It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. And yet every age believes the opposite — that it thinks its way into its conditions, rather than being thought by them.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. And yet — a ghost in this machine — there remains the individual who refuses the mold of his era, who thinks against the grain of his own formation.
The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.
The universe is not a prison, nor yet a playground; it is a loom, and we are simultaneously the shuttle and the thread. What we call fate is only pattern seen from outside.
The universe is a series of collapsed probabilities. What we call history is merely the thread that happened to hold — and we mistake the thread for the loom.
Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you.
Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.
Her new book is a heartfelt, subtly argued response to his question, an attempt to outline how our expanding knowledge of what makes people do bad things – the interplay of our inherited tendencies and our life circumstances – should influence how we assign moral responsibility and blame.
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
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