Choice (Big Ideas) [Paperback]

We are all faced with a dazzling array of choices throughout our daily lives.
Every aspect of our existence - from work, relationships and child-rearing, to cheese, politicians, coffins and water companies - is characterised by the freedom to choose, and the vastness of available options is indicative of the high level of freedom our society has attained. More than this, we can choose who we are, our very identities: not only our careers, but even our sexuality, gender and class. As rational beings, our role is to weigh up the choices available, and choose in accordance with our needs, wants and desires. If we do so correctly, there is no end to what we can achieve. Or so we are told.
In this thoughtful and entertaining account, the philosopher Renata Salecl begs to differ. For her, this ideology - the "tyranny of choice" as she calls it - is actually founded on a series of lies.
Firstly, our individual choices are rarely rational and are more likely to be chosen according to our unconscious (and ultimately insatiable) desires. Acting according to these, often irrational, desires is far from likely to bring us greater happiness.
Secondly, an overload of choice is leading more to greater anxiety than to greater freedom, not least as a result of speculating on the social opprobrium that can result from making the wrong choice. Salecl provides a vivid example from her own country, Slovenia. In the days of socialism, when organising a funeral, you only had one choice to make - did you want a big coffin, or a small one? Now, one is confronted with a whole plethora of not only coffins, but urns for scattering the ashes and so on as well. Although they will only be used for a few hours before being burnt, buried or discarded, the customer is made to feel that anything but the most expensive option is somehow disrespectful to their dead relative, and will be seen as such by the others in attendance. Thus is it is that a seemingly wide range of choice can actually be no real choice at all.
Perturbed by these anxieties brought on by endless choice, many are turning to `expert advice' in the form of self-help books; suggesting that rather than craving choice, we are in fact "eager to have the burden of choice taken away from us". Indeed, the popularity of books on Feng Shui, for example, suggest that even the decision of where to place one's own furniture is too much for some to cope with. Yet by perpetuating the ideology of choice, Salecl argues, self-help books actually serve to perpetuate these anxieties. If the power to change your life is in your hands (as these books suggest), and yet your life remains essentially unchanged, then it must be your fault - and you should feel guilty. Thatcher's view that "there is no such thing as society" has "permeated every level of contemporary society. The feeling of shame for being poor and of guilt for not getting further up the ladder of economic success has replaced the fight against social injustice."
Salecl also notes how the consumer-choice model has insidiously ingrained itself into our view of relationships: "Sometimes the search for love follows the same pattern as the search for a phone service provider: constant switching, followed by the feeling that you may have missed a better deal once you've made your choice".
Finally, for Salecl, the really fundamental choices are actually beyond our control as individuals: not least the choice to reject the consumerist, individualist model altogether.
Salecl also sees a large swathe of the apparent `alternatives' to this model as mere variations of the same consumerist ideology: "Not surprisingly, the ideology of choice goes hand in hand with the New Age ideology that promotes living in the moment and accepting things as they are." Likewise, she sees lifestyle politics, such as the choice of some amongst the affluent middle classes to `downsize' their spending, in the same vein: "Since a huge part of the world's population is offered very few choices and has to endure terrible poverty every day, the Western movement to simplify one's life (along with other attempts to glorify poverty) seems a rather hypocritical way for essentially well-off people to address class divisions obliquely".
Salecl is well-placed to analyse the ideological mechanisms of modern capitalism. Those of us who have only ever known one system tend too readily to view it the natural order of things; having grown up in socialist Yugoslavia, this is not a problem Salecl has. Indeed, it is precisely this choice - the only choice we are not presented with, the choice of our economic and political system - that is the one we most urgently have to make.

This is a very good read. The fact is we are "sold to" every day in one capacity or another. Further, the essence of it is that we can somehow be perfect beings by making the right choices. It just is not so as this book beautifully explains.

Like many of her colleagues in the social sciences, Ms Saleci argues from the particular to the general, and then from one generalisation to another, but without considering whether the generalisations are valid or well founded.

The basic thesis is that capitalism - sorry "post industrial capitalism" - uses choice to increase sales. OK, I've been to Sainsbury's yogurt counter, but I'd like to know how that happened and what thinking by marketeers led to the development of choice as a major sales tool.

A subsidiary thesis is that governments in "post industrial capitalist" countries have introduced an element of choice arbitrarily into service provision in everything from health to education to transport. OK, the contentionis that much of this choice is inappropriate and meaningless. But I'd have liked to learn how this is played out in different countries and how the relationship between state and citizen turned into one of supplier (or purveyor) and customer (or consumer), what factors led to this change.

A second subsidiary thesis is that we are bamboozled by the contention that we can choose what sort of people we want to be, an argument supported by citing the apparent popularity of self-help books. Again, it would have been instructive to learn what type of people turn to these books (for the record, I own none of them) or associated improvement systems and tools. Is it a function of age and/or social class? What she gets right here is the futility of many such change attempts and the ensuing frustration. But the delusion of self-perfection has a long history - as she points out - so why is it a major problem now?

Life in a western democracy is complicated, and the various choices one has to make render it even more complicated. Choice is not a liberating force. But if we are to escape from the tyranny of choice, it is essential to understand how and why it has arisen by studying data and using concrete examples, not playing with abstract theories.

For me, the book did not provide a new factual or historical framework for understanding or analysing the phenomenon that choice has become in consumer society. A big idea, ceratinly, but I wish I had some more books to choose from.