Do you know the saying “ you never know what you have until you lose it”? Well what if you don’t even know that you lose it?

At that point did it matter? Certainly not, if there was no way for you to notice it’s absence means that it’s impact on your life was minimal at best. This thing could be gone for the rest of your life and you wouldn’t even care. Is this wrong? If something didn’t matter to us, should we feel any impact by it at all, and even if it did, wouldn’t it be better to just live on without giving it a second thought, letting it weigh you down? The truth is I’d think so, living to your fullest trumps any one item, no matter how sentimental it may have been. However this question gets a little stickier when it comes to losing human lives. If we truly don’t notice it and it doesn’t feel like it affects us what makes that human’s lives (in terms of our lives) different from an item?

The truth is that I didn’t know, and I’m still not entirely clear on this answer myself, but Kurt Vonnegut writes about this extrapolation of life in his short Story “All of the King’s Horses” and let me tell you story was soooooo sick. 

All of the King’s Horses Analysis

This story follows one Colonel Kelly as he crashlands in China and is captured (along with his family and the pilot) by A communist Guerilla General Pi Ying. (which is kind of a piss poor name if I do say so myself). General Pi Ying (which I will call Ying from now on to avoid more urine jokes), has 16 captured American prisoners all being held in a ruin of a castle. They are all put in what I assume to be a dungeon under the castle and Ying offers Kelly a very interesting offer to save the lives of the prisoners, a game of chess, but instead of pieces, the people will play and get killed.

Ying says an important quote that sums up the whole idea behind the game. “that the game he was about to play was no different, philosophically, from what he had known in war.” Kelly couldn’t help but to agree with this. After all, war is a game with a victor decided by the trading of lives. 

This game did not disappoint. It was everything you expected from war and more. Betrayal, twists, turns and sacrifice. There was no getting around it, people would be lost on both sides, just as in a real war. This comes back to the idea about a fight for people’s lives that go unnoticed by the population. These 16 Americans were in a game for their lives while nobody was any the wiser in the world. If they lost their lives would’ve ended with no indication of the struggle that they had to go through. Instead they might just be another “missing” on the news that we don’t click on because why would we look at that when we could see a really cool cat picture? This isn’t just in Kelly’s situation though. this is war. Thousands of soldiers go out, and are going out to die for a cause that some of the American people don’t even know. The truth is we don’t care. We never really did. We only care for the things we can see, and we can’t see these soldiers. Even Generals and higher ranking officers understand this. It’s easy to send somebody to their deaths because it is tactically the right move, as long as you don’t have to watch it. Now this leads to a very interesting part of the story.

The Chess

The chess with human pieces was more than just a fight for survival. It was a conscious effort by Ying to make a higher up in the military, in this case Kelly, realize was war truly was. War was sending people to their deaths, and that is what Kelly was forced to knowingly do on multiple occasions during this game. This wasn’t some war order telling thousands of mother’s sons to march to the front lines. No, that was much easier. This was putting numeric values on people’s lives right in front of you and deciding to kill a person that is worth more traded than alive to you. (for those who are unaware in chess certain pieces are worth certain points, pawns-1 rook-5, queens-9).  This was the most real War that Colonel Kelly will ever fight.

The Moves

*Warning Spoilers ahead*

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Just about everybody has heard a philosophical idea behind free will, well, or lack there of.  During any philosophical there always seems to be some theory that bubbles to the top, these are generally fairly unoriginal, based off of movies or completely baseless, but how could you disprove them? That’s the true spirit of philosophy, making whatever logical leaps you can to justify one part of life, no matter how large or small. I don’t like this. A logical leap or a theory that can’t use bits and pieces of evidence sprinkled throughout the world seems like a child’s what if rather than a real theory. But I can’t blame people who have these far fetched “what ifs” of theories, after all, they don’t have free will.

Yes, I just said that most these theories were baseless and generally what I don’t like about the spirit of philosophy, but I have thought about the potential for humans to not have free will and, I think it makes sense. My theory is that humans are capable of making their own decisions, but the way that they will think and act could all be determined with enough knowledge of the world (some we don’t currently understand for example specifically how brains work) and an infinite amount of time. I’d like to think that it has a basis in the scientific community, but in all honesty it is a theory based off a theory, and truly requires one to be proved for the other to be even considered, but enough hype around it, here’s the idea.

So we got the big bang theory, right? Massive amounts of mass in the center of the universe all compressed into whatever that would make decides to shoot out in all different directions and essentially start what we know as the universe today. Now if this part is true, which is an obviously big if, then there is no doubt in my mind that we don’t have free will, because every decision, event and happening has been determined by the initial kinetic energy of the mass from the big bang. How was the earth formed? Boom, big bang. How did the earth become exactly as it had to be to sustain life? Boom, the matter that had to be there was all clumped together from having the right kinetic energy in the right direction, making a mashed potatoes of a celestial body. How was the first life on earth formed? Well we don’t really know, but we do know that certain atoms had to be positioned in a certain way to make it happen, and how did they get there? The initial kinetic energy that shot them out. Even if they interacted with other matter while shooting out, that interaction could only have been wholly determined by the big bang. One thing leads to another, evolution happens, dinosaurs, asteroid, you know the drill. Then we come to David in second grade, why did he fail that math test? Boom because he didn’t study. Why didn’t he study? Because he didn’t want to. Why didn’t he want to? Because of the way he was raised, or the specific tendencies inside of his brain? How were those formed? By parents mostly. Why were parents like that? These questions continue and keep going back further and further until it comes to the conclusion that all of those things were formed the way they were because of the interactions that happened from the different kinetic energy from the big bang.

So what? We don’t have really free will, or any decision we make is at least destine to happen based on how we were formed and interacted with others. What should we do about this? Well, here is the disappointing part, nothing. Honestly if we act like we have no control over our lives – true or not so true- then it will have an affect on our brain.  The best thing to do is try to act as best you can in the way that you think you can. Its a disappointing conclusion, but most theories are best dismissed if they may have a negative impact, true or not.