Democracy Requires Free Will
What if there was nothing that molded you, nothing that pulled you this way or that, inclined you to like or dislike, you existed in an eventless void without the thinnest tinsel of influence? What would you think, would you even know to think?
That world once existed for each of us, at that split second our consciousness began. From that instant on, each of us has been led, guided to our thoughts, ushered to our judgements of all that surrounds us.
Each of us is the product of incalculable variations in experience. It is those variations that make me so different than you.
Those profound differences that developed, could once make mouths water at the thought of a nice slab of whale blubber in Alaska or a pile of fried or nicely aged maggots in Italy.
Starting slowly and now accelerating to starship speed, our world is homogenizing into manageable clusters of conformity where one can easily forecast what the members of one cluster or another do, want, think, and believe.
The deletions in experiences and the bundlings of commonalities are increasing in most every aspect of our lives, whether it be in how we live, what we do, where we buy, what we see and listen to. One can now easily forecast what the members of one cluster or another do, want, think and believe.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in politics, where we are captured in clusters of like view, all pulled and inclined to identical judgements, shaped by today’s unscrupulous sources.
With the loss of trusted sources of information and the growing inability to know what is so and what is not, there is no escape. And now with A.I.’s foot on the first step of the human ladder the end of unmanaged thought or what we think of as free will is near.
All that is left is the uncontrolled molding of billions of malleable minds.
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
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