Are we free? Do we have free will or is every action we do – both daily and rare, simply caused from influences or past choices?  Every person needs to physically eat eventually or they risk damaging their body or death.  However every person also has the free will to not eat, to go days without eating, to eat insane amounts, to buy the extra fries with that meal, or to eat a healthy balanced diet of fruits, vegetables, and what not.  We take responsibility for all we do even when we don’t realize what we’re doing.  A libertarian will say we have free will sometimes without cause - you ate because you wanted to, not because you were hungry.  At any time you have the free will to do whatever you wish.  Nothing except yourself stops you from doing what you might do. You could run into a wall, break out in dance, slaughter kittens, or make a wonderful piece of art… all without cause and simply out of your own thoughts – your free will. The ability of free will – to do what we want without cause and untouched by any form of manipulation, makes us free beings. 

I recommend libertarianism.  We are free beings with free will.  Our wills do not always have cause which is proof of free will as we are free to make decisions – both big and small, for ourselves at many times in our lives.  We sometimes do things based on influences like media, peer pressure, social pressures, and family.  Some things we do when we’re influenced we actually do willingly even though we could choose not too.  However that ability to choose not too – that free will is what keeps us and makes us free beings.  Yes, people don’t suddenly start throwing objects about a room and doing all sorts of random unexplainable things but, in every room at any time people could.  You could argue that we’re free beings with free will who freely choose to ignore our free will and simply get sucked into influences sometimes – however you can’t ignore something if it doesn’t exist which makes free will very real.  I honestly believe that the common person does not enjoy going against their free will, but probably willingly does sometimes during situations where there is some good out of it – a silver lining on the horizon, something where you can bite the bullet for a bit in order to gain future access to something which you can treat yourself to – almost like a reward for biting the bullet in the first place.  People have free will even though some may not use it or realize it as much as others and this free will which we all have gives us a powerful freedom which makes us free beings.

We cannot read another persons mind, but people do think alike from time to time.  Are we free in the sense that our own thoughts are private and created by ourselves? We know other people can’t read our minds though they can guess.  Assuming our thoughts are purely our own created only by ourselves and not formed from any form of influence, manipulation, or incentive. We can assume also we are indeed free in the thought that we have free will when we make decisions and take responsibility for them.  When we make a decision we have our own thoughts and process to come to a conclusion or solution to any given situation, task, or etc. No one can read or scan our process on our decision-making, making it private.   With each person having their own free will, their own thought process, and their own private thoughts, it makes sense to call us free beings as we have the freedom to our own thoughts, what we think about, how we process our environment, and how we decide to take responsibility for this and that.

The best reasons I recommend libertarianism is that we are free beings.  We choose who we hang out with, what we eat, what are hobbies are, and essentially how we react to our daily lives.  People don’t usually tell you what you’re going to be when you grow up – they’re usually asking you what you want to be when you grow up instead.  You make the big and small decisions in your life and take responsibility for them and while you make these decisions you have many possible answers in most cases due to your free will to decide to handle the situation any way you’d like.  When you play a video game, you can replay it over and over and with in-depth games you can replay the game many different ways – as the good guy, the bad guy, the neutral guy, or maybe the warrior, the wizard, or a drummer. We can play a game just like we live life as any character or person we like.  We are who we want to be from what we do and what we do we decide to do ourselves.
The best reasons I don’t recommend libertarianism is that we have huge pressures and influences in life which can alter our decision making based on the individual person’s personality.  With free will able to be manipulated the question comes – is free will really something free?  Free will or at least the frequency or power of it may alter due to incentives from influences or some form of manipulation. This makes free will a variable related to daily influences like the media and work or peer pressure. People always ask you what you want to grow up to be in most places – you get to choose for yourself what you want to be, but you have to choose something – you can’t choose to not choose something, it goes against the norm.  The something you choose may also be based on a form a manipulation too.  If you live in a high economy driven small town that needs welders or construction workers you may most likely be a construction worker or welder.  If you live in a farm community and your parents were farmers, and their parents were farmers, and their parents were farmers… you may end up a farmer based on a family influence.  We have our own thoughts, but we’re surrounded in a world of mass influence.

When we wake up everyday we have a choice to stay in bed that extra ten minutes. Some mornings you may have to get out of bed fast and the cause you could argue would be you didn’t want to be late for school or work, or maybe you’ve been in bed for days and physically need to get up and do something or you’ll perish – either way you must leave the bed and sometimes you leave it because of a cause and sometimes without cause, when you haven’t overslept or had a bad sleep and take a few moments to rest for no reason, no cause, you use you’re free will.  We make some decisions sometimes with cause and other times without cause. Since not all our decisions have cause we have free will – we think for ourselves and make decisions using our own process. Our process comes from our own individual life experiences and results from past decisions.  If we’re all born blank slates and as we live our lives with our decisions and experiences carving who we are on those slates – since some choices we decide we decide using our free will, we decide without cause, a fair number of marks carved on that slate should be marks made from that persons free will, assuming this, each slate must be no where near similar to any other as each persons free will is different then another.  We have different slates, we have free will.