--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Or have you not noticed how the shopping experience
> now subsumes everything:
>
> -- I shop for doctors and medical plans
> -- I shop for schools
> -- I shop for potential mates
> and so on.
>
> Where before we were concerned about "freedom" and
> what that might be
> about, we are now almost exclusively focused on
> choice. How one defines
> and realizes one's freedom has to do with one's
> ability to become
> conscious. Consciousness and reflection become the
> key to growing up
> into life.
>
> But now we are concerned with choice, which has
> become the incarnation
> of freedom. And one makes choices through shopping.
> Neither
> consciousness nor reflection are required for
> shopping, because not
> shopping is not an acceptable alternative.
>
> I am being my usual thick cryptic self, so I'll stop
> here and hope that
> someone else can come in and fill in the blanks.
[WS:] As always, you are up to something, Joanna :). The above passage certainly goes into the right direction, but misses an important element - HOW the choices are made. So let me explain.
Having choices is a good thing - to a point. Too many options increases transaction cost of making a choice.
This, in turn, discourages thorough examination of all available options and instead forces people to depend on cognitive shortcuts instead. Such cognitive shortcuts are usually provided by cultural stereotypes, marketing, taken for granted beliefs, "fast food for thought," appearances, playing on emotions, peer pressure, etc.
Consequently, the more choice one has the less one is able to make that chocie oneself, using one's own cognitive capacity, and the more one becomes captive of stereotypes, marketing, emotional manipulation, etc. So the end result is that we become salves amidst the unprecedented freedom of choice, we end up lonely amidst the largest in human history crowd of potentially 'available' people, we thirst for meaning and truth amidst the unprecedented in history glut of information.
It is not the choice that is bad. It is the anarchy of the consumer society, where anything goes, anything can be marketed, which means that nothing really matters or make any difference.
Wojtek
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