Brace yourself, for we are about to take a journey into the dark recesses and bizarre grottos of one of my weird little intellectual obsessions. Make sure your seat belt is buckled firmly around your assumptions and please make sure to keep your thoughts and ideas inside the vehicle at all times.
One thing that really bothers me is just how random and arbitrary character and personality is. The very roots of identity and what we think of as ourselves are mere accidents of fate, no more in our control than the movement of the stars.
We are an assemblage of happenstance.
Take genetics, for example. Nobody knows exactly how much of our personality is determined by our genetic makeup, but modern science has been moving in the direction of “more” for decades now, and so it is safe to assume that it’s more than a little bit and possibly as much as half.
And we have absolutely no say in that. We don’t even ask to be born in the first place, but even when we are, we are given a random assortment of genetic traits over which we have no control.
No matter how badly you want to be a big beefy linebacker, if you are born into a slender petite body, it is never going to happen. You might control your allergies with drugs, but you can’t ever get rid of them. Maybe you would rather not have been born ginger, but ginger you are.
And it’s entirely possible that every single one of your personality flaws, like a too-quick temper or a tendency towards overeating, was genetically determined the moment egg met sperm, when you were a mere zygote.
But it goes far beyond the genetic. Even after we are born, we have little choice in who we become. So much of what we call “nurture” is beyond our control too. It’s down to accidents of birth. The parents you are born to, the place they live, the culture you are born into, the nutrition you get, the school you go to, the weather patterns… all of these things have an effect on who you become and we have no choice about any of them.
And then there is the question of taste. And I am not just talking about whether you like chicken or beef. The question of preference goes far deeper than that. It can be something as broad and pervasive as one’s sexual preference. We never get to choose what we like, all we can do is find out, whether it’s something as small as what we order off the menu or something as broad and deep as to what career path we take based on what we like to do.
Viewed this way, it really seems like what we laughingly call ourselves is just a scrapbook full of random events walking around claiming it’s a person. In modern society, we place a great deal of emphasis on our individuality and individual responsibility. We tell each other that we can be whatever we want to be, and hold people responsible for not just what they do, but who they are.
Yet how much control do we really have over who we are?
I first began contemplating this issue in reference to sexual imprinting. Random childhood and/or teen year incidents can determine a person’s entire sexual destiny, whether it’s something as simple and innocuous as an early sexual encounter leading to a lifelong preferences for redheads, or something as potentially devastating as child sex abuse leading to a lifetime of pedophilia and the resulting shame, guilt, and paranoia.
Nobody asks for the sexual imprinting they get. It just happens, usually at an age when society supposes us not to be sexual at all. You can choose what you act on, and how you satisfy yourself, but you cannot simply choose to have an entirely different sexuality from the one you ended up with.
And it goes on and on. Did you choose to be good at the piano? Or did you just find out? Did you decide to love hot and spicy foods? Did you ask to be an introvert? Who decided you would be easygoing?
I am not denying free will. Free will is evident in all we do and all we think. We have no choice but to believe in it. Like I said, we might have no choice in who we become, but we choose what we do, and that will never change.
But while law must treat all actions equally, I think it behooves us to ask ourselves whether all choices are equally easy to make. No matter what it is about yourself that you take pride in, it might be that those choices were easier for you to make than for someone else. Likewise, it might be that your worst traits are something you had no choice over.
And all of that really bug me. It seems so unfair and arbitrary than we just end up with the personalities we end up with largely due to fate. It makes me question my own identity and makes me wonder if life is a crapshoot after all.
Luckily, I have also begone to believe that it is possible to change yourself. That the choices you make now become part of who you are in the future, and that if you are willing to take control of the process and make your choices with the future self you want to be in mind, you can change who you are by changing what you become.
Therefore, every little act that expresses the person you want to be is important. Every choice you make that represents the person you want to become pushes you towards that very goal. No positive action is wasted.
And all you have to do to change who you are is to keep making those positive choices.
It’s not a matter of a permanent act of will. There’s no such thing. It’s a matter of slowly pounding yourself into a new shape, which will then naturally become the easy and natural thing to be.
Wish me luck in refashioning myself into a far superior version of myself!
Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.