Books on choice and choosing have been hitting the bookstores and Amazon rankings lately – mostly dealing with the potential consequences of choice. Speak to the rich and they’ll immediately tell you that the key advantage of wealth is choice, making the lack of choice – consequently – one of the worst downsides of poverty.
Yet choice also has its downsides. Untutored, we can become stymied by choice. Scared of making the wrong choice, we wring our hands and hesitate. And while this may seem like a harmonious dilemma – compared to those forced to live their life without choice – their restrictions are little comfort as we become potentially terrorised by our own autonomy. If we can choose anything: our career, class, gender, sexuality, identity – then who do we blame when that future turns out not as we had hoped?
Fear of failure is, of course, the psychological consequence of this. Having total freedom to choose our future – with only ourselves to blame for our failures – is enough to make even the confident hesitate at the threshold of a major decision. This, as Renata Salecl argues in her new book Choice, is the “tyranny of choice”, which – she claims – is founded on a series of lies.
The first lie is the notion (often put about by economists) that our individual choices are rational, when they are mostly irrational – based on our unconscious desires. These are likely to be insatiable, meaning that we will always be dissatisfied – hardly a recipe for greater happiness. Indeed, her second lie is the notion choice creates happiness, when in fact choice-overload causes anxiety. We become concerned that our poor choices will lead to public humiliation (a classic concern of the High-FF as I call those with fear of failure).
Salecl states that society’s response to this “tyranny” is a growth in the self-help industry – aimed at aiding choice for the masses. She cites the popularity of books on Feng Shui, for example – helping us even choose where to place the furniture! Certainly this is a major theme of What’s Stopping You? my book on fear of failure (TBP March 2011 by John Wiley & Sons). Seeking a cure for the incurable (our insecurities) we elect temporary authorities that tell us how to behave and how to decide. In the secular modern world these authorities are the self-help gurus or life coaches, and the cure can be NLP or CBT, perhaps delivered by hypnotism or acupuncture or even, what the heck, Feng Shui – anything that is instant and life-changing.
Ultimately, Salecl argues, self-help books perpetuate these anxieties, rather than alleviate them. Offered the chance to become a better person making better choices, we grab it. Yet our insecurities remain unworked and ultimately return – although now we are more jaded than ever because they are laced with disappointment.
Even at street level we outsource our choices to “gurus”, whether these are for fashion or “style”, or – more fundamentally – role models that sway our career preferences (deciding between a career as a popstar or celebrity chef, perhaps). After all, “queen of shops” Mary Portas defined the mid-noughties UK “followers of fashion” as the “disciples of Beckham” – meaning that they had entirely outsourced their reasoning regarding what was and wasn’t fashionable to a celebrity couple from Essex.
More damaging (at least in my view) is Salecl’s noting that the consumer-choice model has ingrained itself into our view of relationships – our search for love following the same pattern of constant comparison and, therefore, near constant switching as we convince ourselves we are missing “a better deal” elsewhere. We are condemned to imagining parallel lives based on perceived wrong turns – especially with our choice of partner.
This brought in the other recently-published book on choice I’d been studying: The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar. In one passage she discusses arranged marriages, which for 5,000 years was the compact by which women met their husbands in many societies (including in Europe), without any noticeable detriment to that society’s happiness despite contemporary incomprehension that anyone could allow others to handle such an important decision. Some religions still prescribe many aspects of life for their believers, again without any noticeable heightening of hopelessness or depression: in fact quite the opposite.
“Perhaps the main issue with increasing choice is that it betrays our expectations,” says Iyengar – meaning that upping the choice also raises anticipation of a beneficial outcome, which increases disappointment, leading to heightened levels of dissatisfaction: even in marriage.
Yet something bothered me about both Iyengar’s and Salecl’s thesis. Was there not something a bit, well, patronising about them both? I hasten to add that Iyengar was not endorsing arranged marriage, but nonetheless both writers’ attack on choice reminded me of the witty Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander. “Knowing What’s Best for Poor People” was number 62 in his ironic list, in which he discusses the fact white people (by which he means the educated and liberal middle classes of America) get very excited by the idea of “poor people” (by which he means the less-educated, often over-weight Republican voters of the “flyover” states) being offered better (not more, note) choices: for instance being encouraged to abandon Wal-mart for a new trendy whole food market. Yet he ends with a sardonic warning: “It is essential that you make it clear that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. To suggest anything to the contrary could crush white people and their hope for the future”.
Care is therefore needed when describing the confusion created by choice. Sure, choice creates confusion, but our displeasure at the freedom others have to make what we may perceive as the wrong choice is, in fact, our confusion, not there’s. And choice is only confusing for the uninitiated. Study something – anything – and, soon enough, the choices (even bad ones) start to make sense. This is as true for the shopping preferences of the “lumpenproletariat” as it is with respect to “bourgeois” pursuits such as modern art or French cheese.
And what’s the alternative to choice? Presumably, it’s no choice, which is dangerous territory in my opinion. Don’t we end up in some form of paternalistic utopia of Maoist uniformity? At best this will look like an unreformed NHS. At worst like the Year Zero fanaticism of Pol Pot. And as for those stricter societies with restricted choice: well, ignorance is bliss – as they say – but that doesn’t make ignorance preferable. I’ll take choice over clarity anytime because clarity is usually someone else’s imposition.
Perhaps a society of choice is, therefore, the worst, err, choice, except for all the others (to paraphrase Churchill’s line on democracy). But even that seems trite to me: an intellectual victory for the totalitarians even if they know their dream of benevolent uniformity (chosen by them) is impossible to implement, at least without millions dead. For me choice is an absolute if imperfect good. We just need to learn how to exercise it.
Although a bit New Age for my tastes, The Mind of the Soul by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis tackles what they call “responsible choice”. They accept that choice can create fear, and that fear can destroy – rather than create – opportunities. But by taking responsibility for our choices, their view is that we can dispel the fear of choice.
“Each choice you make creates experiences for you and others…In fact, the way you perceive yourself is a choice,” they state, so we must choose, but wisely. This means that the stakes are high – hence employing gurus to help us. Zukav and Francis, however, think wise choices possible once we begin out career as a “scientist of consciousness” (I did say it was a bit New Age). Here’s their dynamic for achieving this:
• Reflect on your intentions before acting or speaking,
• Reflect on the consequences of each intention,
• Choose the consequences you want,
• Observe the change you experience,
• If you do not experience change, re-examine your intentions.
All this is really saying is that, when exercising choice, we should work out what we want (in the long term), as well as why we want it, and observe whether each choice is a step towards that goal or a step away from it. And if we can’t tell, the chances are the choice is of no consequence, which mean it’s nothing to be afraid of.
Where’s the tyranny in that?
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