Here's the Einstein opinion on free will and effort and success and responsibility and praise and blame.  This old school philosopher believed in a very new set of ideas, nearly a hundred years ago, in the famous 1920's.  The time of Jung and Freud and J.P. Morgan and Einstein and Henry Ford. 

I just finished a gigantic novel on the period, Doctorow's Ragtime, and feel like a just returned time traveller.  I know what Einstein was thinking.  The future lay ahead, beyond anyone's imagination. (a quote from  George Harrison, in another world changing era.) 


                      FREE WILL


"In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. 

EINSTEIN DOESN'T BELIEVE IN HUMAN FREEDOM OF CHOICE.  REAL CHOICES ARW THRUST UPON US AND DEPEND NEARLY ENTIRELY ON factors over which we have no control.  We choose a career because we find ourselves possessing certain traits and skills that lead us there. In Einstein's sense of reality, that's not a real choice. It's a phantom, a notion of control. 

Einstein chose academia, the study of mathematics and found himself preeminent in it. He did not choose to be preeminent. 

Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. 

Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. 

This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.



What that means is Einstein believed he didn't build his own success or career,  his natural talents carried him into the easy academic life, and then his extremely rare version of mathematical skill lead him to discoveries that hundreds of his peers were looking for.  He found relativity.  It was not his doing. He worked no harder than the man in the next cubicle. 

The intensity of effort in the mathematics  and physics community at the turn of the last century was at a fever pitch.   So Einstein acknowledges his success was not due to greater effort.  He doesn't even take pride in it.  He's glad, pleased, but it happened to him.  HAPPENED.  It was external to his own volition.  

Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. 

According to Einstein, volition or free will, initiative and effort had NOTHING to do with his rise to great fame and fortune and everything that goes with it.  And I'm sure he considered his philosophy just fine for everyone.   He didn't build it. It was all luck and DNA and the usual effort and hard work that just being a person entails.  Very believable, but most people aren't ready for it. 

Here's the Protestant Calvinist version of free will.  There isn't any. If god chooses you for earthly riches and admiration and success and happiness,  you are elected .  You don't earn it. Hell,  you don't even deserve it.    it's called election.  Google Charles Portis and election for more on this subject.  Some great quotes from True Grit.

Also google Sam Harris and free will.  You might change your mind. I didn't have to.  I discovered John Calvin and Albert Einstein's philosophy against free will at about fourteen years old.  Life is unfair.  Also google JFK and life is unfair for another solid doubter of free choice