>>41278107 (OP)
>>41278138 gets it. Free will is some bullshit we made up to feed our vanity. The reality is that people are totally molded by their family/friends, surroundings, and experiences. Smarter individuals may have a more acute notion of their own sentience, but at the end of the day we are all programmable social animals playing a language game. We are primitive beasts who can speak, and we argue that our ability to say "I am a conscious individual" makes it true, and we won't entertain any other possibility because our ego is propped up on this vain idea that we are special, not like other animals. Of course, people who are well off need this to be true to feel pride in what they supposedly have accomplished, while people whose life is in the gutter would reject the idea of free will, enabling their downward spiral by projecting their shame onto something else. But the enlightened cynic must live between these 2 extremes, rejecting free will and looking to the will of the God that created them. They must learn to recognize the forces that mold people into their various behaviors.
