Where did you go, Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Drove my parents to the airport this morning, early. Rain, slush, snow, truck exhaust and fog all mixed to make the road fairly treacherous. The first day of December in northern Ohio… it’s so cold and wet out there right now that I fear going home at lunch (or maybe I just will stay put once there)!

Why am I so cranky lately… for the past week or so I have felt as if I’m actually running off of bile, not blood. Put me under your thumb and press down. Free will, I’m thinking about this notion of free will. Going through my day in a kind of cloaked orbit, the gravitational pull of work, of attending to my duties here, the pull of home in the evening, a warm dinner, cleaning up, the gravity of a run or a book or a movie… which part is the exercising of a free will, who says words with my mouth? I don’t really need to be doing any of this. The choices I make (perhaps) are controlled at a most basic level by my material wants. (Excluding, of course, Vipassana.)

Would you go to work in the morning if you had no need for (at minimum) a house, food to eat, clothing to dress yourself in? What if you could get those things for free, would you go to work then? Or would you be driven to appear by your desire for a new car, cable television, a designer handbag, that latest gadget, gizmo, widget. Or maybe you’d show up if you were 100 percent materially satisfied. Maybe you go to work out of a sense of spiritual or emotional satisfaction… (and if you do, brother, post a comment and we’ll talk…) Maybe you feel inspired by your work, like it compliments your need to feel like a productive, important member of society.

Free will popped into my brain because this morning, driving back from the airport, by myself, I had the NPR news cranked. A story played about a policy in the Netherlands, in some hospitals there; the doctors apparently euthanize people who have a diminished free will, including babies born with terminal illnesses and the mentally disabled. This is something that has great potential for going way too far, and it frightens the crap out of me.

Is mental free will the same as material free will? Can there really even be a mental free will? I have my doubts… we are socialized so early and so often (yes, even you non-tv watchers have been acclimated). My brain is mostly a box full of bright shiny objects that I picked up off the street, with just a few seashells I instinctively knew would be good for me. So’s yours, kiddo.

For now, I have to go. My boss won’t f#%&ing leave me alone this morning. More later.