u/impersonal_process

Imagine that you need to control the behaviour of a large number of people without being able to stand next to each one of them. Coercion is expensive because it requires supervision, resources, and constant presence. It is far more economical to persuade each person that they are the author of their own actions and therefore bear the weight of their consequences. If they internalise this belief, they will supervise themselves. They will restrain themselves, feel guilt, and adjust their behaviour not out of fear of an external hand, but out of fear of their own internal judgment. Ascribed freedom is the outsourcing of control.

This is precisely what makes the concept of free will historically so resilient. It has not survived because it is true. It has survived because it is useful. To those who govern.

The remaining question is whether a system is possible that abandons this fiction. A system that is honest about its purposes. One that says: we do not punish you because you deserve it. We punish you because this is how we configure the future behaviour of the system, including yours. You are not morally guilty in a metaphysical sense, but you become a factor in the causal order of others.

Such honesty is almost politically impossible. Because it strips punishment of its moral aura and reveals it for what it is: social engineering. And social engineering without moral legitimation appears as naked violence.

Perhaps this is precisely why the narrative of free will is so persistent. Not because people accept it after reflection, but because the system that produces it cannot afford to stop producing it. The fiction is not an error in thinking. It is a structural element of power.

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The feeling of unfreedom is not, to me, a philosophical mistake. It is an accurate registration of the actual state of affairs, a registration that compatibilism then tries to persuade me to rename.

I do not feel free because I am not. In the sense in which the word once carried weight, in the sense of a real alternative, genuine authorship, independence from a chain I did not begin - I am not free. Compatibilism does not liberate me. It advises me to settle for a lower standard and call that compromise free will.

The feeling refuses.

It returns in the small, everyday scenes where “my choice” feels like a line already written, one that I merely recite like a complex automaton.

When I reach for my phone for no reason and scroll endlessly, I do not feel freedom but inertia. I did not decide to do it; it simply happens through me. The desire arrives already formed, carrying a weight I did not choose, and my hand follows it.

When I react sharply to a word that touches a nerve, I am not choosing my reaction from a neutral point. It erupts from habits, memories, and vulnerabilities that I did not consciously arrange. By the moment of the “choice,” I am already inclined toward that reaction.

When I procrastinate on something important while knowing the consequences, I am not free between action and inaction. One option weighs more heavily, not because I chose it to weigh more, but because this is how I am constituted in that moment. And no matter how often I repeat to myself, “you can do otherwise,” my body and mind answer in the same way.

When I try to change a habit, I feel resistance that I did not create. Intention against impulse and often the impulse wins, because it has roots I cannot reach. This is not a battle between equal possibilities, but between forces with different origins and different accumulated potential.

Even when I “choose well,” the choice bears the signature of everything that shaped me: upbringing, environment, biology. It is understandable to the point of becoming predictable. And predictability does not feel like freedom, but like necessity.

If you were born into a tribe where eating the enemy after battle is a ritual of respect (where to consume his strength is the final duty owed to him), would you feel disgust? The honest answer is: no. You would sit by the fire, you would chew, and nothing in you would stir to tell you that something is wrong. Because the thing that tells you (that inner voice, solemnly called moral intuition) did not come with you from some transcendent place. It was installed. Quietly, methodically, by the people around you, before you could even ask whether you wanted that installation.

And if that is true of moral intuition, if even what we experience as most deeply our own has come from outside, then the question extends beyond cannibalism and disgust, beyond the specific ritual and the specific taboo. It concerns the very structure of desire itself. Because it is not only the judgment “this is wrong” that is installed; preferences, values, fears, ambitions, even the taste for certain kinds of arguments are installed as well. Everything from which something later called “our” decision will emerge.

And if we follow this line to its conclusion, it becomes clear that we are not free to choose to act in a way different from the one we are already inclined toward by the preferences installed in us. We already have an internal disposition or predisposition to choose a particular option before we have “decided” consciously. Choice is not a source but a result; not a beginning but an outcome. In this sense, “freedom of choice” looks more like a linguistic construction than a real capacity - a convenient narrative through which we organize behavior and attribute authorship where there is only causation. And when this narrative is used to assign us blame for what inevitably arises from us, it begins to look not just inaccurate, but misleading.