“But it is clear that we made our own misery. God didn’t do it.” (Page 133, Big Book)
If you want to understand why a potato is in the condition it is in, a couple of things must be understood. First of all, the condition is not due to a single causal factor. A particular causal factor might be a sine qua non, but so are thousands of other causal factors, extending through time, each of which is in a network of its own causal factors. Thus no causal factor is an absolute primitive beyond which chains of causation cannot be traced. It is no good, therefore, saying that the potato is in the oven because Susan put it there. Why are potatoes grown in England? Why are they sold in Waitrose? Both would require a book to explain the fact. They are part of the reason the potato is in the oven.
So much for potatoes. What about human beings? The first observation is that human beings are not potatoes and are fundamentally different than potatoes. A human being who is entirely passive might appear to be pushed around by the world, and their condition might appear to be explicable with reference to particular causal factors or circumstances, but human beings are not passive. Even if they appear passive, they are actively adopting that passive position. In a Swedish novel I read whose name I have forgotten, a pale Swede commits suicide by sitting in the hot summer sun until they die of sunburn and heatstroke. Apparent passivity is really a form of activity.
The reason for anyone’s practical circumstances and emotional condition is really a combination of upstream factors, the cards that are dealt, and the playing of those cards through the exercise of agency, moment in, moment out. Everything is chosen. Even if one simply stays put, to stay put is a choice. Even if one continues to believe some claptrap one was ‘taught’ as a child, that lesson was taken on board, and then adhered to, when other lessons could have been sought out and followed.
The truth is that one’s consciousness is continuously active, producing the picture of reality one finds oneself in and the action predicated on that picture of reality.
Why are my circumstances the way they are? My narrative plus my actions.
Why are my feelings the way they are? My narrative plus my actions.
I can choose a different narrative, and I can choose different actions.
No one and nothing can exercise power over my consciousness, and therein lies freedom, as succinctly put by Viktor Frankl:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
What’s your experience?