Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom | Hacker News Reader

Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom

aeon.co

155 pointsherbertl110 comments

Freedom 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.

There 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.

Taking 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.

Thanks 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.

This 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.

I feel like we can simplify this: Alice's freedom to do something is in conflict with Bob's freedom from Alice doing it to him.

And then we're back to "you should have the freedom to do anything that doesn't harm someone else" and people get to argue forever about what counts as harm.

Thats just positive versus negative rights, although people often frame positive rights as "freedom from", i.e. "the freedom from starvation", which is just the positive right to food.

Positive rights of course directly imply slavery so it makes sense people wish to frame them as negative rights.

How exactly does the right to food "imply slavery"?

Where does the food come from that you have the right to?

> Positive rights of course directly imply slavery so it makes sense people wish to frame them as negative rights.

I think you're probably a better person than this.

Hmm, let me explain and then you can be the judge of that.

All rights that a person possesses implies obligations that everyone else must meet. For example, if I have the right to not be assaulted, that implies the obligation of others to not assault me. The difference between a negative and positive right is that the obligation for a negative right is inaction, but for a positive right it's action.

If you're forced to act in a specific way, you're robbed of your agency and ownership of yourself. What else would you call that?

Are you able to understand the difference between taxes and slavery? If you can, try your hand at explaining why taxes and slavery are different. I'm am not merely asking rhetorically; I'm serious. It's a worthwhile exercise because it reveals something about your underlying model of the world.

Well, I suppose we should define what we mean by "slavery" first because one could simply argue they aren't the same by definition. If it's something like "someone captured, sold, or born into chattel slavery", than obviously a tax payer is not a slave.

But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.

I'm actually more interested in your argument for why they are mutually exclusive concepts.

> But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.

This is the difference between what I might call philosophical, or perhaps semantic, and practical discussions.

We can define slavery to mean anything we want, up to and including being born. Every human has to eat and breathe to survive, does that mean they're slaves in that way? Sure? Maybe? Who cares.

The practical discussion is how we want to live our actual lives and structure our actual systems of power.

When people talk about "positive rights" (and really, all rights) they are aspirational. Merely creating a law does not change reality. We can create all the laws we want saying that people should not be murdered, but people will in fact, still be murdered, even though it is now against the law.

Similarly we can create a law saying that people should have healthcare access or food, but people will still be unable to see a doctor or get food when they need it. Neither of those laws imply putting anyone into slavery.

At a practical level, human life is better when we band together in larger and larger groups and contribute to the common welfare, however you want to phrase that.

We can, of course, quibble over the size and type of those contributions and how we use them, thats how society should work, but it is incredible bad faith to accuse people who want to use those contributions for, say, healthcare access, of wanting to enslave people.

Well yeah, thats a problem with debates, if people are using different definitions then you end up talking around each other. I don't think the definition I use is unreasonable though. Slavery is fundamentally a matter of self-ownership, and taxation robs you of such self-ownership. Requiring resources to survive doesn't rob one of their own self ownership. Neither does working for a salary, although "wage slave" gets thrown around without much opposition to the term...

Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive. Implying rights don't exist because people violate them doesn't make sense, it's irrelevant.

Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?

Now of course most people who hold these beliefs haven't given it any thought beyond "I want people to be safe happy and healthy". But those who have, realise coercive violence is a base requirement and are fine with it, but obviously won't frame their beliefs in that way.

You keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.

> Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive

Prove it.

> Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?

This a fantasy you've created by deliberately using the wrong definition of the words involved.

The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.

> you keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.

> The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.

Yeah ok. I'm gonna bow out of this discussion now, since you're just accusing me of doing what you're in fact doing.

Like I said, you can use whatever definitions you want, but this is what everyone else means. You can disagree with reality all you want, but you won't become correct.

It's the opposite and highly different across the western world, with America mostly focusing on 2 and Europe obsessed with 1

I have no understanding of the "freedom to ..." and "freedom from ..." phrases that would align with your claim about America.

"Freedom from..." is generally used to form phrases like "Freedom from hunger", "Freedom from homelessness", "Freedom from being thrown in the back of an unmarked black van by unmarked people wearing masks". I don't know what version of America you've experienced, but the one I know absolutely does not focus on this notion of "freedom from".

Yeah, look at the state of our freedom of religion. Conservative Christians love to push the idea that religious freedom includes the right to legislate from scripture, but honestly, it feels like people should know better.

People tend to think that when you get the government involved with something you are passionate about, that passion will now influence the government. Still, the reality is that you're handing control over that passion to the government.

This is how a "Christian America" would play out. Whatever beliefs are held by those in power would be written into law, despite the actual opinions of America's Christians. The government would declare itself an authority over Christianity and would start telling churches how to operate.

This was already partially true in red states before marriage equality (and probably still true today, to some extent). Progressive churches that believed same-sex marriages were holy in the eyes of God were told by the state that they could not perform same sex marriages - in some cases, even barring a pure non-binding ceremony as a form of "attempted marital fraud".

If you are an American Christian and you care about your right to worship freely without government interference, you should cherish secularism. Enforcing the Bible as a matter of law means that interpretations of the Bible you disagree with will be enforced against you. Requiring prayer in schools will lead to vicious fights between teachers and parents over which prayers are the "correct" ones. Literally any piece of scripture you write into law will become controversial even amongst Christians. But still, people insist that their freedom would somehow be enhanced.

And this doesn't even touch on the fact that a Christian America would turn non-Christians, especially Muslims and Jews, into a lower class of citizens.

It is unfortunate that he current powers controlling all branches of our government are primarily interested in taking rights away, and that those who voted for it think that this is freedom.

I mean I'm a Christian and want a secular government but this current administration is the farthest thing from a Christian administration in the history of the United States. Donald Trump is like the first non practicing self identified Christian in US history.

By and large many issues in America today are due to have abandoned Christian norms on both ends of the political spectrum.

Freedom from interference. Hunger is not of human origin, thus no human can guarantee you freedom from hunger. This is a religious desire. On the other hand, humans can guarantee their own non interference

The human world, for decades, perhaps even centuries, has produced far, far more calories than humans need to avoid hunger. So in fact, humanity can guarantee freedom from hunger. But because we concede control over the distribution of food to the richest and most powerful, people are hungry.

No we cannot because such things require restricting the freedom of others and you yourself cannot feed the world. However you can commit to not interfering in the lives of all eight billion people. It's actually really easy if you put your mind to it . These two things (feeding the world v not interfering) are things of two different categories

the fact that "I, myself" cannot feed the world does not prevent me being a part of systems that can.

i put much less priority on "not interfering" than you, perhaps because i'm a priviledged white anglo middle class dude, or perhaps because i believe different things about the world than you. such as: there's always interfering, it cannot be escaped, it can only be shaped.

A free market simply means that individuals are free to conduct consensual transactions with others. In other words, they aren't compelled through violence or the threat thereof, to make or not make transactions that they otherwise would.

Generally speaking, what all other definitions boil down to is Sam and Hanna wanting to make a consensual transaction, and some third party who has nothing to do with said transition interfering "for the greater good" or whatever. Which is nonsense, it's the complete opposite of freedom.

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What you're really asking is if fundamental individual human rights are desirable for individuals and community as a whole, which is of course a hotly debated topic. So yeah, it goes all the way down to fundamental questions like if we should have freedom of association.

> A 'free market' means freedom from monopolistic and rent-seeking practices (according to a Marxist).

This is also the position of Adam Smith and, for that matter, everybody except for the monopolists and their sycophants.

I think the latter are sometimes referred to as the Chicago School and someone should really buy that place out to split it up and sell it for parts. I bet they have some nice buildings that are worth way more than any of their theories.

> 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.

Let's not ignore the third thing here. There are actual economists who will make arguments like "monopolies are efficient because of economies of scale" -- all empirical evidence to the contrary -- and presumably actually believe them. But there are also, you know, monopolies, and government officials in their pockets, who say things like that knowing that they're full of crap because that mendacity has been lucrative for them.

And maybe we need to start putting those people out on their butts or into a prison cell.

Why are you (apparently) calling Milton Friedman a sycophant of monopolists? Here's a Friedman quote, shortened to keep it on topic:

"A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, [long list of other functions of government,] engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which [something about welfare]—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist."

Obviously he didn't like regulation at all, and was probably struggling to decide how much of it to tolerate, but that doesn't mean he wanted monopolies.

I was thinking more of Scalia than Friedman, but let's go there for a minute too.

Probably nobody wants monopolies except for monopolies; the question is what do you do about them? And the Chicago School answer is something like, have more free trade and fewer regulations so that markets are more competitive.

The problem with this is that it isn't robust against selective implementation.

We get "free trade" where international corporations get access to US capital markets in order to fund the creation of vertically integrated global supply chains that offshore jobs and consolidate the global economy into a small number of companies and countries, but we don't get "free trade" where US consumers can feasibly use a foreign bank or payment processor if the US ones have consolidated and captured the regulators, or where foreign doctors have a practical path to immigrate to the US and practice medicine.

We get "fewer regulations" where giant corporations successfully lobby to get rid of laws that are inconvenient to giant corporations (like Glass–Steagall), but not "fewer regulations" where there are still a zillion regulations that impact small companies more than large ones and make it more difficult to start a new business or compete with existing incumbents. I mean, why is DMCA 1201 still on the books? Its nominal purpose was a fraud from day one and the only thing anybody really uses it for in practice is to lock out competitors.

You thereby accumulate a bunch of consolidated markets that you need to promptly smash into tiny pieces with the antitrust hammer or you're in a losing battle against time where they lobby to accumulate even more rules that benefit the incumbents faster than anybody else can accomplish getting rid of them.

And I know I'm criticizing the implementation rather than the theory here, i.e. Scalia rather than Friedman again, but for a theory to be good it's kind of important that it be amenable to practical implementation.

But for that you need the theory to actually specify -- in bright letters on the front page, not in a footnote somewhere -- that the most important part is that the regulations you get rid of first are the ones that limit competition, not the ones that defend against consolidated incumbents. Because otherwise the consolidated incumbents will point to your theory to argue for doing the opposite, which is what happened.

The term "free market" originally referred much more to freedom from government or ruler-controlled markets than it did to the behavior of actors with a market.

A free market in that sense is one in which (more or less) anyone can sell (more or less) anything at (more or less) any price. Historically, the freedom to do this was impeded by laws and/or arbitrary rule making, even if today monopolies, monopsonies and rent-seeking are a bigger problem in many markets.

“People will say with a straight face that having one choice for dear leader is tyranny – but having two is freedom.”

By the way, it doesn't matter how many choices you have - if you can't chose the one you want, you don't have any freedom at all.

> any freedom at all

It's not all-or-nothing. I'd rather have a choice instead of none.

>It's not all-or-nothing. I'd rather have a choice instead of none.

I used to work adjacent to car financing. One of the "tricks" used in car negotiating is the "fake choice": "oh, you want to pay less for the car? Well. I can give you X OR Y for FREE!". Now you spend time thinking if you want X or Y, forgetting thay they are worth $200, and what you really want is $1000 less on the car.

Be careful with the "choice" you think you are making

Don't let the illusion of having a choice make you feel like you have a choice.

Having only one choice is equal to having no choice.

Having only two choices isn't notably better, especially if both options are equally bad.

If I want pasta, and I can chose from 10k options, but none of which are pasta, is it really any different than if I had one option?

> Having only two choices isn't notably better, especially if both options are equally bad.

This is getting pointlessly non-specific. The world rarely has two equally bad choices and that description absolutely does not apply to american elections.

Do you want to eat a plate of worms or do you want to eat a plate of spiders?

Spiders, probably. What kind of worms?

Mealworms, it’s right there in the name

Do you want to die from hanging, lethal injection, firing squad, electrocution?

Lethal injection if done right, otherwise firing squad. What are you trying to demonstrate? Some choice is still better than no choice.

I was trying to demonstrate that choice < freedom

If the people can get rid of a leader, they don't live under totalitarianism. Even though another leader will appear quite soon, the important thing is to be able to cause the incumbent leader anxiety and confusion at election time, to prevent excessive leadership.

I will say with a straight face that having one choice for dear leader is tyranny, but having two is better than one.

Freedom is freedom from choice.

There is this fanaticism in the US with "choice", which is confused with freedom, that can often result in detrimental consequences:

https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...

> - Non-commitment: choosing one of them doesn't prevent you from choosing another for the next meal.

Left unspecified-- do you mean as measured scientifically? Or do you simply mean that a person perceives that this choice won't prevent them from choosing differently for their next meal?

I’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.

The 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.

Meanwhile, 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.

I 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.

I 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.

The 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.

>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.

Your example is completely orthogonal to liberty. Choices are completely orthogonal. If the serf could leave and not starve, he still wouldn't be free because they would find and drag him back and punish him. He wasn't permitted to make the choice, it being incidental that he wouldn't survive long enough to be punished for it in most circumstances.

If they had refrained from punishing serfs that leave you'd still insist there is no freedom there, I think, because of the starvation. But no one is obligated to feed you so that you can choose options that would otherwise starve you.

>Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices

For good reason. Given choices, humans inevitably pick the worst of them. And I'm not talking about those that are only bad options in hindsight.

>it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom.

There's no effort, that's called reality. Reality limits choices, and it is effortless.

We have the choice to be free for a time and then beaten or killed? no?

Yeah, technically we’re always free to do whatever we want. Other people are the issue, not our ability to choose.

There are absolutely ways in which limiting our choices increases overall freedom: specifically, when our choices harm others, or take away their freedoms. Indeed, this is what laws that create a safe and healthy society based in rule of law are.

Removing our freedom—or ability to choose—to kill others, take them as slaves, take away their stuff*, etc, is an increase in overall freedom of the society, especially as that removal is expanded to everyone in the society, no matter how wealthy or powerful they are.

* With impunity, through laws and enforcement thereof; being able to physically prevent us from doing such things en masse is a different kind of question.

I suspect the appeal of Jane Austin is characters making the most of their limited choices. I don’t think anyone reading her can ignore the vast set of rules the characters have hooked themselves and each other to. It’s integral to the story. It’s small rebellions that make the characters feel alive.

> 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.

Even sort of bing a libertarian, objectively speaking, yes, I think other people will make bad decisions with their choices.

I find this argument interesting, because I think it’s a plea to rationality. people who consider themselves good/rational are humble enough not to paint the rest of humanity with such a broad brushstroke. But I think it’s wrong, I think it serves more as an emotional plea than a rational one.

So yes, I think the author probably thinks that too many choices will lead people to make bad choices, and in fact not only do I agree with the author but I would guess many? Most? People would be happy to apply this to themselves.

> 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.

I think it's definitely the case where corporations and the media want us to believe that having a huge array of choices is freedom.

how? in what way? why? what does that even mean?

Unlimited options when it comes to consumerists gadgets, 1 option when it comes to being a wage slave your whole life

It'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.

Choice 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?

Salesmanship has long been associated with convincing people they have a problem and then offering a solution.

And an evergreen one is the single differentiating feature. Like color. How many kitchenaid appliances have been sold in a faddish color only to be replaced by white or black or red a handful of years later? Those things were tanks. Still are to an extent.

On the higher end. Low-end are imported often-junk with a badge stamped on them.

It’s solving a different problem in that case.

I want one but not for that much.

Also being poor is expensive.

> 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)

It's the inversion of something which is correct.

If you don't have any choice or are limited to a small number of bad options, that's not freedom. Freedom requires choice.

But choice is necessary, not sufficient. Having a thousand frivolous choices that are all bad and still not the ones you ought to have is not it either.

The American media environment in the post-WWII era (say, 1948-1968) was full of both explicit and implicit claims that the vast array of consumer choices available to Americans was evidence of the freedom the Americans had.

And it was.

Evidence of a fact is different from the fact.

The GP:

> Said who? This is an argument from invented opposition. I’m not sure anyone actually defines freedom as "a huge array of choices".

This is an argument about who "defined freedom as ..." and I pointed out who did.

Consumer 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.

Productivity 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).

How 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.

Of course there are places like that now; if you're an American, you're living in one. "Consumer choice" didn't save us, because everyone made the same choices and all of the corporations behind those choices merged and repackaged their all-too-similar products with slightly different branding.

But, as you say, that's not because people don't want choice. It's because the choice was often between "safe and decent and expensive" and "unhealthy or dangerous but cheap" and sometimes even "unhealthy or dangerous and also expensive." The choice wasn't meaningful.

I live in an apartment, but I've got a few food plants on my deck. People do what they can within a broken system driven by the profit motive (read: exploitation), but it IS a system and it IS broken, and that's something that no amount of advocating for "consumer choice" or "working hard" within the broken system will change. And you bet your ass that I'd love to see what we have get replaced with one with fewer "choices", where the remainder are actually good ones.

Maybe stop complaining yourself and make that happen. As for me, I'm getting ready to harvest my sweet potatoes and draw a few storyboards. Hopefully one day the world will catch up to the fact that I don't actually have to do the former because we produce more than enough industrially, and that people who can do the latter are a badge of honor for our objective prosperity, and not a burden.

Exactly. The essay meandered, and didn't say much of note. It has vague illusions to personal choice and markets being detrimental. But that's it. Too many people feel entitled the control the choices of others. And yet they rarely accept equal control of their choices.

> "But an emphasis on choice as a form of liberation has occasioned serious resentments in different sectors and geographies, where it can seem a direct threat to other, more communal values and needs." I think this quote sums it up nicely. Personal liberation is not a threat to mutually beneficial communal values. If you need to force people to behave as part of your community, then it should be voluntary. One should be able to choose to pursue any form of freedom or community they'd like. If you want freedom to be "an act of pure imagination" and live a communal lifestyle, you should have the choice.

Right, it performs exactly what perpetuates the problem the author has with the world, in failing to provide or enact any positive vision for how to make things better, and in projecting their own desires onto others as if they're an objective measure of how things ought to be. When I was a kid, I loved walking down the fucking cereal aisle. I personally don't understand why people are so into concerts and music festivals but my girlfriend loves them, and I don't see why they're any worse than the number of open source web libraries or discord channels that people in my demographic take joy in.

The one thing that truly made a difference for my own personal satisfaction was in realizing that inaction and despairing about society because of my own problems were a defense mechanism to justify what might happen if I tried to actually make things better, and either failed or became something I moralized against. Who gives a shit that there's too much cereal? What's actually making people unhappy is not enough of something else, or something missing in their lives that they can't find. Ultimately you either choose to do nothing or to try to make things better, and accept that inaction is itself a choice.

That’s a fair point, material abundance and consumer freedom have lifted billions out of hardship. What I found eye-opening in the essay, though, is that abundance can coexist with emptiness: when every decision is individual and transactional, we lose the shared meaning that once came from depending on one another. The argument isn’t against comfort or choice, but against mistaking options for connection.

I interpret it differently - the author is arguing that in becoming increasingly free of the hardship and consequences brought by lack of choice, we became increasingly disconnected from others because we didn't have to rely on them. But that doesn't have anything to do with milk, or mean we're not free. People actively exercise their freedom every time they choose personal convenience and optionality over other people.

It's not the lack of freedom, but an outcome of it that the author finds undesirable - same with their argument that the amount of choice is so overwhelming that it begets freedom. I've been to the grocery store enough to just get what I like and get it out - you either have to willfully participate in it to let something that unimportant overwhelm you, or think your inability to not get overwhelmed is universal or important enough to not realize that some people want those options more than you, or just are unbothered by it.

If you allow yourself to participate in something meaningful then you just won't care about having so many unimportant decision to make, because you'll choose to not think about them, even if it means you have to accept that there might be even worse outcomes than picking the wrong carton of milk. Personally, I believe that it's what might actually help the author get over whatever it is that causes them to point the finger at having too many options - find something where your decisions matter.

I 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.

Exactly 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.

Free, 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

There 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)

An 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.

A 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

Thank you this is right up my alley right now.

I 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.

The 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.

Toothpaste 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.

Equating 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.

> 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.

    They 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)

I 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.

This 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?

Is 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)

When 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.

To 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...

I have that cheesy-ish phrase I carry around with me since a teenager: “Freedom is the ability to choose your regrets and your remorses”.

The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing.

In 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?

what I think of:

"Privacy choices"

It’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.

If 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.

Sounds like The Paradox of Choice.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Sort 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.

Thanks for the clarifying response.

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