Of Will, Free Will, and Desire or How to Fix the Global Economy (article) by Regis Auffray on AuthorsDen

As the internet continues to grow apace, becoming a wonderful farce of who'll be first with the next tabloidite bit of disinformation regarding anything from cuter toenails to black holes deciding to visit little ol' Earth, we are ever more (to unquote the raven) inundated with paranoid fear-based descriptions of eventually non-events end of times events. If you can figure out that sentence and understand what it means, I wouldn't mind if you replied with your interpretation. I have no idea what I just wrote except that it felt good and it gives me the opportunity now, having cleared that up, to go on with what I meant to say. Which, of course, has nothing to do with the internet, or even with disinformation. I don't need the internet to dis-inform me, after all: I have free will and I can do it all by myself. I don't even use New Age training wheels anymore.

Be that as it may, as my once upon a time history teacher loved to say in re-introducing his line of lecture, we, of the mankind species, are a weird lot. We are not like other mammals on this world, and I think it's almost safe for me to say that, without having to cringe in anticipation of a wave of hurt egos hurling rotten, never used brains at me. What makes us different is a kind of perverted "will" which we so lovingly like to label as being free. Of course there is no such thing as free anything in these domains, but let the illusion ride its pretty unicorn in and out of the dreams of perpetual mind-infancy.

Will—volition. We know we have it. We've expressed it countless times, as individuals and as groups. Usually to our own detriment, or the detriment of what we hold, oh, so dear. While a bovine type animal knows instinctively that green grass is good and is valuable because it can feed itself by chewing on it, we of superior intellect, being creatures of will, know that is not so. It is only valuable if it can be weighed against certain numbers, or perhaps some ounces of gold. Nothing is valuable just as is. It must first be labeled valuable by the system. A log can be used in building a log house, of course. But only after it has been assessed for that value, has passed muster through the various channels of our will-endowed system. The log has substance, therefore can be evaluated properly according to breed, colour, length, size, weight, where it stands, where it will fall (and how); how it will be peeled, scraped, shaped, handled, placed within the building in question and what income level the future owners of the said house will possess . It has to satisfy a whole plethora of bureaucrats who must ensure they get their lunch, airline ticket, pretty girl with the rent-by-the-hour hotel room and golf cart rental from that log. It is also quite possible the log is situated very close to a country's border, in which case it will have to grow enough in value as it is handled to pay for its protection by a professional army, which means it will have to support some military headquarters, replete with starred major generals, generals, commanders, colonels (of every make and description), all the way down the food chain of command to the standing army sitting in its various vehicles. But for that to happen, our hapless log will also have to support a government, of course. I'm not going there. By that time, the log in question really doesn't want to be part of a house's wall any longer. It just wants to fall over in the first blast of Autumn wind and crash into a deep, dark ravine never to be seen again.

The problem with will, apart from the fact that it is too short a name, is that it rests ever-so-uncomfortably in the arms of desire. Desire is fickle, as anyone who has ever had an affair with him, knows. Desire is moody and plain persnickety. You just can't trust desire, and yet, he, the Almighty, it is who rules this planet. What? You didn't know that? Isn't greed a product of desire? And isn't that what has ruined our global economy? Why, that's as plain as the wart on your nose. So when we speak of will, free or not, what we are talking about is desire. Will is desire. What we desire is what we manifest, not what we will to will. I mean, will is like love: it's wonderful and lofty and full of potential that can never do anything. Will is impotent, utterly impotent. Addicts have will. They have lots and lots of will, even will power. They set their minds to get their drug and nothing stands in their way, not even the threat of several years in a jail where, presumably, they will be separated from the dearest object of their will. It's full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. I can prove that. Look at our CEO's and Banksters. Now there's a bunch of willful types. But is it will makes them sociopaths addicted to chewing up what remains of the planet? Isn't it just plain old desire? Come on, let's be honest.

Our bovine, ruminating on various types of grasses, knows instinctively that the best grass is the one all around, not the one growing in the pampas of Uruguay or wherever. First off, it knows that being unable to strip for the terminal inspector, it can never get a ticket to Uruguay to sample said grass. Being super-humanly savvy, it also knows that grass has value to the amount needed to fill that first stomach. It wouldn't think of continuing to fill itself until both its stomachs are filled because then it would certainly die! For those of you uninstructed in the anatomical makeup of the average bovine, they possess two stomachs, one for the raw intake, the other to receive what has been cud-chewed, to be digested properly. I think that greedy people, should they be examined by competent doctors, would be found to possess two stomachs: a natural one that can be filled quite naturally with what lies around in the average farmers' market, and the other that is a bottomless pit of stinking horror, needing to be filled forever with everything that is good for everybody else and that it doesn't need. If we could take these desirous bottomless pits of black greedy holes and equip them with a cud-chewing cycle, we could fix our economy overnight.