Seed Drills And Fate: Part 2

[Note #1: My last post rambled about things that are within your control and things that aren’t. Now I’ll elaborate about choice and free will. Is not the new year a time to think?]

Regardless of the outcome, it feels better to have made a choice than be a victim of external forces.

Whenever you can, you ought to make your own decisions. It’s unwise to take the easy path and “let it slide”. Pretty soon someone else will have taken over the decision. This absolves you of responsibility but also makes you a less complete human.

From the minute you failed to make your own decision, you lost some personal control. Whomever made the decision gained control. They will not and cannot (even if they mean well) make the right choice for you. They’ll make the decision that aggregates their own power, wealth, authority, and control. Your reaction will be only one among the many to which the choice is applied (or inflicted). Thus your preference will be irrelevant, inconvenient, and ignored. If this happens too much, you’ll be miserable.

[Note #2: I intended to use car purchases and homestead gear as examples. However, there’s a topic that steamrolls all else. It can’t be ignored. My muse walloped me with a 2″x4″ and forced me to address the elephant in the room. My muse is a hard ass.]

Lets consider one of the most personal choices a human can make. “There is a new illness and an associated new experimental injection. Both have uncertain parameters. Do I get an injection or do I not get an injection?”

I faced that decision. You did too. What a special time to be alive! All of humanity had a moment when God (or fate) gave each and every one of us a clear experiment in the exercise of or absence of free will. How did your experiment work out?

It’s a classic binary decision; almost like something out of a textbook. There’s no middle ground with an injection; you either got the shot or you didn’t. Also, injections are “forever”; like losing your virginity.

So, did you make a decision? I did! Many others did too. Sadly, a tragic majority let the decision happen to them. How did it work out? Let’s examine ways it could play out:

Everyone who really deeply truly wanted the shot got the shot. They are happy.

Because they got what they wanted, they are happy. They will continue being happy. Whether the shot worked or not is practically irrelevant.

Why wouldn’t a pro-vax person be happy? It just makes sense. They got what they wanted. They were first in line. They got the shot long before governments started forcing them on people. It didn’t cost a dime! They were treated as heroes. They got to post on social media about how they’d heroically, awesomely, gotten the new thing. (Note: I’m talking here entirely about their choice and only their choice. Other factors, such as a widespread abhorrent behavior toward people with different preferences is a different can of worms.)

When a person stampedes to get the thing they most desire it’s still an internal locus of control. They felt in control. That’s why people who really wanted the vax are still happy to have the vax.

Even if it’s not working out as it was marketed, the fact that they got what they wanted is basically all that matters. If they subsequently got covid, they’re still happy. If they subsequently got covid twice, they’re happy. They’ll be happy no matter how many times they get covid. Even if they had a bad reaction, got covid twice, watched acquaintances suffer even worse reactions, someone keyed their car at the parking lot when they got their fourth booster, and their left testicle imploded for no reason… they’re still happy.

They. Got. What. They. Wanted.

I don’t try to change the mind of people who eagerly wanted the shot. So long as they leave me alone, it’s all good. I’m glad for them. They made a choice of their own free will. It’s none of my business if it differs from my preferences. If people who wanted the vax had extended the same courtesy to me we could be the best of friends.

Think about the opportunity we lost! There could have been a world where the people who stampeded for the shot could have been good friends when the ones who never got the shot. A world full of humble, mature, intelligent, kind people would have played out peacefully and in a spirit of goodwill.

Of course it didn’t happen and the reason is that people suck. Many people are narcissistic, immature, unintelligent, and cruel. That’s why things went off the rails. A planet filled with better people wouldn’t have turned a simple medical issue into a totalitarian shitstorm but we don’t live on that planet.

For the folks that got the shot, their happiness is cemented in stone. Further information is unlikely to change their opinion. Every bit of new information will be filtered through a mind that wanted the shot and also can’t change even if they wanted to. They’ve got the vax it indelibly in their veins for life.

It is almost impossible for them to be affected by contrary sources and experiences. Near-dead NFL players, spooky actuarial charts, happy healthy Amish communities, swarms of homeless that seem oddly unaffected, the unvaxxed neighbor that’s doing just fine… these are likely to be dismissed. It almost has to be. It’s in their damn veins, it’s not going away. It’s very hard to change your mind about a big decision that you willingly made and can never change later on.

This is hard for folks on the anti-vax side to recognize. Let it go. It’s part of what makes life interesting. The world is filled with people who make decisions I can’t understand. Face tattoos, disco, EV trucks, and $300,000 degrees in puppetry are all decisions. So long as nobody forces it on me; I’m cool with it. (You’ll note that politics tries to force me into supporting EV trucks and paying for someone else’s student loans. That’s why government pisses people off. I can only assume Federally subsidized face tattoos are somewhere in the most recent omnibus bill. Why not?)

You can see this confidence in their decision very easily. When someone who got a vaccine (a thing formerly defined in terms of immunity) subsequently gets covid they’ve got a go-to answer; “Imagine how much worse it would be if I didn’t get the shot.” Short of death (and maybe not even then) they’ll be happy. That’s how the human mind works.

So, if people who wanted the vax are happy because they got the vax, what about the other side. Are people who didn’t want the vax happy if they didn’t get it? Tune in for the next post.