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In case you want to carry this forward, I think you're right, but I also think that humans are built such that we ignore the suggestion that we don't have free will so it's unlikely that the kludge is going to come down. A few books I researched with Mr. McKee discussed the impossibility of a conscious agent (a.k.a. free will) in the brain. When we're born we have a brain that's evolved to do certain things (look at faces, breathe, look for patterns) then that brain is exposed to certain stimuli (parents, environment) and it develops. It increases in complexity but at no point along that evolving complexity is there a reason for us to suppose that decisions are being influenced by anything other than what the brain and body were when they were born and the stimuli to which they have since been exposed. There is no need for free will.

But the need to feel like we have free will is very clear-- we take more ownership of our actions and remember things better if we feel we are making choices. Even knowing and believing this, however, I still feel like I'm deciding what to type to you right now. Daniel Wegner, whose arguments I'm paraphrasing and who is at the top of the academic ‘free will field’, says that if understanding that you don't have free would cause you to feel you don’t have free will, then he should feel like a robot. He doesn’t.

Long intro, but what I think is interesting about this topic, related to film, is that so many of my favorite films focus on free will over determinism as their topic and conclude that, indeed, against all odds we must have free will. The Matrix series was all about it, and the classic up-ending film is-- in my opinion-- a protagonist struggling against what should be insurmountable odds to gain their object of desire via force of will (Rocky, LOTR, Gravity, Avengers, Shawshank...). The story of free will against all odds is the childhood fairy tale that we want to believe - The Little Engine that Could. I submit that we’re not at risk of losing that very human belief because of something as silly as ‘understanding’.

Thanks for the provocation.

Mckee is playing with fire. If people figured out what free will actually means our whole modern kludge of a world would crumble.

And I grant that may be a good thing...