Akrasia: save me from myself

A nice bit of serendipity after the last post on picking and choosing which ideals of "Americanism" we pay heed to, depending on who we voted for, and whether, in retrospect, it may have been a very dumb choice.

Via Brad DeLong, from Julian Sanchez at Reason:

We are all, sometimes, afflicted with akrasia, those attacks of weak will that lead us to satisfy fleeting desires at the expense of our own acknowledged long-term interests...

...Normal and necessary as these akrasia-countering mechanisms may be, though, they may also be symptoms of what Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan has dubbed "parentalism." Buchanan's term is not to be confused with paternalism, the familiar idea that sometimes people—other people—need to be restrained for their own protection from making poor choices. (In some cases, as with children or the severely mentally handicapped, this may well be right.) Parentalism is in a sense more insidious: It emerges when we begin to suspect that we ourselves are not competent to make our own choices, to yearn for someone to relieve us of the burden of choice. As Buchanan puts it:

[Economists and political theorists] have assumed that, other things being equal, persons want to be at liberty to make their own choices, to be free from coercion by others, including indirect coercion through means of persuasion. They have failed to emphasize sufficiently, and to examine the implications of, the fact that liberty carries with it responsibility. And it seems evident that many persons do not want to shoulder the final responsibility for their own actions..[They] want to be told what to do and when to do it; they seek order rather than uncertainty, and order comes at an opportunity cost they seem willing to bear.

The thought is not novel to Buchanan. Jean-Paul Sartre described the "anguish" that comes with our realization that we are "condemned to be free." Marxist psychologist Erich Fromm diagnosed the totalitarian movements of the 20th century as symptoms of an urge to "escape from freedom," from the displacement of a feudal world in which identities were given—a place for everyone, and everyone in his place—with a capitalist order that made who we were and what we were to become seem dizzyingly contingent. How much more true is that when the lodestones by which we navigated that sea of choices—religious communities, or localities with their own longstanding mores—are themselves objects of choice on the market, in an increasingly interconnected and mobile world that arrays communities and faiths before us like so many cans of soup on a Whole Foods shelf.

Contemporary theorists of choice paralysis sometimes talk as though the problem with abundant freedom of choice were merely that the cognitive demands of navigating modern markets' plenitude are uncomfortably high. Yet if that were so, then adaptive mechanisms to filter our choices—and, as described above, winnow out some of the tempting but destructive ones—would be the simple solution.

For the true parentalist, though, this will be unsatisfying, for the true parentalist wants to escape not just the burdens of the act of choosing, but the responsibility for making a poor choice. Voluntary market mechanisms for filtering or restraining choice will always, ultimately, have an escape clause: We can fire the personal trainer or tell our friends we've changed our minds about that diet or quitting smoking after all. And, in the final analysis, they allow us only to defer responsibility, not avoid it. The expert I consulted may have given me bad advice, yet I may still blame myself for a poor choice of experts....

Much more great stuff, but I couldn't decide what to include. I hope you're okay with that. You are okay with that, right? Ah geez, blogging is dumb. I quit.