Autonomy Minus Self-Control Equals…
During a mock jury trial where my classmates and I read Albert Camus’ The Stranger to convict the main character of either first degree murder or manslaughter — wow, that’s a mouthful — I learned my opinions on autonomy were drastically different from my peers’. Thus, a 45-page essay was born!
Last we spoke, we began digging into patterns in our personal lives. To launch our Monday series, Choosing Chose Us, we must analyze autonomy further. If we can understand our patterns but cannot change them, then ignorance is truly a better existence! But it’s not, because we do have the power to change.
In reality, how effective is our autonomy? Let’s answer that question with an excerpt from the aforementioned essay…
> Trigger warning for genocide and descriptions of physical violence. Pain, even done unto others, can be hurtful and complex to think about. For a while, this was hard for me to write, let alone read, so I must respect each of you readers with this warning.
I believed Camus’ main character was guilty of manslaughter, but my argument against convicting him of first degree had this personal truth layered on top: to become conscious of one’s defensive impulses is not to regain control over them.
I recently went abroad with students, two chaperones, and the goal of learning more about the people living lives far from us. Around the fourth day of our first week in Cambodia, we visited the Killing Fields and walked the same trails where thousands of people had been murdered. Beneath branches and tree crowns, we peered into sinkholes where bodies were tossed for disposal. A butterfly ventured out of the trees to flutter by a tower filled with recovered skulls. At one point, I stepped in a line of ants. They must have climbed up because I felt hot pinches around my thighs on my way over to tree #8.
I fiddled with the keypad on my portable tour guide and listened. Static layered over a man’s voice as he described the purpose of the tree’s trunk: to crack the skulls of children brought from the detainment center.
My eyes flitted over the bark. My brother’s face came to mind, and I tried to imagine what I would do to save him. I imagined the man with his hands wrapped around my brother’s ankles and how I would rush him before he could swing his little body into the trunk. I pretended that would be enough, if I were in that situation. Then, I walked on.
On the ride to our next destination, I leaned my head against the bus seat in front of me and closed my eyes. My brother’s face morphed into that of a child I’d never seen before, and the hands wrapped around his ankles. Into darkness they dragged him, arms squeezing his belly. Behind a tree, up the dirt road, down into a cellar. Gone from this world.
If I’d had my phone, I would have called my family. They would know how to comfort me, or at the very least how to distract me from the waves of violence flooding my mindscape. The child couldn’t save himself and I did not watch his helplessness — I conjured it up. The hands were essentially mine, the arms mine, the image mine, the occurrence mine, the event mine. I couldn’t stop it. Of course I couldn’t, I was a writer. In all the hours of traveling on that bus and stewing in my own bile, it never crossed my mind that training my brain to avoid imagining might be in my best interest. I simply screamed “QUIET” at the needle of a broken record. The entire bus ride.
Our next destination was a preschool. Children grinned through square windows and I cringed. They ran up to me. I cowered. The visions replayed, and I knew the hands were not mine, but I needed to prevent a future I could not see by altering a present that would not lead there. Not if I could help it. That’s what my brain whispered, you see, between the arms and hands. That’s what my body told me as I recoiled on instinct from those children.
Not if I can help it.
Who’s to say Camus’ protagonist did not chant the same mantra when faced with perceived danger?
I say again, to become conscious of one’s defensive impulses is not to regain control over them. If only I had known how to go from consciousness to actively combating my fear back then, I would see the danger I perceived was never even there.
> End of trigger warning.
So there’s our answer: autonomy is only as effective as our self-control, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. Autonomy minus self-control equals untapped power over one’s circumstances.
A brick can be built into one’s worldview with a single event. Each stone of information is placed to form a mighty “Bias Empire.” Like any great empire, this structure is liable to fall — no matter how vast or (presumably) sound — if the right load-bearing stone is struck.
We can correct flawed patterns of thinking if we know what to reconstruct within ourselves AND have the resolve to do it.
As an individual, the beliefs I want to set in stone are constantly eroded by the water of this world, an unceasing river which I must use self-control to fight against. And I am only one human, the sole gatekeeper deciding what is allowed on my premises. Still, I am my gatekeeper. That’s a powerful role and I ought to act like it.
The Choosing Chose Us series is about making us all better gatekeepers. It’s about honing our tools to exercise our autonomy and controlling what we let influence our actions. And it’s about comforting our younger selves for all the battles they fought without understanding how much power they truly had.
