Is anyone here also thinking free-will is a meme?
Porky seems to base his entire moral and social order on the idea of merit vs guilt, saying proles are stupid and didn't work hard in school. But doing so they sweep under the rug the reasons some kids get through school very easily, meaning things such as intellectually-disposed parents vs parents who drop you on the couch with the TV on.
Marketing loves to bring up free-will as the choice of the products of consumption seem to define our true selves.
I've later found out that structural/historical deterministic explanations made more sense and had less risk to devolve into retarded conspiracy theories and it has really been my gateway into proper theory.
Free-will ideology and capitalism
I don't think free will is a meme, you can have agency within the constraints you find yourself in.
But neoliberal idea of "personal responsibility" for all the bad and good things that ever happen to you is very much a meme, aggressively forced one.
That's not contradictory. You have desire, it is oriented towards certain things, like a material situation or a symbolic one, like prestige.
But that orientation towards such or such thing is entirely grounded in a given historical situation and defined by the entirety of the encounters you have made in your past. Therefore, it is determined. Now you can re-evaluate things and knowledge is an important tool in properly orienting one's own desire, but agency is still going to oriented towards that thing and not that other one. The outcome couldn't be any different, just like each speck of dust in the desert couldn't have been anywhere else based on the laws of motion.
Freedom itself is not a meme, but willpower is basically a fascist fantasy. Whenever you hear people start talking about "just using your willpower" to do shit, it's usually some way to shame poor people, attributes everything to individual inner power instead of conditions. It's no coincidence the Nazis were obsessed with it, even making "Triumph of the Will."
Freedom is the ideal state we should aim for, it's not something achieved from the get go. People desire things but they don't know why they desire them.
I mean advertising is obscuring a pretty obvious truth.
That the commodities were already finished and transported to point of sale before you "chose" them.
So with this knowledge, what do we do?
Create a global planned economy with democratic control of production.
The constraints you find yourself in are the laws of physics which permit only determinism and randomness. There's no wiggle room for "free will". You have as much free will as a program running on a computer.