Robert Sapolsky’s Determined changed how I think about human behavior.
Human behavior has largely been shaped by religious beliefs, its preachings and lore, its books and the things only explainable by sciences we hadn’t yet captured reasonably.
If every thought, choice, and action is the inevitable product of prior causes—genes, hormones, childhood, culture, the neuron that fired before you had any say over it, your conception which you didn’t author and its snowballing effect, the millenniums of history that shaped all of it—then there is no uncaused causer. Nothing in the brain steps outside the chain. This is the soul, and the first tenet is that it doesn’t exist.
The serial killer and the saint are both suddenly equal based on the output of a luck they never wished upon, then no one authored themselves. Praise the weather; how dare the tide come in.
Suddenly contempt and hatred and retribution fall apart in your hands. The person you can’t stand was assembled by forces they didn’t pick, just as you are. You stop asking what’s wrong with them and start asking what happened to them.
If you can’t hate a person for what they are, what’s left to do with the dangerous ones? Failing brakes mean you take it off the road, but you don’t despise it. Lock the danger away if you must, but the wish for them to suffer for being who the universe made them doesn’t earn its keep.
So what happens to wonder? You can still feel awe at the universe, gratitude when things break your way, love for the people around you. None of it needs anyone to have freely chosen anything. Feelings are caused too, and being caused doesn’t make the result any less real.
You can’t shake the feeling that you’re choosing. It’s baked in too deep for that. So you believe one thing and feel another, like how the Earth is tearing through space and still sits dead still under your feet.
You won’t choose to believe any of this either. You’ll be persuaded or you won’t, and that was never up to you. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?