It's like we are condemned to Truth and to distort it at the same time. It's probably like the song says: if loving you is wrong, [then] I don't want to be right. And I've chosen the wrong on more occasions I want to admit outside the sacrament of reconciliation.
Often the deep answers to life are not complicated, but rather simple. That doesn't mean they are easy. We have many competing interests and motivations, sometimes conscious and sometimes not, taking on our deeper conscious. We'd often rather fight or flight than fall in line in Truth. And there is no good reason for it.
Walsh notes, “The deliberate choice of darkness and self-destruction, in the face of the appeal toward light and self-actualization, knowing full well the futility of the choice as incapable of changing the outcome, is a radical unintelligibility.” Yes, I think that's a fancy a way of reiterating Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
And yet, sinners gonna sin.
Moreover, this “discloses the precarious character of our exercise of freedom.” From the get go, our freedom in never really autonomous. We are always responding to something beyond our control—such as a pandemic or a crazy girlfriend or a nasty tweet. Sometimes these forces can even be supernatural, making the need for grace to be every more present. Yet, man has a funny way of picking himself by his bootstraps to attain a haughty self-sufficiency. Grace be damned, he thinks.
Thomas Merton says, “We get tired of this “faith” that does not do anything to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us a prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is often quite effective).” Which just goes to show you, that our freedom is “a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty” (Walsh). So we'd rather be an island unto ourselves—where we can be certain of our insanity rather than be uncertain of a God who is with us.
The first choice always has to be taken alone. Walsh insightfully expounds,
“The mystery between our freedom and and the knowledge that structures and directs it is that the latter emerges only to the extent that it is actualized. The more we respond to the glimmerings that first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity. A reality that had previously seemed to offer us unlimited choice now works to constrain us within its imperious demands. Not that we ever lose the capacity to turn our backs on the higher life that calls us. But the more we respond in fidelity to its appeal, the less attractive the option of closure appears to us. We have been “captured” by the strength of that higher reality. The option of turning aside is always there, but why would we want to exercise it when it means the loss of the only reality that counts? A human soul grows to the point that it begins to measure itself and all that it does in light of the truth of that higher reality. Rejection can still occur, but what can pull us back to a life of falsehood and meanness? The attraction of virtue and the emptiness of vice have become unmistakably clear, to the point that we might even say we have no choice.”The first choice becomes the no choice, indeed. Our free will becomes Thy will.