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[APeacefulWarrior]

Sigh, okay, let me give you a very direct and concise example of my argument.

I cannot seem to persuade you to see another viewpoint, you are a slave to your own perspective and I am a slave to your perspective as long as I try to expose you to another perspective that conflicts with your own.

Whhhhhaaaatt?  You are a slave to my perspective?  NO.  No you are not, not in any way.  I outright absolutely refuse the sort of power over you that you're trying to project onto me with that statement.  If you -for some reason I cannot even comprehend- feel enslaved by the mere fact of someone having a different opinion on the subject than you, then that is YOUR problem to work through.

And in the meantime, it certainly does devalue the word "slave" to use it so carelessly.

(Not to mention the implication that the only way for you to feel free is for me to stop exercising my own freedom of speech.)

 It's not enslaving feeling to you, but it is to many others, and you will see that one day.  You won't be able to hide behind your comfortable perspective of how life is forever, there is a darker side and it won't stay at bay for your comfort.

So...  First you accuse me of somehow enslaving you with my thoughts, then you immediately turn around and attempt to tell me what I will be thinking someday.  Falsely perceiving me as having power over you, you in turn attempt to exert power over me.  

Is it really so hard to just accept I have a different opinion on the matter and let this be a philosophical discussion?

A financial collapse is honestly probable enough to be a little bit concerning . . .

But we weren't talking about a financial collapse.  That has nothing to do with free will, aside from being another exercise thereof.

You cannot make a blind man see the sight right in front of him...

Ah yes.  "This person disagrees with me so therefore he must be blind and ignorant."  I was not even remotely this insulting or degrading in my reply to you.

You seem to be doing rather well for yourself, why don't you go spend some time with poverty stricken people, with minorities, with the mentally ill and homeless, you might see from their views the world, that they're not victims, they just ended up right where they were supposed to be if you paid any attention to society and their opinions of those types of things.  There's an entire side of this culture that is beyond apathy and judgment, they have no problem aiding a system that churns out prisoners and addicts and poverty and homelessness, they call it peaceful and say it is working just fine.

You don't have a clue it would seem.  I hope one day you do.

And now you call me clueless, again, because I have a different view on the matter of free will than you do.  Did you really not notice how outright insulting you were being throughout this reply?  You spend all this time accusing me of being unable to accept other points of view, even as you end up throwing schoolyard-level insults at me for having different ideas.

Or does this all go back to your misapprehension that I'm somehow enslaving you by having a different opinion and the ability to express it?

Furthermore, I alluded to this but let me just say it outright:  I am not living in the West.  I'm actually living in SE Asia, where there is quite a lot of poverty and other bad things.  This does not change my view on free will. The everyday people here are not slaves just because a great many of them are poor. In fact, I tend to suspect they would be greatly insulted if you said such a thing to their face. You're disempowering and debasing millions of people just because there is a sad small minority who are in truly terrible circumstances, such as being trapped in sex slavery rings. If there are slaves here, THOSE are the slaves. Not the everyday people.

And on top of that, I never said anything like "Everything is peaches and gravy and there is no poverty and no crime and no bad things happening anywhere."  That is one gigantic strawman you created so you could tear it down rather directly address than anything I actually said on the subject of slavery or free will.   Of course there are very unpleasant things in the world.  That is -as I said- an inevitability in a veiled world with a mixed STO/STS population.

Just because there is a minority who are in truly dire circumstances does not mean that everyone, everywhere, is a slave.  I don't deny those people's existence.  What I DO deny is that someone who's in a position to be spending loads of free time arguing on an Internet forum has any good reason to use the word in regards to themselves.  If anything, the fact that there are still -quite regrettably- some people who are slaves in a much more literal chains-and-torture sense makes it even more absurd.

If you really want to see yourself as a slave, I can't stop you. But I can still point out how unfortunate such a point of view is, and how you're leaving yourself open to manipulation and victimization by taking such a victimized attitude towards your own life.