People can will future actions indirectly by engineering external stimuli that trigger internal responses

Evidence

Nevertheless, one can sometimes “will” oneself into future action indirectly. One can predict well enough how one would act in certain circumstances and can therefore sometimes set matters up to stimulate a particular response. For example, I may know that, once I get out of bed in the morning, I am really up and I will not return to sleep. Therefore I set my alarm clock on the dresser a few feet from my bed, so that I will have to stand to stop its noise. I have then used an external device to get myself on my feet, but it is something internal about me that keeps me from returning to bed and to sleep. If the alarm were too near, I might often turn it off and go back to sleep. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Directly maps to how the doctor’s wife sets up constraints in the blindness novel — she uses her sightedness as the external device to keep others (and herself) motivated toward trustworthiness. — connects to: Repeated external change becomes internal change through reversal of passivity into activity; State labeling of performances enables force and creates models for future action. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 296; Personal and external control are interchangeable ways of warding off perceived randomness. — Dmitrij Agroskin and Eva Jonas, Controlling death by defending…, 21
• DEFINE: Clarifies Hardin’s distinction between direct willing (impossible for distant futures) and indirect self-binding through external devices.