by Peabody Snickersbee

Created on: October 16, 2007

Fear of choice is what is wrong with the world, the fact that we have increasing choices and yet continually choose not to choose.

How often do you hear people bleat that they do not have a choice? Or worse, that there is not enough money/resources/time to do this or that. Yet for those of us in the developed world, productivity has never been higher. The traditional problems of hunger and shelter have been solved in the most spectacular fashion and yet people act as if they still have no choices.

No money to provide for basic medical care when millions is spent on bubble gum. Of course it is not a matter of taxing one to produce the other. But are we satisfied with a system that has this result? Individual choices produce it, individual choices can change it. Choose differently as individuals; do not be satisfied with the choices presented to us. Demand better and suffer the consequences.

We have built up a system that pretends to be based on scarcity in order to help us to accept the lack of choice. We agree to this thin delusion because fear of choice is fundamental to human psychology. People do not want unlimited freedom, for that way lies insanity.

To find the reason for this you need only ask the question: If I had unlimited food, shelter and money What would I do? For most, a serious answer to this question is impossible. This is because to be truly free, to be truly able to choose is a psychological impossibility.

And this is what is increasingly wrong with the world. To have choice and yet be forced to deny it creates a delusional state that is similar to madness. That it is the U.S. as a society that seems most insane is no accident. Here it is that more people have more choices, and here it is that they must bury their power to choose under a never ending round of earning and spending.

How did it get like this? For Erich Fromm the answer was: "The social character is the form in which human energy is molded for its use as a productive force in the social process." For Fromm this meant that where a feudal society required submission and respect to those in authority, since the 19th century capitalism has needed consumers. The result has been a gradual molding of the dominant social character so that for most of us to act or think in any other way is impossible. Or as Ibsen put it: "He can do anything he wants to do because he wants only to do what he can do."

Fromm also knew that society enforces its demands by the threat of ostracism. If you fail to conform you do not belong and so you are in danger of becoming insane. Thus to recognize the choices we have is to risk insanity.

What is wrong with the world is the need to develop a culture and therefore individuals within it that can handle having a choice. People who can refuse to commit their lives to meaningless tasks and continual waste and who seek to focus themselves on the only work worth doing helping others and developing self-knowledge.

Such a society would see the obvious choices between bubble gum and health care - would look in horror at anyone who chooses to work making and selling the one instead of studying medicine. Would contain individuals who would demand to be taught the necessary skills without cost and offer them for free rather than accept wages to accomplish so little. Such strong mindedness would appear a form of insanity in modern society.

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