Free-will's Legacy of Social Fear:
page one
We live in a society where we yearn to know and be known, to understand and be understood, to accept and be accepted, to Love and be Loved. But for all our desperate desire, our yearning remains unfulfilled because a social fear prevents us from knowing and being known, from understanding and being understood, from accepting and being accepted, from Loving and being Loved. This fear places an infinite distance between our I and I. This fear places an infinite distance between the individual and all others. This fear isolates and then destroys. It has since the beginning of mankind's social interaction.  Recorded human history has chronicled this cyclic destruction.

Social fear is a free-will phenomenon. Free-will prospers in the shadows of fearful ignorance; of assumptive bigotry. Fear is the silent voice which prosecutes, convicts, and executes without allowing even a whisper of defense. Amnesty withers on the vine from non-use.  Our social landscape is littered with the corpses of innocent felons, dismembered children, and the guiltless guilty, all immersed within a desert of silence; deathly, fearful, silence.  This is so because where there is choice there must also be culpability. Where there is a self-determined will, there is also damnation.

Universal determinism offers no sanctuary for social fear, no harbor for this free-will rogue which seeks to drive the living into the desert of extinction. Rather than prosecuting, convicting and executing, determinism gags the prosecution and only allows the defense to speak.  The prosecution is silenced and the defense is broadcast from the summits of every mountain of universal experience.  There is no need for amnesty.  This is so because where there is no choice, there is no culpability, no guilt, no condemnation, no excuses, and no blame; only logic and reason, only causes and their unavoidable effects.  Where there is no choice, there is no reason to submit to social fears; only a compulsion to seek knowledge and pursue understanding.

Only in the fertile loam of universal determinism is it possible for each of us to know and be known, to understand and be understood, to accept and be accepted, and to at last, Love and be Loved.


The free-will mindset encourages social stratification and personal isolation due to its proclivities toward obsessive comparison. When each individual is prone to critically assess their behavior in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, virtuous and evil, successful and unsuccessful; all this combined with the attachment experience years saturation of Self-capitulation, Self-critique, Self-demoralization; with this pervasive sense of insignificance, there is a survivalist tendency to critically observe the behavior of others and to then assess their own comparative status.  This assessment very rarely finds the individual competive, and the result is to demean others such that the individual experiences some sense of worth, regardless of how arbitrary that worth is.

When an individual's social status is undermined their sense of personal security is threatened, and as it is always easier to recognize dysfunction in others than it is to recognize dysfunction within ourselves, we tend to obsessively focus on the frailties of others rather than productively direct our focus and energies internally. 
Society then tends to clump into groups with similar dysfunction. Individuals within these groups mirror each other.  They possess common character traits and share a critically aggressive mentality towards other groups.  Sometimes this critical mentality develops to the point where one particular group is made the scapegoat for all that ills the individual's small little microcosm.  This scapegoat mentality legitimizes behaviors that discriminate, subjugate, oppress and eventually segregate societies into small groups which share common bigotries.  Examples of such categories are:  religious, racial, nationality, gender and sexual orientation.

Homogenous interactive deficiencies result in a lack of knowledge regarding other groups.
This lack of knowledge is ignorance, and where there is ignorance, there is fertile loam for fear and suspicion.  Operating within the constraints of fear, each group bases their social behaviors on ingrained group promoted assumptions commonly believed to be true. This dearth of knowledge is often lethal. 

When free-will is the premise on which societies build their social structures, this pattern of social alienation is the natural outcome. It has always been this way.  Recorded history is cursed with a profusion of examples.  Whenever mankind has experienced a respite from this pattern of fearful enslavement, one can find evidence of deterministic principles.  Knowledge fueled The Enlightenment and understanding, or the concept of grace, fueled The Reformation.  Knowledge, Understanding, Unconditional Acceptance and Unconditional Love are the pillars of hard determinism. When these pillars have been incorporated into social structures, the degree to which they have been incorporated is the degree to which that society experiences a respite from the lethalities of corrosive fear.

Procede to Free-will's Legacy of Social Fear: conclusion
Return to Philosophy Content Page
Return to Main Content Page