Commentary on Freedom

Freedom is an idea and a practice so that if a person believes they have it, then they actually have it.
The scientific determinists contend that freedom is but an illusion because science has discovered that every person's decisions and actions have been predetermined by evironmental and genetic factors. The psychoanalysts back up these claims by their uncanny abilities accurately to predict most of the decisions that their patients will make once the psychoanalyst has learned enough about a particular patient's personality.
In free countries like America, most people feel that they are free to go where they want, say what they want and do what they want as long as they obey laws which are quite permissive. As a result of this feeling of freedom, creative potentialities have been released which have resulted in the greatest prosperity and power that the world has ever known. One wonders how a mere illusion could have produced such creative success, especially in light of the fact that illusions rarely work to produce anything. Illusions are almost always failures. If an illusion ever succeeds, it is solely by accident.
Freedom is a strange thing. Even though a scientific determinist might accurately predict every decision that a particular person may make, that would not mean that that person has no freedom. This curious condition can be shown in the fact that should a psychoanalyst inform a patient as to what decision he will make in a particular matter, that patient could deliberately make another decision just to prove that he has the freedom to do so. If scientific determinism really worked, the patient would still make the decision predicted by the psychoanalyst. These facts provide evidence that if a person believes he has freedom, then he actually has it. This means that freedom, as an idea and in practice, really has nothing to do with science. Freedom is solely a spiritual matter.