I’m currently reading Alan Jacobs’ Looking Before and After and came across a brief discussion last night of Augustine’s understanding of freedom. This is an old talking point of mine that I’ve brought up on here before, but the gist of it is that freedom isn’t, in Jacob’s helpful phrase, a function of arithmetic in which a high number of choices equals freedom. Rather, freedom is the ability to choose rightly, thereby being freed from choices that would actually be destructive to you. As a throwaway remark at the end of the section Jacobs added something like, “anyone who has stood in a breakfast foods aisle in an American supermarket knows that more choices doesn’t mean more freedom.”
One of the things we talk about on a regular basis with clients is that they should design simple, easy-to-use websites that don’t overwhelm users with a million different choices. We point to a famous study by a Columbia scholar who found that, I’m trying to recall the exact numbers, when shoppers were presented with 24 jams to sample, only 3% bought any jam. But when they were given six choices, a significantly higher percentage of people purchased jam. This is all part of a fairly well documented phenomenon called “choice paralysis.” The connection I’d never made before reading Dr. Jacobs, however, was how that discussion might relate to freedom more broadly.
We all can recognize that simply having tons of choices doesn’t make us free when we’re standing in a grocery store. Yet this libertarian notion of freedom that values choice above all else still seems dominant in most non-commercial settings. I’m not sure what to make of that, but it was striking to me that in at least one part of our life we can recognize that freedom might be more about being free from wrong choices than simply having an abundance of them.
We all can recognize that simply having tons of choices doesn’t make us free when we’re standing in a grocery store.
Speak for yourself. Seriously. Not all of us find choice “paralyzing”, or need the patrician benevolence of someone else’s decisions about what we can or can’t do – which are far more likely to represent their own preferences about which choices are “wrong”, as opposed to my best interests – in order to live our lives in “freedom.”
I don’t find the cereal aisle at the grocery store inimical to my freedom in any way whatsoever. I find that the expansive options do increase my freedom.
It’s certainly the case that many people – apparently including Alan Jacobs and yourself – find unconstrained choice paralyzing, perhaps even terrifying, and find they would rather scurry back into the strictures and rituals of someone else’s decisions. But not everybody is like that – some of us have the courage to seize choice and freedom for ourselves, and our lives are immeasurably enriched by doing so. I invite you and Jacobs to give it a try sometime. There are higher aspirations than happiness and safety.
There is a extended dialogue between two characters in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace that this strongly reminded me of. The characters are discussing two types of freedom: the very American “Freedom to” and the more valuable, autonomous, “Freedom from.”
Though it was a few years ago when I read it, I believe the idea was that be making Freedom From (from servitude, obligation, only having X channels, not being able to access the internet wherever and whenever you want, having only 6 jelly choices, etc.) into an ultimate good, you stop having Freedom To–because you’re actually constrained by pursuing detachment and autonomy and all the things that are great in the right quantities but poison as your total diet.
You’d like Infinite Jest.
Interestingly, I think most people tend to pursue many of our typical American freedoms (to limitless choices, etc.) not because it is per Justin above the risky and courageous pursuit of some higher aspiration, but rather, for the sake of happiness and safety. Not that happiness and safety aren’t worth pursuing, but which seems the more likely motivator for a multiplicity of jam options at the Supermarket? It seems less “safe” to have to accept 6 options for condiments.