Free Will Does Not Exist, but Accountability Does
Undeserved blame & undue praise
Many confuse explanations with excuses, and conflate free will with accountability. Every time I try to identify and understand the psychodynamics leading to mistakes and crimes, someone immediately jumps with the most predictable, unsolicited straw man: that I supposedly attempt to rationalise or justify mistakes and crimes. This is false. Because in a trial, when the prosecution tries to establish motive behind a crime, this isn’t “excusing” the crime; it’s trying to explain it, to understand why it happened, without stripping away accountability from the perpetrator.
Before understanding how and why bad things happen, we can never hope to preempt them.
If we never try to explain — not excuse — bad behaviour, we will never understand it, and we stand no hope of ever stopping or preventing it.
Showing understanding for bad behaviour is not excusing bad behaviour. Conflating the two is disingenuous, unintelligent, and dangerous.
The impossibility of free will does not mean a free pass for mistakes and crimes. I hope to illustrate this sufficiently by the end of this article.
Why free will is impossible
Despite our imagined greatness, humanity’s available means of communication are hopelessly ineffective. We use the same words, even clearly defined and agreed-upon, but the loaded meaning attached to those words is vastly different.
For example, take the words “anarchy” or “capitalism”, and good luck having a constructive debate using either of them. You can’t because, when we hear ‘anarchy & capitalism’, one understands ‘chaos & corporatism’, and another ‘freedom & property rights’. So, while both sides have the same, valid concerns and intentions, they assume they are in opposition because they have simply attached different nuances to words.
People don’t use words dispassionately; we instead associate each word with the feelings, personal experiences, and subjective meaning we each attach to them — arbitrarily, no less. All this cannot be contained in a dictionary definition. So, words are not as objective as we’d like them to be.
This is why people are “biased”: We’ve just happened to have lived through different life experiences which have shaped our perception, our cognitive processing algorithms, our mental architectures, our neural pathways, whatever you want to call it.
You can’t help the way your brain reacts to hearing a word, because this is how your brain has been shaped by genetics and random, early-life experiences.
Your tastes, inclinations, personality traits — all of these prove the non-existence of free will. The way you process information, the value you attach to things as you weigh them before making a decision, is also determined by your ingrained psychodynamics and external conditions — both of which are beyond your awareness, let alone control.
This is why people make vastly different decisions: if we were all free to will, we’d all decide to make the same exact choices, and we’d all aim to be the same. If you have a distinct personality, then that distinction constitutes your will unfree.
The fact that you have a distinct personality goes to show that you have no free will: you are subjected to what your brain patterns dictate. And that’s a good thing: if you had “free will” without any biological or psychological imperatives, there would be nothing to define you as a distinct individual; you’d be everyone and no one. Just nothing.
And here’s the problem:
Whenever I state “there is no free will”, most people hear “I am not responsible for brutalising, therefore I get a free pass for doing so, since I can’t be blamed for my inclinations.” Understandably so, they react with feelings of vulnerability and fear to someone whom they perceive as promoting the justification of crime. Thus, they respond with vitriol to my statement; they have no choice — no free will — to do otherwise. See the reversal here?
Free will =/= Accountability
I wish people could comprehend the fact that free will and accountability are mutually exclusive.
Free will and accountability are two completely different concepts, and they have nothing to do with each other.
Free will is not a prerequisite to accountability; this false notion is a byproduct of the lawyer cult, whereby they plead insanity in court to absolve monsters.
Yes, they may have no choice in being monsters, but they are monsters nonetheless, and we have no choice but to respond to them in kind.
A force of nature has no mind of its own, but we still need to defend against it.
Every single serial killer and rapist is insane. There is no denying this claim, and I shouldn’t have to prove it. Yes, these people do not have free will, since their insanity is behind the wheel of their actions.
But so what? Does it mean they should be free to roam the streets? Does it mean we shouldn’t know who they are? Does it mean we shouldn’t defend ourselves against them? Does this mean we shouldn’t hold them accountable despite their lack of free will?
A beast in the wild can and will tear us apart limb from limb. It has no free will in the matter. Its behaviour is 100% dictated by its biological imperatives; don’t take its attacks personally.
Regardless, you must defend yourself against a wild beast, whether it’s acting on free will or not. If it attacks you, you attack back. If it poses a danger to your community, you hunt it down and kill it, or you at least fence your community.
In civilised societies, whenever a pet attacks a human, it is put to death. We understand that the pet has no free will; it just obeys its instinct, its biological imperatives. This is why we don’t blame the pet, but we do hold it accountable. We also have no free will in how we respond to danger.
Malicious people have no free will in how they brutalise us, but similarly, we have no free will in how we feel, how we respond to them.
Accountability without free will
We have no free will in our choices, but we are responsible for them. Why? Because someone has to be. All the mistakes you make in life are a direct consequence of psychodynamics beyond your control, even when you have some control over your environment. How you choose to control your environment is still determined by your predetermined psychodynamics. You had some control over your environment, but you didn’t have control over how you evaluated and assessed your situation, or yourself.
For example, imagine you are born tall and gorgeous, with good, empowering parents in a wealthy, peaceful environment. You’ll have a great life. If you don’t, then it means something happened to you that derailed you. Nobody chooses misery willingly. And if they incline to the dramatic, that inclination is not of their choosing.
If you’re blessed in life, do you earn any of your blessings when the vast majority of people have none of that? No, you didn’t earn anything. You didn’t choose your blessings. They fell on your lap.
Does being randomly blessed mean we should deprive you of your random blessings, as evil, spiteful, envious socialism suggests we should? Does it mean that, when you’re tall, we should cut off your legs to get you down to average height? Does it mean that, when you inherit wealth, we should steal it to make things “equal”? No.
Your unearned blessings are yours, and so are your undeserved curses.
So, despite the nonexistence of free will, you are still accountable because you are the only one who must suffer or enjoy the consequences of your choices. Despite not having deserved your blessings or curses, you inevitably receive people’s responses to you and your actions.
Why?
Because they have no free will in how they respond to you, either. If you’re born with a stunning appearance, people can’t help but find you physically attractive, and vice versa. They have no free will in how they perceive your physical attraction.
Regardless, the pleasure from your blessings and the suffering from your misfortune are yours.
You get to enjoy your unearned blessings because you also get to suffer your undeserved curses.
The importance of this distinction
You might say that I’m just arguing semantics, that I don’t need to deny free will if I keep accountability. But there is a subtle and important nuance to this.
When you deny the existence of free will, while keeping accountability, you gain a few benefits:
First, denying free will keeps you grounded. You understand that you are not owed undeserved credit for your random blessings, on top of being lucky enough to enjoy them. This is why insisting on free will is the gateway to narcissism: lack of acknowledgement of and gratitude for your luck. No, it wasn’t your “hard work” or your “superior” decision-making skills. Your hard work and decisions still depend on the opportunities presented to you first. And your intelligence in making “the right choices” is still a random blessing not of your choosing — you deserve no additional credit for being fortunate enough to have it.
Second, denying free will keeps us from blaming people for their misfortune, on top of them having to suffer it. Not blaming does not mean absolution for crimes. It is also not an encouragement of victimhood privilege. It’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation. It’s not an absolution; it’s compassion, understanding, and acknowledgement of extenuating circumstances.
Accountability without self-blame is empowering.
Blaming someone and holding them accountable are two different things. Ironically, evoking “free will” to blame someone is the most deterministic/fatalistic thing you can suggest: You basically imply that they had absolute freedom to choose anything, yet they chose the mistake. This makes them identify with their mistakes. And the more they identify with bad behaviour, the more they will seek it to validate their identity. You can thank yourself and your blaming for promoting bad behaviour.
Instead, granting them the benefit of the doubt that they could have done better under slightly different circumstances helps them visualise themselves as someone better. This is the only way to rehabilitate people: granting them some credit for their misfortune, and helping them identify those unfair circumstances. If you deny them their dire conditions, they will never acknowledge them, and they will never work to separate their identity from them.
You see this with certain groups who dwell in victimhood. They are blamed instead of being held accountable. So, blame becomes their identity. Thus, basking in victimhood becomes identity-validation, a source of gratification.
Help them see they are caged lions with massive potential, but unfair circumstances. This is the only chance they have to free themselves, if possible. If you convince them that there never were any unfair circumstances holding them back, then they assume they have nothing to work towards. Congratulations for kicking people when they’re down.
Certain individuals may not deserve better, but they didn’t deserve not deserving.
Third, denying free will takes away all meaning from the abuses you receive. When we are abused, especially as children but also as adults, we assign meaning to the abuse we get; we treat ourselves as if we deserved it. When we are subject to abuse (whatever form that takes), then our innocent inner child naively concludes that we must deserve the abuse.
The greatest damage from being abused is not the abuse itself but what we conclude afterwards; this is why humans are more easily traumatised than animals. The meaning is more hurtful than the pain of the abuse. And to illustrate the point, consider that a rape is more traumatic to you than a boxing match or a visit to the dentist, even though the latter examples may include sharper physical pain (technically). But the pain of the abuse is not the trauma that scars and haunts you inside.
The trauma comes from the meaning we attribute to abuse, as if we see ourselves through the eyes of our abusers, and hate ourselves the way they hate us. We semi-consciously think, “If someone treats me this way, then I must have deserved it.”
But if you take away your abuser’s free will and instead see them as a mindless force of nature that just happened to befall upon you, then you lessen the impact of the trauma they cause you.
Think about it: If you randomly hit your head on the door, and it causes X amount of pain, you’ll laugh it off. If someone slaps you in the head, on the same spot, causing the exact amount of pain, then you will be shocked: psychological trauma, fear, anxiety, feelings of self-loathing. This is because we grant agency to our abusers, and thus their ill intent toward us becomes meaningful. If you deprive them of their free will and agency, and instead see them as a mindless, will-less, random occurrence, then whatever they do against you bears no meaning for you. This doesn’t mean letting them off the hook; you still need to protect yourself from mindless forces of nature. What it does mean, however, is that when you deny the free will of your abusers, you strip away the negative meaning of their abuses.
Fourth, when you deny free will, you understand your abusers and your enemies — you see what led them there, and why they behave in such an abhorrent way. When you can explain — not excuse — their abuses against you, you gain a defensive and a negotiating advantage. You are thus more likely to find a feasible middle ground rather than waste yourself in a pointless war of attrition. And when that isn’t possible, you are better equipped to defend yourself. ‘Know your enemy’ is the first principle of all strategies.
Simply “explaining” bad behaviour as “free will” doesn’t provide you with any useful insight; it blinds you to useful information about how you can defend yourself against abuse, but more importantly, how you can prevent abuse.
Extenuating circumstances
Sometimes, people don’t perform as well in life. Comparing them to overachievers is kicking people when they’re down. Everyone deserves the credit for their extenuating circumstances; this is what civilised societies do. Even the worst criminal deserves them; not to let them off the hook or to legitimise their crimes, but to humbly admit that, under similar conditions, anyone — including you — could have done the same, if not worse.
We show respect to disabled people because we acknowledge the limitations in their lives, limitations not of their choosing. We respect them for having such burdens and still making the most of life. We respect them because we don’t know how well we would manage such limitations.
Denying people their limitations is a lack of appreciation for your fortune, or at least, a lack of misfortune.
People do have true disabilities in life — disabilities not of their choosing. It would be heartless to scream in their face: “It’s all free will! You chose this! Don’t make excuses!”
It would be insane to expect a man or woman in a wheelchair to have the same accomplishments in life as an able-bodied person.
The same goes for mental disability. I knew a woman who had been routinely raped by her grandfather as a child — everyone in her family knew and never spoke up, never lifted an arm to protect her. I knew another woman who was brutally beaten by her father when she was a toddler. He regularly banged her head on the wall, resulting in irreversible brain damage. I knew a guy who was raped by his neighbour (a police officer, no less) when he was 5 years old. Let’s just say their lives didn’t turn out to be the 90s-sitcom American suburban dream. And it takes immense cruelty to claim “they freely willed” their path.
And then there’s the fortunate, those who were spared misfortune and enjoyed the fortune of a safe, encouraging upbringing; no trauma, no struggle, no insecurity growing up. Instead, protection, guidance, encouragement, help, and love. If you don’t excel under such circumstances, then it means you suffered such a misfortune at some point that nullified the effect of your blessings: not an excuse, but an explanation.
People who observe suffering and claim it was “free will” do so because they are so petrified of the possibility that suffering could any day befall them. So they make up the fairytale of “free will”, this way deluding themselves that suffering will never come their way.
Comparing yourself to those who were dealt a bad hand in life — not of their choosing — is as petty as an adult going all out in a football match against toddlers. Pathetic. Petty. Unfair.
“Free will” is, in fact, determinism
Ironically, insisting on free will is the most fatalistic thing you can do.
Why?
Because when you convince people that they had absolute free will in their misfortune, unaffected and unswayed by their circumstances, they then conclude that they knowingly chose (and preferred) to be miserable. What do you think that does to them? They will thus identify with their misfortune, since they assume they supposedly “willed” to be miserable. And they will seek identity validation, thus plunging themselves into a vortex of self-destruction.
Conversely, if you show them understanding — if you recognise that the things that led to their misfortune were beyond their control — you begin to separate them from their dire circumstances. You help them make a distinction between their true self and the external circumstances not of their choosing. You separate their true self from their self-destructive persona.
Helping people
People still have to live with their misfortune, because someone has to; this is what accountability is. They can’t transfer their misfortune onto others, even though they didn’t deserve it. No one does. But if you help them distinguish between who they are and the random circumstances of their external environment, you empower them. This might be the only and greatest help you can provide.
When you acknowledge people’s unfavourable circumstances, you help them see that their failings do not define them. When you insist that they freely willed their misery, you help them identify with their misery. And this causes even more misery. What does that make you, then?
Insisting on free will and over-accountability is the most disempowering thing you can do; so is treating people with special treatment and privileged victimhood status. These are two horseshoe extremes. The helpful thing to do is to separate people’s identities from the things beyond their control.
Recognise that there are very few things under our control, if any. Even the things you technically control are under your thumb only because of circumstances that you never controlled in the first place.
There is no free will. There can be no free will.
Claiming you did well in life because you “willed” better is a confession of fatalism: you admit you were already endowed with a stronger will and better decision-making.
The aim is not to blame but to empower
You choose to hold yourself accountable because then you have power and control over your decisions. When you recognise where you had control over your life, you see where you had and have power.
But be cautious of over-accountability for things beyond your control. This leads to blame, guilt, and a sense of powerlessness. Imagine holding yourself accountable for things beyond your control, things you could never work to worsen or improve.
Ironically, toxic motivators seek to hold you accountable for things beyond your control, so that they render you controllable. If you hold yourself accountable for things beyond your control, accountability is twisted into blame and self-loathing, which then makes you easy to manipulate. This is what the evil of ‘original sin’ is all about. All organised religions (including statism) are nothing but scams.
If it is beyond your physical and mental capacity, then you are not responsible. If you hold yourself accountable for things beyond your control (even theoretical), then you begin to blame yourself instead of being accountable. Thus, you feel hopelessly powerless and guilty for nothing. Original sin, climate alarmism, and the sick concept of “superspreader” are all about manipulating you to submit you.
True accountability is your greatest strength: it shows you where you have power. Over-accountability, however, makes you hopeless: you end up blaming yourself over things beyond your control or responsibility.
Acknowledging the things beyond your control is not for gaining victimhood privilege or an entitlement to unearned handouts. It’s about focusing on the things you can truly control, and not wasting time and energy hating yourself for things you can’t.
Recognising your powerlessness is about forgiving yourself, not absolving yourself.
True accountability
People have a confused sense of accountability, understandably so. Ironically, the same people holding themselves accountable for things beyond their control don’t hold themselves accountable for things they objectively can control. They blame themselves for “original, by-default sins”, but they don’t acknowledge their complicity in the atrocities of war, centralised government, and paedophile politicians they keep empowering with their vote.
I tell people that dictators don’t kill themselves. Killing, brutalisation, rape, and enslavement are conducted by their loathsome military and police, who then have the gall to cry, “But I was just following orders!” Well, the dictators claim, “But they carried out my orders”, or “They gave me the power to do those things they wanted.” Who is responsible here? Who is to blame? In matters of arbitrary power structures, power comes from the foundation, the bottom. No power structure is possible without a sufficient base. No dictatorship is sustainable without a critical mass of people desperately wanting it. No disgusting influencer can reach their status without an even more disgusting following who applaud their disgustingness.
I tell people that, if you support the notion of government, then you can’t complain about the inalienable traits and inevitable consequences of centralised power, which are always corruption and war. Centralised power has every incentive to use and abuse itself; otherwise, it ceases to be relevant. “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” think people in power, and they are right. And yes, we can have decentralised government, which, in many areas of our lives, we already do; but this is another subject. My point here is that we, as a whole, prefer centralised power, with all the war and organised pedophilia that power structures bring. We freely willed this. Where is our accountability?
Objections to accountability
People misunderstand and get defensive — I’m not holding you accountable to blame you. I’m holding you responsible for empowering you.
“With great power comes great responsibility” is false. It’s the opposite: “With great responsibility comes great power.”
Why?
Because when you acknowledge where you had or have control over your dire circumstances, then you begin to seize that control. When you always point fingers, guess what: you give them the power over you. You can’t control what you think is under the control of others.
Shared responsibility
Sure, you don’t always have responsibility for or power over certain things — fair enough. And it’s truly disempowering to hold yourself responsible for things you aren’t responsible for.
And often you have shared responsibility with billions of people, so you are practically powerless. Still, if we began to hold ourselves accountable on principle alone, then enough people — a critical mass — could make a difference. You can’t disempower centralised government by depriving it of your vote alone; this is why many people fall for the “lesser evil” fallacy. But a vote is your approval of evil nonetheless. If you deprive it of your vote out of principle alone, then more may follow.
The trick is to see your role in a given situation, assuming you do have a role — realistically speaking. And once you see it and humbly recognise it, your mind suddenly begins to think of solutions, even the tiniest contribution to improvement.
Blinding yourself to explanations makes you vulnerable
Here is a video of a total psychopath randomly butchering an innocent woman on the street. You don’t have to watch it. It’s just one of those instances where a total psycho erupts, commits an atrocity, and we get to feel righteously outraged — the ecstasy of indignation — as we play the blame game without seeing how we contribute to such an issue.
I am in no way making excuses for this monster. On the contrary, in a stateless world, he would have been dealt with much more efficiently, effectively, and fairly. If the community is forced to pay for his prison expenses for a few decades before he’s unleashed into it, I don’t call this fairness. Read ‘Punishing criminals in the absence of a state’ for context.
Why do I use this atrocious example? Because I want to make a point about explanations. This person is mentally broken, likely the result of bad genetics or immense child abuse. This is not an excuse for his crime. This is an explanation. We still hold him accountable because we refuse to live in a society with such people roaming the streets. But when we identify explanations, we learn how we can prevent or even anticipate such acts. If you refuse to examine this person’s explanations, you make yourself vulnerable.
Finger-pointing around this example includes politicians, poverty, corporations, misogyny, race, ethnicity, religion, and every other symptom that blinds us to actual causes.
This individual has no excuses, which means he must pay for his crime (in a decentralised governance model, he would have been executed by the end of the day, rightfully so)
Without excusing or justifying this criminal, if we deny him his explanations — he was severely abused as a child — then as a society, we miss a chance to realise how detrimental child abuse can be for everyone, not just the victims. We lose sight of how unsafe we all become when we allow others (and ourselves) to abuse children.
Every single psychopath was severely abused as a child. This is not an excuse or a justification; this is an explanation, not to spare them punishment, but to spare us future occurrences of psychotic behaviour. When we hide behind the illusion of free will, we miss the opportunity to identify what caused harm, and we thus can’t think of ways to avoid those causes.
Child abusers create monsters like this. Understanding this grants us some responsibility and a lot of power.
Yelling, spanking, neglecting, and enmeshing children are also forms of child abuse. And most parents make excuses for these atrocities.
Read “The Origins of War in Child Abuse” by Lloyd DeMause. This is not excusing or justifying war; it is explaining it in hopes of averting it.
If there’s truly zero free will, then accountability has to be about consequences and behavior not blame. But if you’re using “no free will” to dodge responsibility, then the idea collapses.