Them's the breaks

Bryan Cranston stars
as Walter White

Episode 5 in Season 1 of Breaking Bad ("Gray Matter," which aired on February 24, 2008) features a speech by high school chemistry teacher Walter White that could have informed Sam Harris's thinking about free will.
    In the first episode, Walter was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and resorted to selling crystal methamphetamine to provide for his family when he is dead. But he didn't let his wife (Skyler) know he was sick until the fourth episode.
    Having learned the news, Skyler becomes determined that Walter will undertake chemotherapy, and she doesn't hesitate to let Walter's wealthy former graduate school research partner know or to urge Walter to accept his old colleague's offer to pay for everything.
    But Walter resists.
    In an emotional power play, Skyler engineers an intervention to show Walter how much his family loves him and needs for him to do the therapy. Her sister and brother-in-law don't behave as she expects, they think it should be Walter's decision.

But can it be Walter's decision? That's the question Sam Harris raises.
    Walter responds in as affecting a speech as you can hear in television drama (or in feature film):

Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own choices. My entire life, it just seems I never had a real say about any of it. With this last one—cancer—all I have left is how I choose to approach this...What good is it to just survive, if I am too sick to work...?I choose not to do it.

    [I didn't think I could quote that verbatim, given the difficulty of writing down dialogue from a Netflix download, but then I thought of YouTube, where you can actually see the scene:]



    So, Walter refuses...until, as usually happens with all of us, the balance of forces shifts in favor of the stronger ones' tending toward our compliance. "I'll do the therapy."

Friday I asked what if Judeo-Christian ethics had been all-life affirming (rather than in-group-affirming)?
    A friend commented simply that not enough people think and feel the way I do.
    And probably no one in ancient times thought or felt that way. The forces that produced the Judeo-Christian ethic could have produced no other ethic than the one it did produce. And the forces working now can but have us slaughtering and eating animals, fighting to control oil, tearing down mountains to mine coal, driving just the fuel-inefficient automobiles we do, building pipelines across tracts of wilderness, decimating rain forests, continuing to overpopulate the planet.
    Like Walter, we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.
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Wiktionary on "Them's the breaks"
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