Willpower is Neutral

What makes a person use their will to do something great or something terrible?

It’s like the big bang. We can trace it back through their memories, impressions, upbringing, karma, etc… when we attempt to focus in on point zero, we reach an impossibility of knowing. It’s impossible, it seems, to know every mystery of our existence and nonexistence.

Zoom out that far and the problem is it all becomes meaningless, and willpower used for terrible things are a shoulder-shrug. Who cares? Who cares if I do something good or bad if in 1,000,000 years back or forward we are all dust? What will it actually matter?

But–I still find myself using my willpower to create as much goodness as possible.

Is it instinct and animalistic survival behavior that I want to use my will to do great things and preserve and progress the human race? Or is a result of spiritual evolution? Is it a blossoming of genetics in a different direction when a human wants to destroy or harm others? Or is it the concept of evil making a lump under the sheets of human activity?

This blog post was one of wandering rather than answering. Willpower is neutral, yet without an objective central truth, we have nothing to which anchor neutrality and give it meaning.

A good rule of thumb I’ve learned: in the impossibility of knowing, act as if you know.