 Do your actions truly matter in the grand scheme of things?
You’re sneaking through dishonored 2, silently, choking guards out feeling like a righteous ghost in the night.
Or maybe you’ve gone for chaos, slashing, blasting, rat swarming your way through Karnaca.
But here’s the thing, does any of it truly matter or were you always going to end up exactly where the game wanted you?
Dishonored two gives you choices
or so it seems
lethal, non-lethal, high chaos, low chaos.
But no matter what you do, the same core story plays out the same missions, the same betrayals, the same royal usurper with a punchable face.
Yes, you get different ending scenes and Delilah is either dead or trapped in the void, but either way, Emily is on the throne and you are the Lord protector in the end.
It’s just that people will love or hate you. Yet it raises a much bigger question.
What if life is like that too? What if our choices are mostly illusions?
And our path is 90% written before we even hit new game. What if we might be able to give it slight nudges if we are famous or infamous, but the ultimate ending of our life is already set in stone?
The Illusion of Choice
You get to choose how you approach each mission, lethal or non-lethal, but structurally, nothing really changes.
Same missions, same plot beats same boss fight.
The game doesn’t branch.
It just adds rats or fewer rats based on your behavior. Feels familiar?
Like life sometimes gives you a choice of paper or plastic, Pepsi or Coke, but the real story, it’s already written.
So is the choice really only cosmetic or does it set things in motion we just cannot grasp yet?
Karma is set to transcend lifetimes, so maybe how we act in this lifetime influences the next one. It just doesn’t change anything in this life.
In dishonored if you are the good guy, people love you. You’ll rebuild Dunwall all good.
If you are the bad guy, people might revolt in the future and push against Emily. It might happen just not in this game time or lifetime.
Is it God, or Our Soul?
Dolores Cannon through thousands of hypnosis sessions uncovered that souls incarnate here with specific programming. Tendencies, lessons, default settings.
She basically got in contact with higher beings, so to speak, and they said the world isn’t predestined, but they can correctly assess what you will do.
According to your soul’s programming.
I mean, that does imply free will, but it also doesn’t, right? Because it means you can choose what you do, but they already know what you will be choosing.
So is it free will or is it not?
In simple terms, if you know your partner has steadfast beliefs on loyalty and cheating, you still have full control if you do it or not, right?
But how the other person will react to it is 90% set in stone, isn’t it?
It goes further than that. What if these higher beings and yourself as your soul, in this case, choose specific scenarios happening to you based on knowing how you will react and does influence your future?
Is it free will then?
Technically, you can always choose against your programming.
But if it’s only 10% or maybe less than that of the chance that you will do this, is it really free will?
Outgrowing Your True Self?
It’s like Dishonored 2 giving you a choke out option, but you’re playing a character who’s basically built to stab first.
You are a assassin.
You can go with the choke-out option, but the killing is just more natural to you, so maybe free will exists, but it’s heavily guided by the character build of your soul. Think of it like a DnD sheet. Your stats are rolled. You can choose a path, but you’re not suddenly dropping 20s in charisma if you rolled a five.
Same in dishonored. You can role play the saint, but Corvo or Emily are still assassins at heart.
Trained killers put in the world, designed to tempt them back into the shadows.
I mean, you can even decide to play the game without powers entirely tell the outsider to F off. But even this doesn’t change the ending of the game or how it unfolds at all.
So even directly denying the void. The darkness still changes nothing.
And maybe our lives run the same way.
Major events pre-written with our free will limited to changing the color of the curtains as the house burns down.
But maybe that’s not bad.
Maybe the game isn’t about changing the ending. It’s about who you become along the way.
Maybe it is designed to learn that way.
Is This How We Grow Our Soul?
In fact, this is precisely how it is described in the Dolores Cannon books and even the hidden books of the Bible, the Apocrypha.
We, our soul. Your Soul chooses the lives you live.
With all the bad things that are happening.
We cannot escape the bad things and the good things that will eventually happen in our lives. Even if we choose otherwise, it will appear in a different way later down the line.
You choose this to learn lessons.
If you are being cheated on, it is either to learn forgiveness or to learn to stand up for yourself and break free of that relationship. Or both.
Dishonored 2, like life gives you just enough freedom to feel in control while you’re really playing out a story written long ago.
Dolores Cannon’s work says, we agreed to most of this before we got here. So is it our choices?
It seems to me more like side quests, we can choose, the main quest is set in stone.
But the real test is do we handle the betrayal, the chaos, the temptation with grace, or do we drown in our own darkness?
What is Free Will Then?
So maybe the free will isn’t so much about what happens, but how you react, to what happens. Could that be the case?
And maybe that’s the point,
not to change the ending, but to change ourselves.
Now, I don’t want to make this too negative that we’re just rats trapped in the wheels spinning, but it does beg the question how much control we actually do have over our lives.
It appears not as much as we thought.
It is also said that 95% of our daily decisions are done and driven by our subconscious or our reptile brain if you want, just acting on impulses and habits.
Rarely do we really consciously decide what we do in a given moment.
’cause it would also use a lot of mental power to judge everything and everyone anew every time.
It’s much easier to put them in predefined drawers, isn’t it?
But what is your experience?
Do you believe in free will?
Do you think it is all predestined?
Do you think we can change the world through our actions or is the only thing we will ever be able to change ourselves.
And that in turn through
who we are
shapes the world?
