Who Am I? Why Am I Here?: Admiral Stockdale on the Anxiety of Choice (Guest-Starring Victor Frankl)
It struck me this morning that Schwartz’s problem of managing “too much” freedom is kind of the opposite of the problem of managing too little freedom implicit in Admiral Stockdale’s Epictetian stoicism and Victor Frankl’s existential therapy. Or is it the same!? (If you don’t know, Stockdale was tortured for years by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war. Frankl was imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis.)
Stockdale tells us [pdf]:
Epictetus was telling his students that there can be no such thing as being the “victim” of another. You can only be a “victim” of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? “He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart… What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity… Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I’ll show you a Stoic.”
[If you haven’t read Stockdale’s amazing account of his torture and confinement, do it.]
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
So here we have strategies for maintaining a sense of freedom — a psychological feeling of choice, control, agency, and self-efficacy — under conditions where the external menu of open alternatives is more or less blank. Both push us to consider what ultimately is and is not in our power. In the end, the only steadfast choices, the only ones that cannot be taken away, are choices about how to orient our minds, and about our attitude toward our situation. This implies that we can maintain a sense of freedom and openness, and the sense of responsibility and dignity that entails, even under conditions where we are not at liberty to act on most of our desires. The Stoic also implies that other freedoms, because they can be taken away, are not genuine freedoms, and so we should cultivate an attitude of indifference toward them. The only true freedom for the stoic is in virtue, and virtue is entirely a matter of what is genuinely up to us, and the only thing that is genuinely up to us is the maintenance of our composure.
Because the problem of two much choice is apparently the opposite of the problem of too little, I entertained the idea that what we need is to turn the stoic and/or existential attitude inside out. But now I’m not so sure. It seems to me that the problem of too much choice requires, in the first instance, a kind of withdrawal, detachment, and centering, and then a kind of selective re-engagement with the panoply of choices once we’ve achieved a firmer grasp of what one really cares about and is after in life.
It seems like a mistake to concentrate on the sheer quantity of choices rather than on the quality of the choices relative to the nature of the choosers. Chinese takeouts generally offer hamburgers, pizza, jalapeno poppers, etc., etc. The most celebrated restaurants often have tiny menus. If a friend offered to take me to either Lucky Dragon carryout or a Michelin 3 star, I would not regret my loss of the freedom to order curly fires with my wantons upon choosing the fancier joint. A single job you like is better than 1000 you don’t want.
If we were homogeneous in our natures, interests, talents, projects, and preferences, then it might be possible to trim the set of choices to a subset that is more manageable, and yet with all the best choices intact. But we are not homogeneous. So, even if the set of choices that is ideal for each of us, given our unique constitution and aims, is small, the fact of our variety will require the availability of a huge set of choices overall. Almost any reduction of the most inclusive set of choices reduces the quality of choices for someone, i.e., it restricts their freedom to choose something that is best for them.
The difficulty is that the plenitude of consumer culture, which offers the tantalizing possibility of a different ideal pattern of consumption for each of us, tends to drown out the whisper of what is best for each of us in the cacophony of variety. We are left searching through a junkyard for a handful of gems (though one man’s junk is another man’s gem), often without knowing what’s junk and what’s gems. But the problem is not quite that we have too much choice. If I need to get to Minnesota and don’t know how, the problem is not that there are just too many roads. The problem is that I don’t know which ones to take. It wouldn’t help me if there were fewer roads, none of which goes to my destination. But if I know the route, the number of other roads is irrelevant. Similarly, if I know what I am, know what I need, know what I like, and know what will make my unique life go uniquely well, then I can just tune out the stuff that is superfluous to me. Most of the choices will just psychologically fall away, fade into the background, because they are not for me.
So what we need is self-knowledge, and a procedure for identifying authenticity in desire, a kind of practical wisdom. It does not seem that public policy can do much about this for us. But a kind of Stoic indifference toward the hurly burly of market culture may be useful, helping us to stay disentangled from the lures of marketers, salespeople, and taste makers, and allow us to better focus and who we really are. A kind of existential therapy may also be useful, sensitizing us to reflexive modes of thought and action, our bad faith, our false consciousness, and our ability and responsibility to consciously define ourselves and make meaning in our lives.
So maybe the ways of thinking that make it possible to remain human in Nazi concentration camps and Hanoi prisons are also indispensable in carving authentic lives of customized meaning out of the otherwise disorienting surplus of alternatives. Maybe the way to maintain a sense of freedom when in chains is also a way to manage agoraphobic hyperventilation in the unbounded consumer paradise.
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I think the problems with existential and stoic freedom (as you call them) are actually different.
The problem with stoic freedom is that it has no value except for coping. (Not to slight coping, but its not the kind of value upon which libertarians are seeking to build a conception of the good society.)
The problem with existential freedom is that it really isn’t freedom at all. In free will 101 we are confronted with a dilemma between determined choices and arbitrary ones. Is an arbitrary choice really a free one? Existentialism alternatively celebrates and dreads the observation that individuals’ actions result from arbitrary choices about what to find meaningful and how. But the more seriously we take the free will 101 question, the more we should reject the existentialists’ understanding of our choices as free.
A satisfying account of freedom of choices will be one that gives conditions for choices being free ones. But the conditions will have to go deeper than individual inclinations or else we’re back to existentialism. In order to have a free society we have to have individual choices determined in the right way. I think a large part of that right way will be individuals having sophisticated understandings of the structure of the society in which they live and the interrelations among our various individual plights and ambitions.
That which increases our ability to act on this understanding to our mutual and collective benefit increases our freedom. That which distracts us from the attempt, perhaps by satisfying our arbitrary desires, decreases it. Stoic freedom abandons the need for effective action. Existential freedom abandones the need for shared understandings (or says, perhaps correctly, that its impossible).
One possibility would be turn it around and suggest that the goal is/should be self-knowledge and that the only route to self-knowledge is through the struggle with (too many) choices.
Choice is the vehicle through which we both discover our selves and create our selves.
We are better people if we confront choices — superficial or substantive, tempting or difficult, selfish or selfless — even if we choose poorly, than we would have been if we had been sheltered from them. Because we exercised the basis of our humanity, our will.
Perhaps we should toss aside happiness and return to a quest for areté through our struggle with choice.
Certainly that’s a better outcome than denying our heterogeneity or giving in to base impulses like envy of those who choose more wisely.
The question then becomes, as Will says, what if anything can be done to help people engage the possible opportunities in a more self-aware manner?
Richard: I think that you would be hard pressed to find an ancient Greek ethical theory that viewed “arete” as the product of individuals’ being confronted with a wide variety of choices.
I’m not saying that having choices is not important, only that, the more you know about the choices you and others face, the more meaningless they will seem unless certain conditiions are met. It’s far from clear to me that “exercising our will” in making choices that would appear arbitrary if we were better informed makes us human.
I think part of what I was trying to say is that an excellent person is likely to NOT struggle with choice, since the will find it easy to choose what is appropriate for them, and to not be distracted by the proliferation of irrelevant alternatives. But part of gaining this kind of self-knowledge is the discovery of what is appropriate for us, and that requires experimentation, and sometimes choosing badly.
Bill: I guess I was being a bit simplistic just throwing out the term. I didn’t mean that the ancient Greeks thought that areté was achieved through confronting a wide variety of choices. I just meant that, in my mind, there is virtue in facing choices, choosing, and living with the consequences — moreso than in achieving the same outcome without having to make the choice. And if that’s the case, and I think it is, then normal consequentialist metrics make less sense and maybe we should just focus on being the best person we can be through our choices (hence the glib reference).
Will: That’s exactly my point. You cannot wake up knowing how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Abundant choice is good because it exercises that part of our selves where we learn to distinguish important choices from meaningless ones, life-fulfilling ones from empty ones. It also helps us learn what is “good enough” in each situation so that we can satisfice — which is a crucial skill even in low choice environments.
I think we color the discussion a bit by focusing on consumer choices — something for which many people have disdain. Imagine we’re talking about love. If a Don Juan has hundreds of girls throwing themselves at him, he might sample all of them until his resources are squandered, randomly choose one (or a few) without much thought, freeze up and choose nothing, choose one but switch when he grows envious of his friend’s choice, or choose poorly based purely on superficial characteristics. But surely the more interesting story is one where he learns (through mistakes) what is important in choosing love — even if he can’t fix it or get it right in the end. Isn’t he a better person, with this knowledge, than the one who never faced the choices because a consumer advocacy group picked a perfectly pleasant lady for him? What if he would have been slightly happier overall with the non-choice?
Great post and discussion - thanks! Abundant choice is really good situation! When you have more than two ways to reach your goals you shoul clearly imagine all consequences of your action. Making our choices we can’t forget about responsibility.