The Force

Oliver Sacks, writing about an artist who lost the ability to see in color after a car accident, says that

At first he was intensely, furiously conscious of what he had lost ... He would glare at an orange in a state of rage, trying to force it to resume its true color.

Scientology turns this kind of wishful thinking into a religious experience. Some of the Church's low-level Training Routines, or TRs, involve the use of "Tone 40 Intention (intention without reservation or limit)," which is both a state of the will and a mode of speaking. The guidelines for "TR 8: Tone 40 on Objects" are as follows:

Trying to make the ashtray STAND UP. Student gives Tone 40 command "STAND UP!". Tone 40 acknowledges with "THANK YOU!". "SIT DOWN!". "THANK YOU!."

Repeat until cognition (about an hour).

As a disillusioned ex-Scientologist put it,

By this point, I was so deluded by the concept of Tone 40 that the fact that I was LIFTING IT WITH MY HANDS was irrelevant. I gave the command, the ashtray stood up. After doing this for half an hour, I felt like God, lifting the ashtray by sheer intention. My Thetan's (Scieno-babble for "spirit") Intention was using my arms and hands, though that was only for convenience, since with sufficient intent they were not necessary.

This is probably what happens when you start to worry about Free Will too much. Even rappers fall into this trap:

• Jay-Z: "...he who does not feel me / Is not real to me. Therefore, he doesn't exist. / So poof: vamoose, son of a bitch" ("Izzo (H.O.V.A.)," The Blueprint (2001)).
• Tony Yayo, in an interview somewhere: "I don't believe in Cam'ron. I don't believe in Jim Jones. I don't believe in Baby. I don't believe in Lil Wayne. I don't believe in Game. I don't believe in Fat Joe."

On the other hand, the loss of free will is pretty rough too. It only just occurred to me that Jack Kirby's Fourth World stories are pretty clearly one big allegory for the Cold War: Apokolips is the evil empire, clanging with machinery, filthy with smoke, sadists and spies around every corner, Darkseid the dictator presiding over it all. And do remember what Darkseid is always looking for: the Anti-Life Equation, which has long been one of my favorite comic-book concepts (alongside the Ultimate Nullifier, if only for the sake of the name). As Wikipedia explains, "Various comics have defined the equation in different ways, but a common interpretation seems to be that the equation is a mathematical proof of the futility of living." Armed with the Equation -- portions of which, in an odd bit of cryptic symbolism, are scattered throughout diverse individual minds -- one can "dominate the will of all sentient and sapient races." And because it eliminates free will in the target, the Anti-Life Equation also renders wanton violence permissible, since, according to some perverse moral calculus, beings without freedom can be freely abused. Thus the nefarious Glorious Godfrey (don't ask) dubs the ALE "the cosmic hunting license." Of course, you'd have to have a pretty strange configuration of qualms and non-qualms to think it was okay to eliminate freedom from the universe but not okay to kick a puppy, but why quibble ?

(As it turns out, the Equation has been used to prove empirically that, at least within the moral superstructure of the DC Universe, Benthamite utilitarianism and "libertarian paternalism" are both unambiguously wrong. It's never okay to override individual choice in the name of the greater good: when Darkseid's rebellious superhero son Orion "learned the Equation, and tried to use it to make people happy and good, ... [he] realised that the suppression of free will is always a bad thing." The end.)