Episode 3 - INTERPLAY BETWEEN CAPACITY AND CHOICE

In this episode we explore the idea that we are each born with a predetermined capacity or potential and that what matters isn’t the amount of potential we have but how much of it we actualize by actively exercising our free will.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we explore the idea that we're each born with a predetermined capacity or potential, and that what matters isn't the amount of potential we have, but how much of it we actualize by actively exercising our free will. Today is the first episode in the new year in 2021. And so I thought that I would share some reflections with you on the topic of free will choice. It's an exciting topic. Many of us make New Year's resolutions at the beginning of the year, and it would be fun to kind of examine what it means to conceive of a different world, what does it mean to choose something different, and the power of choice. So let me begin by saying that there is a very close interplay between the concept of free will choice and capacity. As we know, let's start with ourselves as individuals. When we think ourselves of our lives as individuals, we know that each of us is born, it seems with a preordained capacity, a preordained measure of potential. This becomes obvious when you look at members of a family. You will see that some children are more adept at mathematics and yet another sibling in the family will be really poor at maths but then great at English or will be very good at sports and another will be good at music. So you see that even children who are raised in the same surroundings under the same conditions seem to manifest a different aptitude for various things. We also noticed that not only the kind of aptitude we have, in other words, what, what is it we're good at, is different, but the amount of capacity we have in any given area is also different. And in fact, you see this even with qualities like patience or generosity. Some people seem to have an easier time being patient and others really struggle with it. And others have a hard time being generous, some have an easier time of it and so on. Now, some people you'll see have the capacity of a teaspoonful in a certain area, while others have the capacity of a cup, or a bucket, or a river, and some seem to have endless capacity in certain areas. So essentially, we see differences in capacity between individuals both in terms of the kind of capacity, in other words, what it is we're good at, and the quantity, or the amount of capacity. Now, just as individuals have a preordained measure of capacity, I believe that when we look at the human race as a collective whole, we too have a particular amount of potential, which we can choose to develop or not. Now, the important thing about capacity is not so much how much we have and whether we have it, but what we make of it. In other words, how much of this capacity do we actualize, that we do we manifest and do something with? In order to actualize potential, the tool that's required is the tool of volition. or the exercise of free will choice in a very intentional manner. And here we start to see the intersection of capacity with free will choice. So let's examine this concept of free will choice because it will inform us as to what we might do going forward in 2021 as a human race. If we've decided that we don't like where we are now, we don't like what we've been doing so far, the choices we've been making that have gotten us to this point with the pandemic, with the economic recession, with the competition between countries, with the rise of nationalism and xenophobia and social injustice as manifested in racism and prejudice against all kinds of people. Prejudice based on gender, based on education, based on wealth. If we don't like where it's gotten us, then we can choose in any given moment to start making changes and making adjustments so that our trajectory changes and so that our future will be different. And by the way, very small shifts in choices can have huge effects in terms of where we end up. Alright, so let's look at this concept of free will choice. The famous 20th century psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, speaks a lot about free will choice. And he refers to it as a spiritual freedom. And he says that free will choice is really the thing that defines human beings. And that demonstrates to us that we truly have an independence of mind. And it is the thing, says Viktor Frankl, that gives our lives purpose and meaning. Now let's unpack this a little. The first thing we notice is that free will choice is really a gift that has been given to humanity. as distinct from other realms of creation, the mineral kingdom, the animal world, and the vegetable world. They are more subject to the laws of nature and they have to abide by them. Human beings, on the other hand, have been given this amazing ability, the power to conceptualize and the power to imagine something different. And therefore we can learn the secrets of nature, harness the laws of the physical world in order to achieve things that the animal and vegetable kingdoms can't even dream of. I was going to say can only dream of, but they can't even dream of it. A bird can't conceive of the idea of plummeting into the ocean and living for prolonged periods of time underwater as human beings do in submarines. The lion cannot imagine the idea of soaring into the air and getting from Africa to Asia or Europe or South America in an airplane. Yet human beings, because of this incredible, dual power of the ability to conceptualize and imagine something and the power of free will choice have been able to do both. So that's the first thing to note, that this is truly an incredible gift and I think that we often underestimate it and don't give it its due. Now, Viktor Frankl says that free will choice really means that it is distinct from the conditions that we find ourselves exposed to or the circumstances in which we find ourselves. So he separates these two and makes the point that what free will choice lets us do is it lets us choose our reactions to circumstances, lets us choose how we're going to respond in any given situation. In other words, we're not slaves to our conditions and circumstances, no matter how awful they are. Now, he had plenty of experience with this, having been confined to a concentration camp in Europe during the Second World War. And he refers to those conditions as a laboratory. And he says, in this laboratory, we noticed that human beings were, behaved in one of two ways, human beings who were subject to the same awful conditions. Some of them chose to behave like swine, he said, and others chose to behave like saints. And here's the quote. He says we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine, while others behave like saints. And then he goes on to reflect and say that man and woman have both potentialities within themselves. Which one is actualized depends on decisions. So this is the power free will choice of exercising the power of volition, but not on conditions. And he gives a wonderful example. It has to do with the fact that the inmates in these concentration camps were every morning given each of them a small piece of bread, dried bread, that had to last them the whole day. He said that you could see the differences in how humans chose to deal with that reality. And the fact that some people would look to see who was in greater need than themselves and would share their dried piece of bread with others. On the other hand, you had the other extreme. People who would look to see when somebody turned their back for a second and then steal that little piece of bread from them. So this is one of the examples he gives of some people behaving like swine and others behaving like saints. Now, we are all familiar with situations in our personal lives, we've probably have seen this many times, when people subjected to the same conditions choose to react differently. So, an example that leaps to mind is the example of the children of alcoholic parents. And one sees this quite a lot, where one of the children in the family will decide that, oh gosh, this is such an awful thing. And this alcoholism within the family has been such a bane that I will never touch alcohol. And they stick to that decision that they make. And within the same family, you'll see another sibling who will decide to literally follow in the footsteps of the parent and themselves become afflicted with the disease of alcoholism and struggle with it and put their own families through similar trials and tribulations as they themselves have experienced. In my own life, I, I saw this play out firsthand when we lived for a number of years in Haifa, in Israel. We had a set of neighbors down below. They lived on the ground floor of our apartment building, and they had a vicious dog, whom they wouldn't muzzle. And every time I left in the morning to go to school with my little backpack, the gentleman who lived there would set this dog on me and have this dog chase me, barking, jumping on me and really terrifying me. And the guy's argument was "My family suffered in the Holocaust. I lost everybody. And since we suffered so much, since I've suffered so much, I want to make sure everybody tastes what suffering of this kind is like. And so I want to induce terror in you for your, for the whole day." So that was, That was his take, his family's experience. This is how he chose to react to it, make other people taste something similar. Now, on the other hand, we had another set of neighbors, also in the same building, who were extremely loving and whose family had also suffered equally in the Holocaust. And their takeaway from the same experience was to say, gee, you know, we know how terrible it is when human beings treat each other badly and in inhumane ways. And so we want to spend our lives making sure that we that nobody ever has to go through that kind of discrimination and suffering. And so they were unusually kind and friendly and loving. So here were two families who had suffered very similarly during the Holocaust in terms of losing all the members of their family, and yet their reactions, the choices they made, were different. Now we see this question of what kind of choice we make, play out when leaders or people in positions of influence get to make decisions that impact the lives of thousands or hundreds of thousands and millions of people. And the example that has always struck me that I want to share with you is the example of Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, and his wife, Winnie. So as you know, both of them were subjected to the atrocious injustices of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Both of them suffered a lot and they both started out believing that the answer to this suffering was to meet violence and injustice with violence. And in fact, Nelson Mandela was put into prison because he had started engaging in bomb making activities. He was charged, found guilty, and imprisoned for 27 years. While he was in prison, he went through an amazing process of transformation that he chose to go through. Through reflection, and reading, and contemplation, he completely changed his mindset. And he moved from a place of wanting vengeance, to a place where he recognized the humanity of the Whites who were oppressing the Blacks in South Africa. And he decided to forgive them for the atrocities that they had committed. And having changed his mindset, he decided to extend the hand of reconciliation to them. Forgive them, extend the hand of reconciliation, and choose to work with them to build a new united South Africa. Now, meanwhile, his wife Winnie remained stuck where she was, so to speak. She continued to hate the Whites all throughout and the actions she chose to take were based on violence and vengeance. She committed a lot of atrocities herself, including introducing the whole idea of necklacing, which was the idea of putting a rubber tire, filling it with gasoline, putting it around the necks of those who were believed to be working for the other side and setting them on fire. So these were viewed in her mind as traitors to the cause. So these two individuals, husband and wife, who suffered very similarly, under the same harsh conditions, made very different choices. And as a result of Nelson Mandela's choice, South Africa was able to avert what could have been a terrible civil war once he was released from prison and made president of the nation. He had a lovely saying about this whole idea of vengeance and resentment. He said, resentment is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die from it. So when we live our lives in resentment as to what has happened to us and all the injustices that have been inflicted on us, it really poisons our own systems and doesn't inflict the damage that we hope in a spirit of vengeance to inflict on others. So the question then returns, we come full scale back to the question of here we are standing today at January 2021. We have choices before us as a collective humanity. We know now that we have this amazing gift of free will. The question is how will we choose to use it during 2021? Will we start putting away the old mindsets and habits that have been so destructive and dysfunctional and start to create a new kind of world where For instance, a world in which our watchword instead of nationalism and xenophobia and political polarization and isolationism in a sense that in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, we can go it alone, each nation alone, each people alone, each ethnic group alone, despite all the evidence that that is not true, that we are, as we said in the first episode of this show, like 193 cabins on a ship as opposed to 193 separate boats. Will we continue with the old ways or will we replace our old mindsets and habits with ones that focus on what I call C cubed S, which is collaboration, cooperation, consultation, and solidarity. Imagine if we were to start with those four habits and start implementing them at all levels of society. Imagine what a very different world we might have. We have such incredible capacity as a human race. We have the capacity to bring forth amazing arts and music, make amazing inventions that can help us solve all kinds of problems, including our climate change problem. Imagine what would happen if we put aside the expenditure of energy we have made on producing and disseminating arms and instead took all those trillions of dollars spent annually and put them into research development to find alternative clean sources of energy in order to help countries and people adapt to the climate change that is already a given, in order to create health care systems where health care is available to everybody on an equal basis, in order to create educational systems, in order to meet our development goals that we're supposed to meet by the year 2030. Imagine if we just changed our mindset, and then redirected our energies into building an amazing, new, better world, as opposed to continuing along a destructive path, which is really the path of of perdition. It all depends on how we choose to exercise this gift of free will, which is an amazing gift, but first we need to recognize it and then utilize it. You'll remember we talked about in one of the earlier episodes, what the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. So the first step is to imagine what we can conceive, but then the second step is what we can achieve. And achievement comes from the application of free will choice in a very intentional manner. So to sum this concept up. I want to end by sharing a beautiful poem by an American poetess, and author who lived between 1850 and 1919. Her name was Ella Wheeler Wilcox. It's beautiful and really conveys this whole point very eloquently. It's called Tis the set of the sail, but to every mind there openeth away and way and away. A high soul climbs the highway, And the low soul gropes the low, And in between, on the misty flats, The rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth A highway and a low, And every mind decideth The way his soul shall go. One ship sails east and another west, By the selfsame winds that blow. Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales, that tells the way we go. Like the winds of the sea, are the waves of time, as we journey along through life. Tis the set of the soul that determines the goal and not the calm or the strife. So we are not the victims of the strife and the problems created by the COVID 19 pandemic or the economic recession or climate change. We get to choose. It is the set of the soul, our collective soul and our individual souls that determines the goal. That's the imagining where we want to end up, right? Imagining the destination, and then charting our path from where we are to where we want to be, bridging that gap. So it's been wonderful to spend another few minutes this afternoon with you. Before we we move on, I want to tell you again the exciting news. If you like this series essentially, I, I've written a book that is just, it's hot off the press. It's now on the market, available on Amazon, and it is called The Alchemy of Peace. Six essential shifts in our mindsets and habits to achieve world peace. And I hope that you will utilize it as a tool to have conversations with your friends on these kinds of topics. It lends itself really well to book clubs, conversations, things like that. And I'm really excited about it. It was writing this book that inspired me actually to start this video series with you all. I will now look at the comments and see. Thank you, Jamin. Thank you, Suraj. You're welcome, all of you. I don't know how to pronounce your name. I hope I'm not butchering it. Joe Ganey. So, Again, thank you all very much. So there's a question here from from Sylvia Ellison. A Truth and Reconciliation Committee was set up in South Africa, which was also part of Mandela's approach. How important is that to help a society forgive? So, I'm not an expert in this area, but my understanding is that it really took South Africans quite a distance in terms of being able to forgive. There are different arguments about the need to mete out justice, in other words, to punish those who are perpetrators of atrocities versus having a forum in which people can come and air their grievances and have the perpetrators there and have the perpetrators apologize as so that they can then move forward. So it's wonderful. We need to have more creative endeavors like this to think about new ways of helping societies move on and forgive as opposed to reach to our old habits. Our knee jerk reaction is always to punish, imprison, and throw away the key, and not rehabilitate. But when we do that, as we've seen also in the United States, we don't actually move the ball forward and our prison populations just get bigger and bigger and we don't actually solve the problems at the root cause. So I think it is a very important piece in helping a society forgive. Thanks for your question, Sylvia. Question from Jamin Zacharias. What approach do you take to avoiding or bringing elevation to polarized topics? That's a brilliant question. I'm so glad you asked it. So I live in a country, the United States, where things as we all know, are extremely polarized. So this is how I've approached these conversations, because I think it's important to have conversations. Some of us have stopped having conversations, because we're so fearful that it will lead to discord and argumentation. And so we figure, Oh, just stay out of the fray. Again, that doesn't move the ball forward and doesn't help us create an understanding. So what I propose and what I've experimented with that seems to work is the following. First, I make it clear when I enter into conversations with friends or colleagues or even family, that I do not belong to any particular political party. So I have no agenda. I have no vested interest. I'm not trying to argue for one side or the other. So that's the first thing. The second thing I do is bring a genuine and authentic curiosity to the conversation. And I start by asking people, what is it that keeps you up at night? Because one thing that's become very clear to me is that the reason people are so polarized is that they feel very strongly about something that they're very concerned about. Often it's a bunch of fears. Now, we may look at someone's fears and say, well, those fears are unfounded. That's just silly. But that means that we're judging them. Entering these conversations without an agenda and without judgment and with the genuine, authentic desire to understand the other as a human to human, as a soul to soul, is critical. And people pick up on that very quickly. I mean, they know whether you are in a mode of judgment, even if you don't articulate, use words that are judgmental, they can feel it from us. And I'm genuinely interested in finding out what is it that is worrying people so much? What is it that is causing so much fear? What are the fears? What are the concerns? Because I think once we're able to flesh this out, and they exist on both sides of the political spectrum or several sides, surely We have the capacity, again back to capacity, as a human race, if we flush these concerns out and do it in a spirit of love, and non judgment to then find ways that address everybody's concerns and if need be to remove some of the misconceptions or the misinformation that is triggering some of the fear. Very often fears, especially fears that lead to prejudice, are founded on ignorance. We conceive of a group of people as being something, and as soon as we've labeled them, we think we understand what they are and that we don't have to explore any further. But once we remove the labels and we look to see, well, wait a minute, I don't really know this group. I don't socialize with them. I don't spend time with them. I haven't read their literature. I know so little about their history. Once we start again in the spirit of authenticity and the spirit of wanting to build unity, then I think that we can have these conversations and they will not be argumentative. And the final thing I do is that as soon as somebody tries to argue with me, I say, I'm not interested in arguing. Because arguments are not going to get us anywhere. It's not a question of competition and one upmanship. I'm not here to try to persuade you or convince you. I'm here to really have an open consultation. So back to the C3S, right? Consultation being one of the Cs. I hope that helped. All right, well, thank you very much for your time. I wish all of you a happy 2021, a safe one, and may this be the year when humanity chooses to make better, more constructive choices. So that we can collectively actualize our collective potential and create the environment in which we as individuals can actualize our individual potential. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.