Home is Where the Walls Are

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.                                                                               Friedrich Nietzsche

The individual mind is an open system, and all of its content comes from the world. That means various tribes have their hooks in you; experience shapes the mind and if you believe it plays the largest part in building your identity, you have to accept that you belong to each of them to some degree or another depending on their individual contributions. And, even if you declare yourself to be proudly not a member of this, that or another tribe, you remain susceptible to their influence, even if only slightly, if they had any role in creating you. The danger of the human tendency toward tribalist behavior, though, manifests itself most insidiously when we interact with others who hold many of the same deeply held beliefs that we do while we each in turn hold onto the belief that we are completely autonomous individuals. A sudden turn of events can quickly conspire to polarize thinking and drive the individual into the arms of the tribe, and the more fiercely independent we think ourselves to be, the more ashamed we feel at such times.

If you think you are a completely autonomous individual not susceptible at all to the calls of a mob, than you are in great danger of joining one.

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Taken by the Prevailing Winds

Where my thoughts go, so do I.


Your last thought, you know not from where it came. But, come it did. And so it goes for your next thought, and the one after that. Like a river flowing, they sweep you along and direct you from one point of your life to the next. You believe that they define you; indeed they guide your actions, and others define you by those actions, so in a way, you're correct.

Most of the time, anyway.

There are times when it occurs to you that rather than be guided by your thoughts, it's better for you to actively guide them. Studying, learning, putting ideas into practice... these activities make it much more likely that you'll make optimal decisions in certain contexts.

This is the closest thing we have to free will. You can decide now to act in such a way that at some point in the future you'll most likely arrive at a place that is closer to your desired destination than one you would've arrived at had you not decided to guide your thoughts at all.

In a short-enough time frame, free will all but disappears. In a long-enough one, free will is a lot less fuzzy.

Those dark thoughts you've been having, you wish they'd go away, and sometimes they do. But, they come back eventually. Is it a chemical problem? An environmental one? Is it something else? Shouldn't you at least try to know the answer?