"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny..."

No politics tonight, no call to action, no liberal rants. Instead, a question: To what extent do we control our destiny, and to what extent does our destiny control us?

As you may have noticed, I don't blog much anymore. There are several reasons for this, none of which I am going to go into now. I prefer to do memes these days; if nothing else, they encourage brevity. But of late my memes have gotten longer, and this one just plain got away from me; my brevity has deserted me. So rather than edit the shit out of this piece, I decided to dust off the old blog. I suppose that in the future I'll continue to post memes to Facebook and occasionally post something to this blog, as the mood strikes me.  

We tend to use words like destiny and fate to excuse ourselves for the things we do that we are driven to do by our baser natures. When the consequences of acting on these natures would otherwise overwhelm our conscience, we tend to claim that such things would have happened anyway, that they are the result of forces beyond our power to control and we cannot be held responsible for them.

This is, of course, bullshit. We invoke such nonexistent "powers" to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of whatever we felt we had to do to achieve an end, an end that we then claim as our destiny to achieve, regardless of means.

The truth, the truth that we so often deny, is that there are no "forces beyond our control" acting to create the harm that may result from our actions. Or rather, it is we ourselves that constitute a force beyond our control. And that's the problem; we do not control our actions because we have created the concepts of fate and destiny to excuse ourselves. In other words, we have no control because we refuse to take the responsibility for controlling ourselves.

If we are to wrest control back from whatever unseen nonentity to which we have surrendered it, we have to first admit to ourselves that we are solely responsible for our actions, that we are beings of free will and we ourselves must bear the blame, and make whatever restitution may be necessary, for any consequences that may arise from the things we do.

Fate and destiny, if they indeed exist, will happen whether we want them to or not. I have seen no evidence that anyone knows them in advance, and when people talk about them it tends to be as an excuse for doing something that is necessary to achieve their desire, hang the consequences, and whether they admit that desire or not.

Perhaps it is such desires from which we truly need to free ourselves. Perhaps the best way to avoid doing harm with our headlong rush toward this "destiny" thing would be to control, if not conquer, whatever desire is driving us. Perhaps we should let fate and destiny look after themselves; they will, in any case. 

The Blues Viking

The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.