for Old Men, that stone has been on its journey to its place in your lawn for all the millennia. It could've ended up nowhere else. So has the nail that ended up in your tire, regardless of whether you drove over it accidentally or whether some neighborhood teen put it there.)

My deterministic leanings were a prime prime reason why I never subscribed to the "you can be/do anything you want in life" school of thought. Sometimes the variables that prevent you from doing what you want to do are physical/external: You're not going to play center for the Boston Celtics if (a) there's no such thing as basketball, (b), you're presently serving a life sentence in jail, and/or (c) you're 4-foot-11. And sometimes the variables are more "personal"/internal: You're not going to invent a way of modifying acetylcholine so that it becomes a natural vaccine against cancer if you have the approximate IQ of a breath mint. And please don't cite me exceptional cases; they just prove the rule. And those exceptional cases were predetermined, too.

By the way, the personal/internal stumbling block can also be ambiguity or confusion about what you "really want" to do, or a total misapprehension of what you thought you wanted to do. ... If you're a person of middle age, how many times in life have you pursued a goal that turned out not to be what you wanted once you got it? Those are cases where you were able to be or do "what you want," and yet it wasn't what you wanted after all, in hindsight. So you were still predetermined to fall short of "what you wanted."

I think most of us accept the examples having to do with being 4-foot-11 or having an IQ of 67...but we have a tougher time with the shortcomings that, in the consensus view, stem from flaws or vices. We'll cut someone a pass for flunking out of school if the problem really is a lack of brainpower, but we're less forgiving when the problem is perceived as laziness. Thing is, if you're lazy, you're lazy; you're going to live a phlegmatic, unambitious life. Now, it's possible that society can impose sanctions on you that will lift you out of your laziness. But sometimes those sanctions aren't going to work anyway. Some people are incorrigible. And if you're incorrigible, you're incorrigible. It's a little bit like being left-handed or blue-eyed.

Similarly, we will not cut someone a pass for being a serial killer, even though the tendency to be a serial killer may be every bit as ingrained as the tendency for a genius to do, well, the geniusy things a genius does. (Do you cause thoughts and impulses to occur. Or do they just occur?)

Seems to me that if there is no choice, no free will—if we all pretty much arrive where we simply must be at any given point in the ongoing timelines of our lives—then that realization behooves us to do what we can to understand and even help people who arrived in worse places. Through our insights, we can become part of the software updates that encourage others to be more understanding. This is also why I'm not one of those who flinches when the term redistributionist is applied to Barack Obama.

This becomes something of a paradox, a conundrum, because if you can't help being the way you are, then you might argue that you can't help feeling the way you feel about people who don't seem to deserve your sympathies, including people whom you flat-out dislike and root against. But I think there are higher odds of enlightening our friends and neighbors about determinism and getting them to be more accepting of others than there are of changing someone's mind about being a shiftless bum or a serial killer. This is why I generally feel more sensitivity to the poor, the downtrodden, and those whom life has otherwise passed by.

Of course, I can't help thinking that way.