On the True Nature of Choice
By: Misatheus
Tags: Goodness, Essay, Morality, Choices, Freedom

Weekly Essay

True choice is always a choice for the best.

A person never chooses the worst of two options if he understands both options in full, and it is only when he fully understands his options that he can be counted as actually choosing between them.

And so, presented with a genuine choice, a person always chooses the better. And if this simple principle is true, then the more genuine choices a person has in his life, the better things he will choose.

But you see, choice is restricted not only by external circumstances: it is also restricted by the internal circumstances of being human. Drives, desires, impulses and instincts — these inner forces are just as constricting as the material circumstances outside us.

The problem with the modern idea of freedom is that it focuses on material emancipation but not inner emancipation. Modern freedom ends with the individual’s desires: a liberation of the individual from all forms of physical slavery so that they may pursue their wants and needs unimpeded.

But this limited notion of freedom has completely forgotten the most ancient form of slavery, the form of slavery which the ancients knew quite well: the slavery of our own passions. If we are to talk about freedom, genuine freedom, we cannot end with external slavery: we must account for the slavery of our inner lives.

To locate genuine freedom — a choice that is truly unrestricted and unconditioned — we must go deeper than the modern notion of freedom. This genuine freedom is freedom from internal as well as external compulsions. And what may seem like slavery to the modern notion of freedom may actually be freedom in this truer, deeper sense: a freedom from our own rampant desires as well as the rampant desires of others.

Once we can secure some degree of freedom from our own instincts and impulses — either by satisfying them, abating them, resisting them, channeling them, disciplining them, or otherwise consciously directing them — then we will have expanded the domain of possible choices available to us. And, having more choices, we will be able to choose even better things.

The word choice itself can be misleading. Nothing is free. The way we act when we are free is predictable; this alone undermines the idea of pure freedom or choice. And the predictable thing that happens when we expand our genuine freedom, freedom from internal demands as well as external demands, is a demand for yet greater things. The more immediate concerns, now fulfilled or transcended, open our minds to greater and more general concerns.

And so, it is far more accurate to say that freedom, genuine freedom, is merely an opening for better things to happen. The freer we become, the better things we consistently choose, and the more that good choices, moral choices, begin to come out spontaneously from us.

Freedom taken to its fullest expression always turns out to be moral. Freed from both external and internal compulsions, we begin to turn towards service to others; we search for significance to our lives beyond our own selfishness; we accumulate power, wealth, and wisdom not merely for ourselves but in order to create structures and systems for the benefit of others.

Freedom in this genuine sense, rather than its liberal modern sense, is equivalent to the good. Freedom is not a prerequisite to the good, as it is classically conceived, a mere preliminary stage in moral action — it is good, if it is genuine freedom.

And so, when we pursue the idea of freedom in full, freedom of choice begins to look less and less like the model of rational self-interest or political libertarianism and more and more like a transcendental ethics. The less conditioned we are, the purer we become, and our purest unconditioned existence is revealed to be, in the final analysis, pure goodwill.