I’m a compatiblist. I don’t think determinism and free will are mutually exclusive.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Except according to Sapolsky, there is no “you”—the hunger is what dictates your behavior, along with your stress level, whether or not you were born with fetal alcohol syndrome or grew up in a culture that valorizes individual freedoms versus one that prioritizes communal responsibility or in one that believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, vengeful deity.

So much so that if you’re hungry, tired, stressed, or lack resilience because you were born poor, which gave you chronically elevated glucocorticoid levels, your PFC simply does not have the juice to make good decisions when it matters.

Sapolsky points out that “a substantial percentage of people incarcerated for violent crime have a history of concussive head trauma to the PFC.”

“To get people to think differently about moral responsibility, blame, and praise.” Although the world is wholly deterministic, we can, and have, learned to change our views and behaviors—both on the individual and the societal levels.

Incidentally, these are the same molecules, genes, and neuronal pathways modulated when a sea slug learns to avoid being shocked by a researcher—i.e., not free will.

He refers to Bettelheim, the self-hating Jew who insisted that autism in kids is caused by their cold “refrigerator mothers” as “a sick, sadistic fuck.” He calls Anders Breivik, who carried out the largest terrorist attack in Norwegian history when he murdered 69 kids at summer camp in 2011, “a lump of narcissism and mediocrity” who “finally found his people among white supremacist troglodytes.”

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