Freedom & Choice

Choice. Something that we ought to have every day, at every juncture, on every issue, every purchase, every emotion even. What about choice is it that we demand so much of? What do we get out of choice? Is it the freedom to choose between options that we hold dear? Or the power we feel when we have the ability to make one?

Or even a power we feel when our choices can decide the fate of others? Let's leave this one out of the equation as we should not enter the heady realm of politics yet.

It usually boils down to freedom, thus the term "freedom of choice". The availability of choice immediately gives you freedom. But how can one measure freedom? Can a measure of freedom be based on the number of choices that one has? By that measure, we might conclude that if you're a mother shopping for milk powder in the UK, you have more freedom than if you were in Iran because there are more choices of milk powder. A mother in China on the other hand might run you closer on this issue and more freedom is deemed to her than you might reckon.

So having more choices is better isn't it? It allows us to choose and compare between multiple options before coming up with our almighty decision. We shall not discuss what affects the decision making process, although it's safe to say the usual brew of culture, advertising of some sort, current status and minimal intelligence is involved. What if we have 50 different milk powder on the shelf but all of them are shite? Are you still free? Do you still have a choice? What if all the milk powders are equally good?

To have a true freedom of choice, or rather the ideal of a true freedom of choice, one would imagine that the shelf be filled with milk powders offering different benefits. Variety then. A variety of choice would give you maximum freedom. But what if each milk powder offers each an unique benefit? And your kid needs the most benefits, doesn't he. Surely you have freedom to have all the benefits in one tin. This doesn't leave you much of a choice then.

The quality of the options matters now. What goes into the different tins of milk powders and their make-up is now directly affecting your freedom of choice. So you want a choice of factories, with a choice of ingredients, a choice of price point and a perhaps a choice of taste. It might sound ludicrous but if upon examination, I'm sure that's the least you have to ask for to have the best choice available to you, distribution networks allowing. It might start to become clear that we can go much deeper into the exploration on the quality of the options available to us and demand to have a choice in them to allude to your freedom of choice. It might boil down to having a choice of a proton or neutron. Or a superstring.

Practically speaking, having freedom of choice means to let us have a chance to choose between options presented to us on the shelf. Often which options get to go on the shelf and what goes into the options are beyond us. We might affect it but there's no real way we can control it. What we're left with is the opportunity to make an intelligent choice while standing before the shelf. That is really what it is and it is not freedom.

I won't say freedom is over-rated because I really rate the ideal. But I will say that freedom is often bandied around as an advertising tool to allow all sorts of mischief and affect all kinds of bad decisions. It happens because people confuse the illusion of freedom with the real thing. I'm not sure if anyone on each ever touched the true ideal of freedom but certainly a lot of folks believe so. And that annoys and disappoints me no end. So choice if choice does not give us freedom, what does it give? Annoying decisions and the responsibility of your decision, that's what. And all with the underlying illusion of freedom which makes the responsibility feels even heavier.

Now, let's go back to the shelf. Imagine you've a choice of 2 supermarkets (OMG lucky you!),one with the variety of milk powders that each has a benefit unique to itself and another one with only one brand of milk powder that has 10 freaking benefits that's almost exactly what you need (barring a death penalty or two). Which supermarket would you rather be in? The one with freedom of choice or the one with nothing but the one milk powder you could use?