Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC
I recently discovered an interesting article by Barry Schwartz with the ironic title of Self-Determination: The Tyranny of Freedom. His thesis is this:
Americans now live in a time and a place in which freedom and autonomy are valued above all else and in which expanded opportunities for self-determination are regarded as a sign of the psychological well-being of individuals and the moral well-being of the culture. This article argues that freedom, autonomy, and self-determination can become excessive, and that when that happens, freedom can be experienced as a kind of tyranny. The article further argues that unduly influenced by the ideology of economics and rational-choice theory, modern American society has created an excess of freedom, with resulting increases in people's dissatisfaction with their lives and in clinical depression. One significant task for a future psychology of optimal functioning is to deemphasize individual freedom and to determine which cultural constraints are necessary for people to live meaningful and satisfying lives.
While there is much in the details of this article with which I agree, I think the author fails to understand that the already-existing psychologies of optimal functioning--from Abraham Maslow's to Ken Wilber's to Robert Kegan's to Jenny Wade's to Clare Graves's to Susanne Cook-Greuter's--describe a series of sequential, emergent levels of psychological development characterized by progressively greater capacities for both freedom and responsibility, agency and communion, self-determination and other-determination.
In calling for a new normative psychology that sets specific cultural constraints on individual freedom, Schwartz may be inadvertently elevating his own preferred cultural values--those oriented toward the curtailment of certain individual freedoms--to the level of universality, as if he is certain of the specific sources of, and solutions to, the widespread cultural malaise he describes.
I believe all of the theorists mentioned above would agree that individual and collective development to each subsequent level is predicated upon and catalyzed by a perfectly natural and utterly dissatisfying life experience within the constraints of the previous level--constraints which are necessarily both universal in the sense of being common to all who pass through this stage and cultural in the sense of being tailored to the particular historical circumstances in which they emerged.
Therefore, individual and collective psychological pathologies like those cited by Schwartz are evidence of the need for psychological development that will awaken new capacities to deal with the problems that seemed so insurmountable at the previous level. Those overwhelmed by the personal responsibilities that come with increasing freedom to choose, as well as those who are oppressed by others' efforts to control and limit everyone's choices, will discover that individual and collective psychological development holds the key to lasting resolution. With such development, choices proliferate along with the capacity to choose.
This developmental process seems to have an inherent set of rules by which people eventually learn their way out of the messes they create, one step at a time. The more we understand and practice according to these process rules--which I my view certainly include the mutual pursuit of transparency, choice, and accountability--the more likely we are to preclude crises and resolve the personal, cultural, and systemic conflicts we have created.
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Referral Source: The Liberal Order via Marginal Revolution
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