In our postmodern contemporary world, choice, and the concomitant feeling of freedom, have come to define the greater good, the highest value, and the measure of living a full life. However, choice and freedom are instrumentalities; vehicles for the creation of a life structure that affords the possibility of becoming a life well lived. In-and-of-themselves choice and freedom have no direction and offer no guidance on values and purpose.
When our focus is on maintaining the experiences of choice and freedom, we are trapped in a deep paradox, because as soon as we make a choice we have reduced our freedom. If freedom and choice are our highest values, then we cannot commit to a choice without the risk of feeling diminished.
Topics below:
The Paradoxical Trap of Choice and Freedom
Choice and Our Sense of Self
Authenticity
The Paradoxical Trap of Choice and Freedom
Striving to continually maintain a feeling of freedom and choice has become the measure of things for many people. If creating a world for our self, in which endless choice is the definition of what is valuable, then all decisions in life will include a sense of loss. Making choices becomes a source of frustration and possible self-recrimination since, no matter how good the choice made, it is always possible to construe a better choice. Overvaluing freedom and choice is a fundamental paradox that will trap an adherent in an endless cycle of frustration and futility. The paradox of freedom and choice is tied to the fact that as soon as we make a choice we reduce our sense of freedom.
Much of contemporary culture is embedded in an overvaluation of freedom and choice. The recent marketing slogan “know no limits” typifies an entire zeitgeist, a spirit of the times that cannot be sustained as a greater good. Valuing freedom for freedom’s sake is a painfully stifling pursuit, because as soon as you choose something, you have reduced your freedom. When freedom and choice are held as the primary moral truths then the possibility for contentment is a near impossibility. The inherently limiting nature of choice leads to an inevitable sense of regret for the road not taken.
Erich Fromm makes an important distinction between a freedom from something as opposed to having a freedom for something. In the absence of holding a position of freedom for something, an individual strives for an ever-increasing freedom from things. Such a pursuit distorts the humanistic potential for full development and self-actualization. Instead of the pursuit of growth and development, we come to pursue the feeling of being unrestricted and limitless. The misguided pursuit of freedom-from leaves us with little in the way of moral moorings, other than the immediacy of desire or aversion. A pursuit of freedom-from reduces the humanistic enterprise to a perversion asserting that the satiation of needs and desires is paramount. The humanistic pursuit of growth and development is reduced to being measured in terms of the amount of freedom an individual has for reducing the frustrations of unmet needs and desires. A fully realized humanism in this reduction is one where choice is the measure of the person, choice being a right to pursue the fulfillment of ones needs.
Choice and Our Sense of Self
Maintaining a sense of choice and freedom can come to define our very sense of self, our goodness or badness. If we are always trying to avoid being constrained, then the emotional and moral challenges of life will seem to be persecutory. When this happens, we come to experience any constrictions, limitations, or wanting as a threat—psychologically, at the very least, and possibly a sense of survival in the world. The difficulties of life will be seen as injustices leading to a belief that frustration and feelings of deprivation are wrong. Our sense of self begins to feel inadequate as it is unable to prevent the feelings of needs, wants, and frustrations. Frustration and conflicting desires come to be experienced as indications of a defect in ones being, a narcissistic injury. Our very being becomes the sadist, as the intolerance for feelings of wanting is transposed onto our own sense of self. The self comes to be experienced as lacking or being bad.
Satiation of our needs and wants then becomes not merely a source of pleasure or relief, but the satisfaction of desires comes to represent our overall self-value. Any feeling of frustration comes to evoke a diminishment of self. Frustration comes to equal being in a state of sin, not the estrangement from God, but the estrangement from an ideal humanistic nirvana where there is no frustration.
Authenticity
Freedom and choice must arise in the context of striving for a fully actualized self, a striving grounded in our entire life circumstances. There certainly is considerable pragmatic value in focusing on getting one’s needs met; however, without an overarching context, life and its meaning would be taken over by an endless succession of needing and wanting. When we are authentically connected to our deeper values and actual life circumstances, we can create for ourselves a viable hierarchy of needs to guide our choices. Moral psychology has been developing an understanding of human nature that can help us authentically create our morals and values as unique individuals, but not as limitless beings.
Creating viable hierarchies of goals and pursuits has traditionally been the aim of religion and moral theory. But when religion and moral guidance are not integrated with our sense of self and life situation, they often fail to help us make the choices that fuel our commitments and purpose in life. The limited utility, as well as the constrictions on individuality, of religiosity and rigid moral theory contributed to the humanistic shift, a focus on the self. However, just as the rigidity of authoritarian moral guidance is too restrictive, similarly, the overvaluation of freedom and choice in humanism does not provide sufficient scaffolding for helping us learn how to truly flourish.
The shortcomings of the humanistic perspective must not be taken as a call for a return to previously failed moral or religious eschatology. A return to the religious or ethical rigidities of the past is not the answer. The dehumanization emergent to rigid moral authoritarianism is no more viable than the humanistic perversion of the blind pursuit of choice and autonomy. The challenge lies in the development of a pragmatic humanism with viable foundations that can support the development of moral intelligence.
The humanistic liberation from the limiting rigidities of precast social roles, authoritarian directives, and religiosity, is essential to our flourishing. Yet the simplistic hedonistic humanism seeking freedom from these bounds left a lack of structure on which to build a coherent identity. The subsequent alienation resulting from this lack of structure has beckoned for a return to more authoritarian constraints, and many individuals have retreated to the limited comforts of fundamentalism, a way of thinking that holds out the promise to satisfy our Need to Know.
The diversity and conflicting nature of our motivations makes a simple retreat to a singular truth unsustainable. Our desires and motivations are tied to psycho-evolutionary drives that are not fully reconcilable. When we are choosing between competing needs and desires, we are being confronted with the disparate nature of the self.
Since we are each comprised of innate need and motivational systems that serve disparate functions, any viable moral guidance must include a process for mediating among our conflicting natures. True authenticity provides a sustainable structure to help us guide our value-based choices while maintaining our unique individuality. Charles Taylor, in The Ethics of Authenticity, holds that we have a need for authenticity and that this need is often reduced to a subjectivist morality defined by seeking autonomously-defined goals. However, a deeper connection to our complexity of needs, values, and motivations can help us cultivate a true authenticity. True authenticity is not merely a freedom from external restraints, but takes into account our inherent inner conflicts. Our personal challenge is to authentically accept the diversity of our nature. When we endorse a narrow range of those needs, we are being inauthentic and abdicating from the struggle of full self-actualization.