The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [81]
The problem is that choice is sometimes empty, ephemeral, or false. We may experience our behavior as the result of choice and ascribe the behavior of others to the result of choice even when such behavior is largely predetermined by situation or disposition. If neither is under our control, then there is not much choice. What’s worse, our feelings may not be our best guide to whether choice has occurred. In addition, we may be too distracted by the options at our grocery stores and on our television sets to recognize the dearth of choices in our politics and culture, or our inability to choose differently.
So building the ability to choose entails building the ability to control our choices. As Iyengar points out, “In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.”4 It is terribly easy to feel overwhelmed or under siege. How do we find the control necessary to build the ability to make real choice?
One thing I am absolutely sure about: this control is not innately robust. It takes effort, and we can be good or bad at it. We can develop our choice “muscles” or let them go flabby.5 There are things we can do to improve our abilities to make good choices.
First, we should acknowledge the power of situation and circumstance—the context for our choices. One of my middle-aged friends has been married to his college sweetheart for many years. He is terribly devoted to her and to their children. He is a successful businessman, a pillar of his community, and a friend of Barack Obama. He’s also gregarious and charming, and women find him attractive. I once asked him his secret to staying happy in his marriage for so long and maintaining faithfulness to his wife through thick and thin. His answer was, “I don’t put myself in situations in which I would be tempted or my behavior would be misunderstood.”
I think that was a wise answer. Even though my friend is a very disciplined person, with unquestionable integrity, he did not allow his family life to depend solely on his discipline and integrity. He acknowledged the risk that bad situations might pose. This might strike some readers as weakness, a failure of my friend to trust himself or to “take personal responsibility” for his actions. But I think the most powerful thing we can do to gain some semblance of genuine control over our choices is to recognize our tendencies to relinquish control and to succumb to the influences of our environment.
Those of us who are parents know what this awareness is like—we worry about our kids being around other kids who are “bad influences.” We worry about where they are, what they are seeing, and what they are being pressured to do. We understand that one of the most difficult things about growing up is building the capacity to resist bad influences and accept good ones. That is, growing up is about developing the ability to make one’s own choices rather than mimic the choices of those around us.
The more I understand the contours of human choice, the more I believe that this process of growing up should continue long past age eighteen. Even as adults, we are wise to pick our friends carefully, to be aware of the influences of our surroundings, and to be humble about our abilities to resist the pull of bad choices once we’re in bad environments. Jesus was onto something when he included in his most famous prayer the supplication “Lead us not into temptation.” He is not reported to have said, “Give us strength to resist.” Perhaps he knew we would be better off not to be tempted in the first place.
A second way we strengthen our capacity to choose is by acknowledging our limitations and “irrational” tendencies. We’ve seen in several places in this book how humans are irrational from an economic perspective, in that they do not always make decisions in ways that make sense to economists. Many of these tendencies are laudable, such as acting altruistically. But some irrational tendencies constrict our choice