Aren't fatalism and determinism more or less synonymous with each other? Well, either way, freewill is essentially a fantasy. It's a quaint idea that makes most people feel good and endows them with some illusory concept of hope, but that's all it is. The fact that anyone thinks we have any real control over our lives is a cute notion, but also entirely fictional. Our entire lives are basically just one long Rube Goldberg machine. Where one actions leads to the next action which leads to the next action, in a totally fixed and predetermined sequence of events. I for one think that if you could measure all the factors of a person's make-up in relation to their environment, you could predict with perfect accuracy whatever their movements or "decisions" would be. If a person manages to "change", that's only because this change was already established within the parameters of what they were already capable of doing. It didn't just spring out of the ether on its own and, if anything, was just the next step in their already fixed path. I guess you could call this "not knowing" of the path a kind of freewill, but not really. It's more like a fog of war over already established terrain. Whatever is revealed is what one has to work with. That's all there is to it.
The general ideology of our society, or much any other, prizes freewill because it makes those with decent lives feel special in the belief that it was all thanks to their hard efforts for bringing what it is they're enjoying about, when really they were just sitting on a fixed track like a ride at an amusement park and totally fluked out with getting a pleasing ride. Freewill is also a kind of religion in a sense that it claims that any and everyone is capable of being saved so long as they "try hard enough", but this simply isn't true. Most people would be crushed by the truth, so they cling to hopeful bedtime stories instead and, given how crappy the truth is, I guess I can't blame them.
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