So, here’s this post about a repeating cycle in Internet Discourse about what kinds of insults are okay to use.

Which I’m revisiting right now, because I just saw a post about the whole “poor reading comprehension” complaint that gets thrown around here a lot– and how “having poor reading comprehension” is actually a misfortune closely tied to the effect of poverty on literacy– and how therefore it isn’t really nice to yell at people for it.

And that isn’t exactly a mental health issue (the main topic of the post) but it still means the cycle may be getting close to the part where behaviors generally agreed-upon as Bad and Evil start to be re-examined.

And while I’m still not comfortable claiming to have a well-formed opinion….

I think part of the issue with this cycle– and other cycles between tolerance and intolerance–

…Is that people start giving up, when we start approaching the idea that ALL human characteristics and choices– all aspects of “what kind of person you are,” and “what kinds of things you consider appropriate to do”– come from factors ultimately outside your control.

And this gets people leaving the conversation for a few different reasons.

Basically, though, they boil down to, “it’s making us question the idea of free will, and we don’t feel like dealing with that.”

Which, depending on your expectations from the world, may mean:

“I don’t want to think about it because I think doubting free will would mean that we’re not really conscious or alive, and/or we have no power to change the future and there’s no point to anything we do”

Or

“I don’t want to think about it because having no free will would mean nobody deserves to be punished for what they do, and I want to punish people who deserve it”

Or even just:

“It makes the whole debate over insulting people fall apart into nothing, because you’re telling me it’s wrong for me to insult anyone for anything, BUT ALSO it’s therefore wrong for YOU to insult ME for insulting anyone, because, by your logic, I can’t control that either… SO the argument is over and I may as well go back to saying whatever I want anyway.”

And I still don’t think it’s a good idea for me to get into the debate over which specific words should and shouldn’t be considered acceptable… and I don’t think there will ever be a consensus on that anyway.

But I feel that it’s important to focus on a few things:

- The difference between insulting a person and criticizing an action

- The difference between “our actions are important” and “our actions are entirely spontaneous”

If your understanding of free will has always been “the things you’re going to do in the future can’t be decided by your past, because then your choices would be pointless and your life wouldn’t matter”…

Then it’s important to consider:

There’s never a way to stop being the result of your past. Even if you actively TRY to do things inconsistent with your upbringing, the fact that you WANT to try and do that had to come from somewhere.

If you wanted to choose what kind of person to be, WITHOUT that choice being determined by the kind of person you ALREADY ARE– well, there’s no way to do that, except to somehow go back in time and create yourself.

(And yeah, even then, that choice would be determined by “the kind of person you already are”… but, at least THAT person would not be determined by anything outside “your” control. Congrats, you’ve achieved the ultimate in self-determination. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. …And that’s why the time loop you’re in now is called the Bootstrap Paradox.)

But, without time paradoxes, the only “free will” we have is the fact that your choices are caused by your desires and your identity.

And sure, THOSE are still “predestined” by things you didn’t choose.

But to me, being limited only by your desires feels like the freest you could be! It’s the very definition of doing what you want!

Anything more free and you’d be acting totally random. Electrons might act that way. The behavior of particles like electrons is the only thing suggesting that the universe may not be deterministic. So, maybe electrons have “real free will” as you’ve been imagining it.

You probably don’t want to be an electron.

And as for whether your choices matter? Of course they do! They help determine the future, just as much as everything in the past helped determine your present. Even if the universe is deterministic– or “deterministic” as far as non-electrons are concerned– that doesn’t mean you’re predestined to have zero effect on the future. You don’t know what you’re predestined to do, if anything! YOU choose that– even if you don’t know what your choice is “destined” to be until you make it.

Does this mean that nobody should be held accountable for their choices, because their choices are caused ultimately by things outside their control? No! Regardless of where people’s actions come from-- if they’re a problem, it’s in everyone’s best interests to fix the problem! To prevent future bad behavior, from them and from others, by whatever method works!

Once you think in terms of rehabilitative and restorative justice instead of punitive– in terms of what is needed rather than what is deserved– the whole question of “free will” becomes a lot less relevant.

And maybe there are circumstances when the best method for stopping bad behavior is punishment and violence! Maybe there are circumstances when the best method is insulting people! I don’t know. There are a lot of different situations in the world.

But I think that in the majority of cases, the best methods are structural changes to systems, and constructive criticism of individual choices.

So, in my view, this part of the cycle– the increasing number of human flaws and sins that are being recognized as involuntary products of people’s circumstances– could potentially be a path to turn away from insults in general, and toward greater sympathy for the circumstances of others, and more constructive approaches to changing them.

But… I also see why this doesn’t happen.

Because for many, many, many people, life is hard. Brutally hard. And the suffering in that life is very, very often caused directly by the actions of other people, who either don’t think about what they’re doing, or just cannot be convinced that they’re doing anything wrong.

And when you’ve lived with that kind of treatment long enough, you do not have patience for constructive criticism of those people’s individual choices. You do not have patience for an impersonal focus on structural changes that could change the societal trends toward that sort of behavior.

I won’t say I’ve experienced the worst of this, personally, but… I’ve been in places similar to it. When you’ve lived with that constant abuse, you’re bone-deep exhausted, and you’re angry as hell. You need, at the very minimum, to vent your anger. And there is often just no satisfying way to do that without directing it at specific people, and expressing it in the most cutting insults you can think of. Sympathy for the circumstances of people who’ve been thoughtlessly beating you down, over and over and over? …It’s just simply not an option.

So, very likely, people are going to keep on using whatever insults they want to. And the cycle of approval and disapproval over those insults is probably going to keep going. And there’s probably not much we can do about it, as a whole.

But that’s just a general statement. Some of us, individually, probably can change our approach and decide where we go from that cycle, according to what makes sense to us.

Because whatever limitations there are on free will, it doesn’t mean nothing can ever change. Very much the opposite, actually.