`Philosophy for Gangsters, Manifesto of Free Will

Courtney Romano, as Callie, in `Philosophy for Gangsters

In “Philosophy for Gangsters,” a fitfully amusing dark comedy, Callie Rizzoli, a college-educated Mafia princess being groomed to lead the family business, is particularly aggrieved by the way her parents and brothers have departed — in a firefight with the police, shrugging that they were always meant to die that way. 

What killed her people, Callie (Courtney Romano) insists, was their determinism: the belief that nothing occurs at random, that every decision and action is the inevitable outcome of previous events. Never mind the mob; those damn philosophers are the true menace to society. 

She and her crew are offended that no one suffers the consequences for promoting such dangerous ideas; in the rough code of their work, they grouse, accepting responsibility is essential, even if occasionally lethal. So they kidnap Wilfred May (Tom White), a young philosophy professor at a nearby college, to make an example of him. After resisting — and losing a finger in the process — Wilfred does a Patty Hearst and joins them as they try to manipulate the media and redefine their crimes as a manifesto of free will.

Reference: Mob Princess Wages War on Concept of Inevitable.

In Dubai we are wont to say insha'allah, that is, God willing, whenever there is something we very much want to see happen.  It's not strictly determinism in the way that Western philosophers may define it, but Islam does not put fate in the hands of humankind per se.  Rather, God determines everything.  

I suppose, on the contrary, that Western ideals and Christian beliefs revolve around self-determinism, what Callie and cohort may refer to as free will.  To take this to the realm of physics, I might argue that `Philosophy for Gangsters pits Albert Einstein's notion that God does not play with dice (i.e., nothing is random) against Werner Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty (i.e., there are limits to what we can know).  

In the latter can that criminal manifesto of free will thrive.