“Perhaps the only goal of all men on earth is to prove, at every moment, that they are men and not piano keys.”Feodor Dostoievski · Însemnări din subterană · 1864 · Partea I, capitolul 8
A human is human precisely when choosing wrongly by free will, not when responding correctly like a mechanism.
Dostoevsky attacks the deterministic view in which man, like a keyboard, produces only the notes pressed by the laws of nature and self-interest. The mechanism is the paradox of freedom: people sometimes refuse even calculated good, just to show they are not mechanisms. A gear cannot choose wrongly; a human can, and that is precisely what makes him human. Anyone quitting a profitable job for an impractical cause of his own confirms this purpose.
Why it matters It resonates with anyone reduced to a resource, an algorithm, or a function, who wants to reassert a will of his own.