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Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom
- gausswho 1y agoAn abrupt ending to a worthy if lomg setup. The final paragrpah hints at what I thought would be the meat of the article, but ultimately nneded more to demonstrate how limiting choice can lead to freedom. In practice, we all restrain our choices in ways that we hope narrow our focus and abilities towards things that matter. It would be nice to read a piece that explores how this can be true collectively.
- cma 1y agoA long treatment of some of the stuff in the last paragraph is Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom though not necessarily the same conclusions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
- gausswho 1y agoThank you this is right up my alley right now.
- leobg 1y agoFree, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke. Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude. Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT? Nietzsche, ~1889
- Isamu 1y agoI’m trying to engage with the author here and maybe I’ll read the book that this refers to, but I think the author has this backwards. It’s that when you little to no choice we say you aren’t free. It doesn’t follow that having more choices makes you free, but it is a prerequisite. Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice. Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices, and this seems not like freedom to the author. This piece makes me uneasy, it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom. I’m wondering where this is going.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoThe author kind of lost me in the first few paragraphs because she bases her entire thesis on this idea that we frame freedom in terms of having many choices. But I've never heard anyone do that! As you said, people generally recognize that having choices available is a prerequisite to freedom, but they do not require it to be a large number of choices, nor associate more choices with more freedom. So the author's entire argument seemed to me to be based on a strawman.
- TuringTest 1y agoMeanwhile, I've heard that very argument every time some official organisation makes a proposal to regulate the market to limit the dominance of some dominant players. Those distorting the market in their favour will oppose any regulation that reduces their power by bemoaning how it will limit consumer's choice.
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- hinkley 1y agoI think all of you are getting hung up on quantity versus quality. Past a very low threshold, it’s the quality of the choices that matter not the quantity. And I don’t mean workmanship or value, but the cost/benefit ratio of the choice.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI mean I certainly agree, but I never said otherwise. I am simply saying that the author is arguing against a viewpoint I've never actually seen expressed.
- TuringTest 1y agoThe article says 'abundance'. The point you make that having choices is a requisite for freedom, but truth is that freedom comes from meaningful choices, not an abundance of them. You have a myriad of artificially created choices that amount to more or less the same outcome; think of a supermarket, where all products are the same high-processed food and imported vegetables. Freedom would be having a competing family-owned local shop with proximity products. To have meaningful choice, you cannot depend of having a single homogeneous environment providing all the choices you can make; this can come from having healthy competition, or sometimes by you creating your own choices when there were none.
- halayli 1y ago> It’s only in recent history that freedom has come to mean having a huge array of choices in life. Did we take a wrong turn? Said who? This is an argument from invented opposition. I’m not sure anyone actually defines freedom as "a huge array of choices". The author seems to invent a mainstream narrative just to dismantle it(arguing against a straw man) Abundance of choice and freedom are orthogonal. Having the right choice and being free are not.
- bfio 1y ago[dead]
- gtowey 1y agoI think it's definitely the case where corporations and the media want us to believe that having a huge array of choices is freedom.
- dkdcio 1y agohow? in what way? why? what does that even mean?
- lm28469 1y agoUnlimited options when it comes to consumerists gadgets, 1 option when it comes to being a wage slave your whole life
- card_zero 1y agoIt's not like they're obstructing a better arrangement. I guess you have in mind something like: all the pointless churn of making the latest video doorbells and smart watches could instead be dedicated to giving me and you some time off work. So, UBI? Maybe. But this is obstructed by voters, or by practicalities.
- ch4s3 1y agoChoice is an aspect of freedom. You could have absolutely freedom from any kind of social or political obligation or coercion and if all you can do with that is how potatoes then what good is it?
- raincole 1y agoFreedom isn't about the number of choices. It's about: - Comprehensiveness: instead of pork or beef, you can choose from meat, fish, tofu or egg as your protein source. - Non-commitment: choosing one of them doesn't prevent you from choosing another for the next meal. - Safety: none of them shouldn't be so expensive that it hurts you financially, or poisoned it hurts you physiologically beyond its nutritional nature. I'm not talking about meals but elections, by the way.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Theodores 1y agoThere is also the aspect of freedom - for whom? A 'free market' means freedom from monopolistic and rent-seeking practices (according to a Marxist). Yet we have a different capitalist take on what a 'free market' is, which is more like a choice between Pepsi, Coca Cola and own-brand cola, with plain old tap water not on the menu.
- acuozzo 1y agoTaking it further, it's worth asking if we're talking about: 1. Freedom TO or 2. Freedom FROM? Both are valid in discussions of freedom, but I find the west tends to focus considerably more on #1 than #2.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoThanks for bringing this point up. I may have incredible freedoms inside a market, but I have little to no freedom from markets (or capitalism) I have no practical freedom between different economic systems. Capital has eaten it all. I detest being essentially forced to participate in a system I don't believe in where the alternative (living in the woods alone) isn't really an alternative at all. It's Moloch or the wilderness.
- saurik 1y agoThis wording isn't as useful as it comes across at first, as the issue itself is often two-sided. Steve Jobs--one of the defining users of these phrases in tech--saying that it is important to exert his puritan values on everyone to provide a "freedom from" porn by normalizing taking away someone else's "freedom to" install whatever they want is also him exerting what he feels should be his "freedom to" build centralized cryptographic locks and take away many peoples' "freedom from" authoritarians, whether here or in China. The west, for numerous reasons, tends to focus a lot on "freedom from" such control, and it happens to manifest as a "freedom to" do things, but a "freedom to" do something is always commensurate with a "freedom from" the constant intrusion of the people who insist that you can't. GPL software guarantees me both a "freedom to" do things with it, but it's moral purpose is to ensure "freedom from" all the shitty things developers can do to me if I don't have those guarantees. At the end of the day, I feel this linguistic contrivance is maybe useful if you've never before realized the world is made up of tradeoffs between multiple interests, but then it starts to lose its usefulness once people try to apply it as a shortcut for how to analyze or judge morality.
- dpflan 1y agoSounds like The Paradox of Choice. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
- massysett 1y agoSort of. I took the argument in “The Paradox of Choice” to be that too many superficial choices can reduce happines: for instance, choosing between ten different varieties of toothpaste in the supermarket can overwhelm the consumer. I think a practical lesson from that book is that a company can boost sales by reducing the number of trivial choices it offers, making it easier for the customers to pick the “right one.” This article on the other hand seems to say that people have equated choice with political or economic or philosophical freedom and, furthermore, that this equivalence is a false one. It’s a deeper and more difficult argument to make. I think “The Paradox of Choice” makes a lot of sense but this article leaves me unconvinced. For example I’m not understanding the argument this piece makes about the abortion debate. Abortion rights proponents are not arguing that the right to choose abortion is an empty promise. They’re arguing that women need to have real choices so they can in fact choose abortion if they wish. The arguments this piece makes to suggest choice does not promote freedom seem to me to support the opposite conclusion: that choice is an essential component of liberty and freedom.
- somewhereoutth 1y agoIs this about freedom to vs freedom from? The first freedom of course is freedom from fear (e.g. from fear of being snatched from the street just because you are brown and speak with an accent)
- techblueberry 1y agoI find this topic wild, and it makes me wonder a lot of things - is an abundance of choice not freedom, or is freedom not strictly speaking “good” - is there a freedom to be able to have a life on rails? Maybe 50 years ago you grow up in a small town with a coal mine, and you get married to someone from that town and work in that mine for the rest of your life. That choice or lifestyle is not available to a lot of people anymore. - non-compatible choices —- some people say about work from home is always good, because each person has a choice, some can work from home, some in the office, but these choices just aren’t compatible. Having a work from home policy generally means that people who want to work in the office don’t get the experience they were hoping for. - super markets. consolidation means there’s only a few brands of supermarkets left. But those super markets have more choice than ever before - but they also tend to have a pretty narrow selection of raw ingredients / produce. What is freedom here? * the loss of special experiences. My city had a great authentic Thai restaurant. It was great! I could go whenever I wanted, but when I actually went to Thailand, I was a bit disappointed that nothing really felt new there. * the loss of human connection. I think the world was a better place when Tv during the day sucked. We’ve fundamentally lost the need to rely on each other for entertainment, and I think this has impacts in community formation, friendship and dating. * Adaptation to self vs self-adaptation. When there was less choices you had to change yourself to appreciate new things. Now one can probably almost precisely do the opposite, only find the things that match who you currently are.
- ch4s3 1y agoThis is demonstrably false. Large supermarkets in the US have far more SKUs in produce, dairy, and meat than they did 30 years ago. I can still remember the first time I encountered a number of vegetables in the early 2000s which suddenly appeared in large chain grocery stores. Who knew what a sunchoke was in 1992?
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- bendigedig 1y agoIn my view a superabundance of irrelevant choices blinds most folks to the lack of more politically important choices which are denied to most. Perhaps the contemporary fight back against 'woke' is really about the important and empowering choices in life being denied to too many?
- cjfd 1y agoI once hear 'freedom' explained as having the ability to do what only you can do. I think that is better food for thought than this entire article.
- SoftTalker 1y agoExactly this. The article (and most of the discussion) is about choices in a marketplace. Consumption of goods and services. Freedom to me is much more about the ability to pursue one's own life goals, what to study, what things to devote one's life to, where to live, how to practice religion or other systems of values, etc. Talking about freedom in terms of a selection of products in a marketplace seems very shallow.
- ranprieur 1y agoThe most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing.
- loganc2342 1y agoThe article brings up some interesting points but doesn’t really go anywhere with them. I came into the article with a mindset of “freedom of choice is objectively better, explain to me why I’m wrong,” and only came away with the caveat of “if public health and safety demands less choice.” Which is fair, and essentially how (the majority of) people reason politically, at least in the US; on paper, your choice of political party affiliation rests on how much individual choice you believe people should have on individual issues, such as the choice to have an abortion or the choice the manufacture a product that harms the environment. The debate is essentially: does giving people this choice have a significant enough negative impact on public health and safety to warrant limiting the freedom to make this choice? However, I still think that, in general, more freedom of choice is only a good thing. > Is there any real difference between the scores of toothpastes or breakfast cereals in contemporary supermarkets? That depends. Do you have a preference for one flavor of toothpaste or cereal over another? Do you have dental issues that require a toothpaste with whitening effects, or without fluoride, or with baking soda? In a cereal, do you value health concerns over taste, or vice versa? If so, then yes, there is a real difference between different choices in these cases. Making one choice over another can have a direct impact on quality of life, if often a minor one. And this is what makes freedom of choice so important for me: it’s the freedom to strive to improve quality of life—synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. Of course, as the article briefly touches on, freedom of choice isn’t the only kind of freedom, and arguably isn’t the most important one, either. I think this is the point the author was trying to make, but she doesn’t go into much detail. Freedom from oppression is a prerequisite for freedom of choice, and freedom from suffering is (on paper) the ultimate goal of it. Therein lies the debate: when does increased freedom of choice impede on these other two freedoms? Which should be prioritized in these cases? The line is different for everyone. I would’ve liked to see the article add more nuance to the discussion.
- tug2024 1y ago[dead]
- card_zero 1y agoToothpaste options do matter. There's only one kind I know of - conveniently very cheap, not a big brand - without massive amounts of menthol in. Since menthol triggers my gag reflex, I buy that one. Without consumerism, I would be supplied with the people's utility toothpaste, and I would be retching whenever I brushed my teeth.
- overflyer 1y agoWhen you had therapy for several years there are very wise therapists and authors that teach you that the opposite iOS true despite sounding paradox: Freedom is the limitation of choices.
- notagoodidea 1y agoI have that cheesy-ish phrase I carry around with me since a teenager: “Freedom is the ability to choose your regrets and your remorses”.
- kleiba 1y agoThey say that choice is freedom I'm so free it drives me to the brink ... They say that choice is freedom I'm so free it's driving me insane ... They say that choice is freedom I'm so free I'm stuck in therapy Joe Jackson: It's All Too Much (1991)
- samdoesnothing 1y agoTo me, freedom means to be free of obligations to others. I don't really see how an abundance of choice has anything to do with freedom...
- NaomiLehman 1y agoThere is a really good book that touches on some of these topics: “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants,' while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.” ― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (or The Fear of Freedom in another translation)
- tug2024 1y ago[dead]
- daft_pink 1y agoIt’s not the same thing as freedom, but it does correlate. Correlation does not equal causation all the time, but sometimes it does and it’s often impractical to prove it doesn’t if the correlation is high enough. Having a lot of choices is often a strong indicator that you also have freedom.
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- JanisErdmanis 1y agoEquating freedom with choice is strange. Often choices comes hand in hand with commitments which removes initial options from the table while other options appear. Whether the lost options produces regret is a matter of one’s evolving values that perceives the available options at the given time. Hence absence of regret seems the real freedom, but we don’t have a Time Machine or a Crystal Ball. The next best option is approaching regret with humility of the past and agency to align current values with future options. If the values don’t need to be forced on oneself to align with available options then we get freedom.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoIf you have many choices that are within a small range, it's the opposite of freedom. It's more about control. But it works extremely well to give the illusion of freedom. You see that in our political discourse. Debates over things like gay marriage, immigration or abortion are encouraged because they don't cost the oligarchy any money. Discussion about things like income inequality that may reduce the power and wealth of the upper class is discouraged.
- autoexec 1y ago> Behavioural economists point out that most people are actually pretty bad at making decisions of this kind That's okay because those choices are their own. I think most people would rather make their own choices and live with the consequences than have the ability to choose taken from them even if that'd mean being forced into something that would be better for them than alternatives. Personally, I don't equate an abundance of choice with freedom, but a lack of choice or unnecessary constraints on avilable choices aren't going to make people more free either.
- weitendorf 1y agoConsumer freedom is a real kind of freedom that goes hand in hand with the freedom to choose more meaningful lifestyle and career choices. The reason those choices are meaningful is precisely because the stakes are higher than what you buy at the store. If you go back two hundred years, the ability for a family to offer their children such an abundance of food with so many options was extremely meaningful because poor people really did have to struggle to put food on the table and almost nobody had access to so many different kinds of food. Now we take it for granted because it’s easy and anybody can do it, not because we stopped enjoying it. When people decry that nobody else will pay them to be an artist or to follow their passions they’re really decrying that they’re unwilling or unable to follow their passions without either giving up something or without offering enough back to other people to justify their use of their resources. Reality doesn’t give a shit whether or not you’re free, neither does the guy that built your house or grew your food, or the nurse that wipes your ass when you get sick. You either have to be the change you want to see or stop whining that other people won’t adjust their lives to conform to the way you want them to be, without subjecting yourself to any discomfort beyond jeering from the sidelines. It’s really easy to imagine a world in which you’re free to benefit from everybody else’s lack thereof, children do it all the time.
- h2zizzle 1y agoProductivity has outpaced population growth for some time, and the largest obstacle to the full-fledged social stability that would guarantee ubiquitous "food on the table" (at least, in the West) are people like you, who advocate zealously for artificial scarcity based on a mistaken or emotional sentiment. Anyway, "consumer freedom" as we know it is a facade, with a handful of conglomerates owning most of the brands you know, a few large investment funds owning the conglomerates, and a few factories in Asia supplying many of the parts and products that nominally Western brands sell. The choices aren't meaningful and the costs are higher because we try to maintain this appearance of choice (hence, Temu).
- weitendorf 1y agoHow willing are you to farm for your own food, or let someone else decide what's worth eating? How willing are you to order other people what to do without taking those orders yourself? Do you think that you're going to be the one in charge in a world where someone gets to decide we have enough different kinds of cereal? There are places where you can live like that right now, most people don't like them. And if you think I'm whatever cultural archetype you hate that keeps things this way, just know that my life sucks too and I'm giving up a lot to just try to make it better for other people instead of moseying along hating what I do and how powerless I am. But pretty quickly you realize people hate that even more than they hate their own suffering, nothing you do will ever be good enough for them because they just want to be miserable and make it someone else's fault - if they take any responsibility for it, they have to admit that it's not going to just change for them. Nothing is actually stopping you from making your own music, nobody has to listen to it though, unless you make them. But it's your only choice if you don't like the music you have already. Just get ready for people to tell you they don't like it.
- zyklonix 1y agoI never really connected the modern idea of "freedom of choice" with today’s loneliness epidemic until reading this. The author makes a compelling case that our obsession with individual choice has quietly eroded the social fabric that makes freedom meaningful, turning independence into isolation.
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- RLAIF 1y ago[dead]
- m463 1y agowhat I think of: "Privacy choices"