What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?
What does choice even mean in that kind of environment?
You are forgetting about the time factor. I don't make a choice every time, but I'm not a 22 year old out on his own for the first time either (22 was about 30 years ago for me, and there are reasonable odds I have another 30 years to go). I don't have to make a choice every time to take advantages of choices.
Independence here isn't about whether your mind exists in a parallel world - devoid of external inputs - it's whether your input is required for an action to happen or not. They didn't simply comply with a choice from above, they experimented and came with an option that works for them. It doesn't matter whether that's a common choice or not, but who held the final authority in it.
In centralized systems, your input is, in theory, basically irrelevant/in practice, completely irrelevant unless you happen to the central authority.