http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3335275.stm
We are repeatedly informed that what we think and do is caused by some influence like heredity, evolutionary development, environmental pressure, social norms, mind-determining psychological conditioners and so on. Such scientific determinism would eliminate any understanding of our own potentiality for change. The defeatist sense of powerlessness would have pacified everyone were it not for that fact that there is something very healthy in us which enables us to resist even the seeming 'inevitable'. What that 'something' is does not fall within the pale of science.
All kinds of fatalism deny the power of the individual to transcend the inner and outer conditions of life, to alter oneself and to change society. To blame the ills of life wholly on society or 'the system', be it monopoly capitalism, socialism, an elite class or whoever, is to alienate oneself, making oneself a passive victim of factors beyond one's control. To deny personal responsibility, such as by blaming criminality exclusively on a social or political system, on a bad environment, material poverty and so on is a fallacy. This is shown by all those who had a similar start in life but were upright and honest instead. At most, such objective factors should only be called upon as 'extenuating circumstances'. By now the ills of self-defeatism and dependency upon others - not least on a State that is made responsible for many things - are becoming well-recognised.
The Human Whole by Robert C. Priddy
http://home.no.net/rrpriddy/P/
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.
--Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927
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