“You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice //
If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice //
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill //
I will choose a path as clear. I will choose free will”

This chorus really bothers me. The concept of making a choice has an implied adjunct of options. That is, there are limited things to choose from. Free will implies that each individual can make up their mind, and yes, I would agree with that for the most part, but the choices are limited and unaffected by the chooser.

The idea of choosing free will is simply preposterous, because the choice is being made in order to express the chooser’s freedom, yet in choosing it, the chooser is accepting that it isn’t something innate to him. Does this not seem a bizarre contradiction to everyone else? On a side note the music to this song, as with the majority of Rush songs, is unbelievable. Anyway I am not certain that Neil Peart didn’t have some sort of ironic reason for saying this the way he did, but it really bugs me at face value.

(This was written a while ago, but I thought I would port it to this blog)