On Free Will and Self-Esteem: The Philosopher’s Lament
People with low self-esteem generally feel like “I’m not good enough.” And philosophy would ask: Why? What does that mean? Good enough according to whose judgment? Judged by what standards? For what reason? For what purpose? And according to what foundational premises? And, I think, (and I speak from personal experience), the premise is a faulty understanding, a misunderstanding, of the nature of free will. But the truth about free will is, in a way, very, very sad, so people don’t want to face the truth. But this short essay states that truth. And this truth, in a way, holds a great deal of wisdom.
It is not, ultimately, within my control whether my philosophy has any effect upon the world, or how long it lasts. The readers control that. I do not have any control over that. You should write for fun, not for effect. If the readers reject you, that does not mean you “failed.” It isn’t necessarily true that always “doing more” would make it more likely that you “succeed.”
I had been operating under a false premise: that I was responsible. The world is the sum of other people. I am not responsible for other people. Not in any way. And I have no control over them or what they do. In any way.
And when you move to a new apartment, you won’t control whether you like it or not. You can’t know that before you move in and live there. And you could get stuck in a place you don’t like. You don’t control that. And that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. So you should not feel guilt. You accept, let go, move on, and fight your next battle.
I was writing for the wrong reason. I was writing for effect, not to have fun.
Same with gaming: Don’t play to win. Play to have fun.
Although I did have fun writing books. To paraphrase a saying, “You can’t change people, but it sure is fun to try!”
That is the premise of “yes and yes”: You don’t control whether someone wants to have sex with you or wants to date you. All you can do is put yourself out there, show up, ask, and then see what their answer is. And it’s only a match if you are a yes for them and they are a yes for you. But if they are a no for you, that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, because you don’t control their answer. You being a yes for them is necessary but not sufficient. They have free will, so you are zero percent responsible for their answer, and they are 100% responsible for their answer. Whether the other person says yes or no after you ask them to date you or have sex with you is, from their point of view, completely determined and controlled, and, from your point of view, completely random and chaotic. You have no control, there is nothing you can do to gain control, so you are good enough, no matter what, and there is nothing you could have done better where you did wrong and were not good enough. In this context, it is impossible to not be good enough, therefore you are good enough.
For examples:
Your writing is good enough. You don’t need to write more.
You’re thin enough. You don’t need to lose weight to get a boyfriend or hook up with someone hot.
I no longer take responsibility for the moral failure of being single and not having a boyfriend despite being lonely and lovelorn and for the moral failure of not having had lots and lots of hot gay sex despite being openly LGBTQ and horny all the time.
I no longer take responsibility for the moral failure of not having gotten a PhD in philosophy from an Ivy League university and for not becoming a philosophy professor (and for sparing myself the agony of being constantly surrounded by idiots).
I no longer take responsibility for the fact that my parents abused and/or neglected me my entire life and I let them stay in my life and continue to torture me long into adulthood instead of kicking them out for far too long, and I forgave too much. I no longer take responsibility for the moral failure I inherited by being the son of fucked up insane evil parents. I no longer take moral responsibility for the fact that my parents neglected me by not getting me any diagnosis or treatment for my Autism or Social Anxiety Disorder as a child when I had no friends or in high school when I did not date, thereby traumatizing me and torturing me by making me feel like it was my fault and I had no fucking clue what was going on or why I couldn’t socialize and I blamed it all on myself. I no longer blame myself. There is nothing better that I could have done. I did not need to do better. I was, and am, good enough.
I no longer feel guilt for my life. I did the best I could given what a fucked up nightmare shitshow this world is. What I did was good enough. Life is not an easy game to play. I didn’t need to be better. I’m good enough.
You’re good enough. For what? For anything. Why? There is no justification. No justification is necessary. But, if you take the opposite position, that you’re not good enough yet, then you would always have to do more, and feel guilty for not having done enough, and focus on every negative as an area of improvement, and ignore every positive because those aren’t the areas where you need to do more, where you’re not good enough.
You might make a big mistake, and feel like now you’re not good enough to succeed anymore, and feel guilt. But, if what you are doing is within the scope of your free will, then you control whether you succeed, because you have free will, so, yes, you are still good enough to succeed. And, if what you are doing, or the result of your actions, is outside the scope of your free will, then you do not control it, and “good enough” has no meaning in this context. The one wrong thing you can do is to feel guilty, cry, feel self-pity, and give up, and blame yourself (or blame other people, or blame fate, or blame at all). If you keep fighting the fight that you have the ability to fight, or accept that which is outside your control and be at peace with what happens, those are the wise things to do.
The premise that you doing better could influence or control other people, make them like you, make them love you, make them recognize your achievement, make them give you a reward, is flawed, is false. Because they have free will. But, absent that, you are good enough for them, and guilt could rarely, if ever, be justified. Did you do good enough? Was what you did good enough – to please others? That question has no meaning. You are good enough.
You cannot influence other people or control other people, but, if you want someone else to give you something, you can ask for it, you can ask them to give it to you, and there is no reason why they would ever give it to you if you don’t ask them for it. And there are better and worse ways, more or less effective ways, of asking someone to give you something that you want from them. And no reasonable person should expect to get anything from others if you don’t ask for it in an effective way; however, with the caveat that, in whatever way you ask for it, no matter how “effective,” you still do not control them as to whether they actually give it to you.
Radical free will. Let go. Atlas, shrug. Go Galt. You are responsible for yourself, you are not responsible for other people, you do not control them, and it is not your job to take care of them, or to have an effect upon them. You can’t help them. You have no effect on them. Each person is responsible for themselves. Each individual is 100% responsible for themselves, physically, spiritually, morally, economically, socially, sexually, and romantically. Because they have free will. Either you have free will, or you don’t. If you have free will – and, yes, you do – that is what it means to have free will. That is the doctrine of radical free will.
Because you have free will, you are personally responsible for yourself, so it is your job to provide for yourself and to take care of yourself. It is your job to make the money to pay the costs of you living your ideal life, to the extent that you have the ability to get a job and work. It is your job to make friends, find love, and have hobbies, to the extent that you desire to do so. It is your job to create meaning in your life, to build a narrative of what is going on in your life and find joy and meaning in the story of your life, to the extent that you need or want to do so. It is your job to love yourself – rational selfishness and egoism and self-esteem, the core tenets of ethical Objectivism, mean nothing more than this.
And when I say “it is your job,” I mean, it is your responsibility, you are responsible, your free will controls this. But did you do this job well enough? Should you have done better? Were you good enough – to yourself? You have free will, so this was under your absolute control. But this means that you did what you did, you willed what you willed, you willed that which was your will, and you would have done nothing else, given the scenario of choices which you faced. Will is not precisely the same thing as choice: you choose your choices, but you will your will, and your will is your intention, your meaning, your truth, that which you absolutely will and would bend reality itself to your will in order to achieve, you mean and intend it so completely and so absolutely that you intend to cause it to exist, so, if you willed something, there is no reason to believe that you would have willed something else, something different, given that specific opportunity a second time. That was your free will. That was who you are. You are the person who did that. You did what you chose to do. What you willed is what you meant to do, it is what you intended to do – literally, by definition. Was it the right thing to do? That is between you – and yourself.
You live the life you will. Your life is what it is because you willed it to be. That was your will. To say that you don’t like your life, that you feel guilty about how you took care of yourself, that it wasn’t good enough – guilt does not make sense in this context. From your point of view, that was your will, that is what you declared your will to be. Starting right now, today, throw out the guilt from the past, do what you want, and do what you know you should be doing, and will the life you want. Forget the past. Then, there is no guilt, you are doing what you want, and you are doing your job. The past and future do not exist, only the present time exists, from the point of view of someone alive today, at the present time. You only have free will over yourself at the present time; you cannot change the past, or the future, but you can change today.
What is outside your control: Accept, and let go – or try to control it, which is a losing cause. Such as, for example, by political control, or legal control, which fails, because each individual has absolute free will. Another approach is my theory of faith. People want to get God to control the things which they cannot control, for their benefit, so they seek to pay God with prayers and worship and service and faith, in return for God controlling the things which are outside their control. Totally illogical: God would not, in theory, need or want your prayers, your faith, your worship, your service. God is the one who literally already has everything, so there is nothing you can give to God in return for God controlling things outside of your control. You cannot buy God’s favor. This attempt is an end run around loss of control, it is trying to control that which is outside of your control by means of religion. You don’t control God, you don’t control other people, you don’t control the world, you don’t control what happens, you don’t control everything that is, according to logic, outside your control. You can let go and accept, or tear your hair out and gnash your teeth and cut your skin to blood fighting to get control.
It isn’t that each person is an end in themselves. “End” implies a justification, a reason to use a means. There is no justification. There is no need for a justification. Human beings simply are. We live. We exist. There is no need to justify behavior, there is only the need to deny the need for any justification, deny all negativity, and live a positive, affirmative life. Don’t justify, deny the need for justification. You have free will and the absolute right to do what you will. You might have done right, or wrong, factually, for a particular purpose, which might be your chosen goal, but you do not, in the end, either need, or have, any justification whatsoever. You stand naked, alone, before God, stripped of the clothing of justification, of pretext, of excuse, of “why.” You need no excuses and there are no excuses. There is no blame, and there is no need to blame.
The great mistake in human psychology is to blame your life on other people, or blame your life on yourself, or blame your life on your parents, or blame your life on bad luck, or blame your life on your mental health disorders, or blame your life on your addictions, or blame your life on the socioeconomic class you were born into, or blame your life on what other people did to you. And then you would need to do better to compensate for it. But there is no need to blame. There is no blame. There is nothing blameworthy to blame for. The crime that rendered you not good enough was never committed, and the proof is that you are good enough. You are good. You are good enough.
It's like the hero says in the movie “Serenity,” based on the TV show “Firefly”: “You can’t change people. They are what they are.” It’s because they have free will. They can change themselves, but you can’t change them. You can change yourself, but you can’t change other people. This is the philosopher’s lament, because the philosopher understands free will, and so he knows how little he truly has any power to affect other people. And that is wisdom.
The famous motto of recovery from Alcoholics Anonymous also comes to mind: “God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Except that I would rewrite it: Reason and logic, grant me the courage to change the things that are within the scope of my free will, the serenity to accept the things that are outside the scope of my free will, and the wisdom to know the difference and to understand free will.
