Freeconomy Blog
Wed
22 Oct
Personal choice – does such a thing exist?
| 7 comments |
One dilemma I’ve had over the last few years, which many of you may share, is on the whole issue of speaking your mind. I’ve been wondering whether or not it’s a positive or negative thing to do.
Personally I feel like it is a no win situation sometimes; if you don’t speak up for those who have no voice – poverty-stricken humans, our planet, all the other species that inhabit it – it can make you feel like you are just complicit in the violence.
However a lot of the time when you do speak up, regardless of how lovingly and non-judgmentally you phrase it, people tell you to stop preaching and forcing your opinion down their throats (which ironically is them forcing their opinion down your throat!), which has the unfortunate effect of putting their backs up even more. Whenever you criticise a certain act, folk who regularly perform the act that you are criticising often get quite defensive about it, and understandably so I suppose. But that’s when the argument that frustrates me the most comes out – “it is my personal choice so don’t tell me how I should live”.
Personal choice, to me, is a complete misnomer, an illusion, it doesn’t actually exist. We do not just make decisions for ourselves; we are making them for the world we communally live in. We are all part of a very delicate ecological system and every one of our actions has a consequence on something other than just ourselves. Of course you make your decisions about what you are going to think, say or do – however it is not just a ‘personal’ choice as it affects the world you live in.
Take this for an example – you are walking home late at night and you see a woman getting raped by a man. What do you do? Do you walk past saying “that is the personal choice of the man to have sex with her”, or do you jump in and help the woman? Of course you help the woman, that guy’s personal choice isn’t really his personal choice as it is affecting somebody else, and pretty horrendously at that.
Okay, I hear you say that this is an extreme example. But everyday we humans, through our actions, are raping the planet, torturing the animal kingdom and destroying their natural habitats, whilst keeping billions of people in extreme poverty. But because it is not as visual, as real, as apparent as a woman getting raped before our very eyes, it is our personal choice and it shouldn’t be questioned about it.
I don’t want to make people feel guilty or bad about themselves – I want everyone to be happy, totally fulfilled and to have complete freedom. But only if that perceived freedom isn’t at the expense of the freedom of others – and anyway, true freedom can never come from negative actions. As Nelson Mandela once said, “to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”. Wise words we’d do well to actually put into practice.
But let’s be honest – if you could see the conditions that the kid who was making that dress you want to buy from Primark worked in, would you be happy for your friends to see you buy it? If you could see the conditions the pig lived in that gave you your average bit of sausage from Tesco’s, would you still be happy to buy it? If you could see the ‘Business for sale’ sign up on your lovely little local book shop in advance, would you still shop from Amazon? If you could see the destruction in Iraq, would you still be happy to take that Sunday afternoon stroll in your oil dependent car?
The rape is happening everyday, legalised and part of everyday ‘normal’ life. Just don’t think that because it’s ‘normal’, legal and socially accepted that it is fine to do it. Think for yourself, question your own actions and ask yourself if you are happy with the consequences it has for others.
Does it sound like I am preaching? You know what, sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I see the pain and destruction that we cause, myself included, and making a few people feel awkward and defensive is just the way it has got to be. My dilemma is over; I say we all speak our minds non-judgmentally (and with a sprinkle of forgiveness) and in the understanding that we are all doing something that causes an element of suffering. But, at the same time, to speak without fear and accept that people should feel a bit awkward about their actions, if they are causing others suffering, and that it is an inevitable part of the process.
All of us need to be aware of how we react to people who question what we do, and see what part our over inflated ego’s play in our responses to such criticism.
On the upside, Freeconomy just got a brand spanking new forum last week, and already it’s very busy. We realised that, given the tough economic and meteorological climates coming up, the world needed a resource that people could feed into about simultaneously living with less money and walking lightly on the planet. Sorry by the way for the cock-up that led to many of you getting an entire inbox worth of emails about it though, a complete oversight from us!
So if you have any questions, advice or information, get posting!
To join it, simply register using the same details you used to sign up to the main part of the site. You have to register with the forum even if you area member of the rest of the site, we were unable to integrate both systems – sorry it couldn’t be a bit simpler!
You are what you repeatedly do. Do one thing today that will make someone else happy, for no other reason that for the love of it. And then do something else tomorrow. And before you know it...
Comment on this Post:
Jenny comments ...
I appreciate what you have said about when to say your truth and when not to, and I have thought similarly.
However I do think that silence is also powerful if used mindfully, I believe that mindfull silence at times in challenging conversations can raise awareness in others more effectively that saying things that they don't want to hear which at times simply increases peoples defenses. For me this allows the opportunity of feeling some of the tension rather than trying to force it away through what can feel like righteous opinions.
appreciate yr posting
Fergus comments ...
Your dilemma brings to mind one of my favourite short stories: Walking Away From Omelas by Ursula LeGuine. Walking away, walking towards, coming, going, becoming, inspiring through action, work in tandem with intellectual argument. Keep the faith you are doing great things! x
Ursula K LeGuine, author of the Earthsea books and many science fiction novels, has also written a number of fantastic short stories. The following is from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, and is subtitled “Variations on a theme by William James’. Ursula K .LeGuine herself provides the introduction: “The central idea of the psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven’t been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was 25, and I’d simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James’s ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’, it was with a shock of recognition. Here is how James put it:
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a special and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness offered, how hideous a thing would e its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a again?
‘The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated. Dostoyevsky was a great artist, and a radical one, but his early social radicalism reversed itself, leaving him a violent reactionary. Whereas the American James, who seemed so mild, so naively gentlemanly – look how he says ‘us’, assuming all his readers are as decent as himself! – was, and remains, a genuinely radical thinker. Directly after the ‘lost soul’ passage he goes on,
All the higher, more penetrating ideas are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experiences, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as ‘the probable causes of future experience’ – that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark1
‘Of course I didn’t read James and sit down and say, Now I’ll write a story about the “lost soul”. It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started the story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word “Omelas” in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem, ackwards. Don’t you read road signs ackwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas, Yrubretnac……Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. O melas. Omelas, Homme helas. “Where do you get your ideas from, Ms LeGuine?” From reading Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
By Ursula K. LeGuin
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ringing of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was s o clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding throughout he city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming to to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the trains station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcane and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: This is what swells the hears of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I don't think many of them need to take drooz. Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thing magic of the tune. He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute. As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering. \"Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope...\" They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun. Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. \"I will be good, \" it says. \"Please let me out. I will be good!\" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, \"eh-haa, eh-haa,\" and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery. This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child. Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer. Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible. At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Danny comments ...
I agree it is good to speak your mind when you witness someone, or some people doing what you consider is an injustice to others no matter who it is being distributed by.
Schnurz comments ...
I believe in speaking my mind at every opportunity. The media are raping us every day - If we can accept the pollution of our environment that is billboards and advertising in every conceivable way, the shoving of commercial messages into our everyday lives, then we can also buy into messages being shoved into our face that are less glamourous, less pretty but with a beneficial purpose to all of us. Personal freedom is hailed as such a fundamentally important concept that we do not realise that it is working against us as it predeposes responsible and co-operative behaviour towards each other and the biosphere. A lioness doesn't go out and kill an entire herd of antelope, then dumps half eaten carcasses all over the place where nothing else can benefit from it because her personal freedom allows her to do so. The lioness kills one antelope to feed her family in order to secure survival. If we cannot act responsible and co-operatively with regards to nature, then our personal freedom should be sacrificed until we are ready to do so. The 'us' before the 'I' as opposed to the 'I' before the 'us'. I do accept however, that pushing is futile. So education is the answer but how do we achieve it if not by demanding it from our government?
Jo comments ...
Hi Mark,
Nice one. I have the same dilemma as you about this and chop and change regularly as to how I feel about it. Thanks for the post, it was helpful.
I've been meaning to let you know that a few people I've contacted on the site have finally replied to me months later to say oops, they didn't check their messages in a long time. It always emails me when I get a message. Perhaps it would be better if it did that for everyone?
Why no anarchism section in the forum?
Jo xx
Markus comments ...
Interesting, you have always managed to get your back right up when I have made comments about the way you live. xxx
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