Suppose I live with someone who is a recently recovering alcoholic. One evening, before going out to dinner with some friends, I bid him goodbye, say, "there's a twelve-pack in the fridge, so help yourself," and set a bottle of whiskey out on the counter as I leave.
Is my roommate more free or less free because of what I have done?
I have certainly provided him with more choices than he would have otherwise had. If "freedom" is a measure of the quantity and frequency of choices, then he is more free -- I have increased the number of choices available to him. But, of course, he is not more free. By placing the alcohol before him, I have given him more choices, and even increased his ability to choose drunkenness, but I have reduced his ability to choose what matters: sobriety.
The degree of freedom one has expresses neither a quantity of choices nor the mere ability to make choices (though the latter is closer). Rather, the degree of freedom one possesses is a measure of one's ability to choose the good. This is the classic Christian conception of freedom. If an alcoholic who is able to choose intoxication but not sobriety is unfree, a reactionary teetotaler who is unable to choose to drink is likewise unfree. In the latter case, the person is blind to the good; in the former case, the person is well aware of it. In both cases, though for different reasons, the person is unable to choose it.
A candy bar contains more sugar and fat than anything found in our ancestral environments. When we encounter high-calorie foods, deeply engrained response mechanisms signal, "here is a good source of energy; eat more!" A candy bar matches these response circuits, but it matches them much more strongly than anything that actually exists in the milieu for which they operate. Elements of taste that formerly represented correlates of healthiness identified through a long process of evolutionary approximation are hijacked by an artificial substance that overdetermines the signifier but divorces it from the signified. We thus have a thriving industry in such products with a corresponding dramatic fallout in consumer health. In the United States, for example, obesity is responsible for some 300,000 deaths each year.
Our bodies and minds have more than two million years of evolution to work out psycho-biological decision-making processes and responses to stimuli, and they have served us quite well. The problem comes with superstimuli -- products created in order to exploit these evolutionary adaptations in maladaptive ways.
The first recorded death from video game playing came in 1982, but there have been a number of high-profile cases since then. How does a consumer product become so involving, so attractive, that after 49 hours of continuously using the product the consumer would rather use it another hour than eat or sleep? Video game designers hire experts in behavioral and brain sciences in order to develop gaming environments that take full advantage of deeply engrained psycho-physical traits. By manipulating reward/punishment cycles, their timing, and their connection to player activity, game architects work to produce specific patterns of activity from players. The result is a long series of cases of people losing their jobs, spouses, children, and lives.
Attractive members of the opposite sex set off a whole cascade of
response patterns oriented around finding optimal mates. This popular video
shows the process through which superstimuli are
produced that exploit these patterns, and a huge percentage of
advertisers seem to think it extremely effective. Meanwhile, actual women are killing themselves -- supermodels abuse cocaine to be thin, 1 in 10 women in college have clinical or near-clinical eating disorders (almost half of ten year old girls say they have tried to lose weight), etc. -- to keep up with women who literally do not exist.
Of course, people have a "right" to play video games and eat Snickers bars; "consumer freedom" requires it. And if people have a right to temptation, the market is going to supply all the temptation money can buy. In the United States, fast food alone is a $140 billion industry, the video game industry claims some $10.5 billion in revenue, and the scope of product marketing and sales tied up in sexual superstimuli is unquantifiably large (not to mention the $4 billion a year pornography industry).
By their nature, however, superstimuli reduce freedom. These kinds of products are so effective because on their most essential level they do not appeal to our regular faculties of conscious decision-making, but rather to unconscious drives and response patterns branded into us over millions of years of development in precarious conditions of existence. By exploiting the power of these structures, such products reduce our ability to choose the good, eroding our freedom.
Temptation, of course, can be resisted -- we are not forced by our biological makeup to eat every Snickers bar we see. But research shows that people work with a limited amount of "willpower resources," a limited amount of energy with which to mount these resistances -- and the greater the temptation, the greater expenditure of willpower is required in order to resist. Walking through the checkout line at the grocery store, even if I buy nothing, lowers my ability to resist the next temptation that comes along.
In other words, these products compromise the freedom of everyone who is exposed to them. Superstimuli are thus a particularly interesting case of a frequent phenomenon: something defended in the name of freedom is in truth hostile to freedom.
2 comments:
It is difficult being a parent and seeing just how strong the pull of candy and video games is on our kids! I hope that by our trying to limit these things for them, they will feel that limited consumption of them is normal and be able to continue that pattern into adulthood. It's an interesting balance of trying to limit the superstimuli, as you put it, while hopefully helping to develop their willpower to resist it. Also, the video game link goes to the Dove evolution video, which is great, but not the link you seem to have intended!
It seems the same with alcohol -- children who grow up in family cultures where moderate consumption is normal tend to be less likely to abuse it later in life. When I was a child, my parents put rather severe limits on television consumption, for which I will always be grateful.
(Also, I checked all the links, and they all work properly for me. If you tell me which link is not working for you, I can get you the proper URL.)
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