A few weeks ago, leaving a big-box store with a cart full of groceries, I tried to click open my 2009 black Prius with my key fob. When it didn’t respond, I tried the door handle. Still locked.
Fearful my one key no longer worked and my groceries would melt while waiting for road assistance, I looked over the parking lot like a miracle would appear, and it did, in the sight of this car’s doppelganger parked nose to nose to it.
Wandering over to my car, I heard someone say, “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that.” Looking up, I saw a Colonel Sanders speaking from behind the wheel of a parked white Prius. “All Priuses of a certain age look the same.”
I laughed at my stupidity and tried to come up with a witty comeback, but just said, “Yeah,” and chuckled like we were old friends.
I tell this story to suggest two concepts: how easy it is to mistake falsehood for truth and how we lead unexamined lives regardless of how hard we try.
First, philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson preached, “Obey your intuition.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist. He’s suggesting how easy it is to be swayed away from the truth. From believing in yourself.
Easily swayed by looks and desire, I quickly took another car for my own.
Believe Emerson and find genius in yourself. To envy someone, he writes in his essay, “Self-reliance” is “ignorance”; to try to be like someone else is “suicide.” If fool enough to be sheepish and follow the pack, you’ll be devoured by wolves.
However, beware: To “trust thyself” leads to nonconformity, and, for that, “the world whips you with its displeasure.” But better that, Emerson contends, than cave to a vocal, rapacious, oblivious majority.
My second point in relaying the mirrored Prius story concerns our inability to really think about what we are doing. If paying more attention, wouldn’t I have seen which car blinked back at me?
We are blindly steered by custom, ritual and unconscious motives. Stanford University neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky, in his book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” posits, “All your thoughts are determined; you have no free will.”
Face it, he opines, our behavior has been determined since birth.
Studying the effects of biochemistry, physics, family and history on our behavior, Sapolsky determines [no pun intended] we are the product of everything from our mother’s infinitesimally small glucocorticoids “marinating your fetal brain” to generalized cultural attitudes, beliefs, language and traditions.
Why this examination of two diametrically opposed ways of thinking about how we think?
Because, as you may have heard, there’s an election looming. And most of us have made up our minds who we’ll vote for.
Sapolsky and Emerson would encourage us to inspect each of our two Priuses like our futures depended on which will drive us smoothly home and which will not even open to us.
Independence Day arrives soon; the operative word, “independence,” is Emerson’s go-to concept for living a life true to one’s nature. Vote independently.
Can we honestly believe we can decide whom to vote for independent of our unconscious motivations? Sapolsky would argue, “Probably not.” But that doesn’t preclude paying attention to facts, learning from history’s lessons and remaining suspect of lies and innuendos.
If we can’t sidestep what is determined from birth, at least we can educate ourselves to live fully rational, realized lives.
We can strive to make every day an independence day.
• Rick Holinger has taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness and elsewhere. His book of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and collection of essays, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores, Amazon or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.