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JonathanBoyerSecondPaper 10 - 29 Jan 2010 - Main.JonathanBoyer
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*UNDER CONSTRUCTION* | | | "We don't force. It's exactly about not forcing, our history's genus. You [as an American] are entitled to your values of maximum pleasure. So long as you don't fuck with mine." --p.424 | |
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< | But arguably nary a case exists in which choice is not accompanied by at least some level of coercion. In other words, much of human decision-making derives its structure from extraneous, often social, pressures that are specifically designed to coerce. And depending on the magnitude of coercive pressure at play, an individual's capacity for resistance and autonomous choice-analysis will be tested to varying degrees. If individual autonomy, then, can be defined as an inverse function of coercion level, one can also imagine a full range of solutions, or mixtures, of autonomy relative to coercion, given more or less of each. The autonomy question, then, is one of miscibility: at what points does the coercion:autonomy ratio produce immiscible solutions -- points where the coercion level is no longer soluble within a free-flow of autonomy? And given such varying ratios, when is strategic advertising aimed at Pizza-Hut-lovers who are known to become entranced by the comfort of heart-stopping hydrogenated cheese grease akin to dangling the "fatal fruit"? Are we all adults here, or do some temptations reduce us to children in need of government rescue? | >
> | But arguably nary a case exists in which choice is not accompanied by at least some level of coercion. In other words, much of human decision-making derives its structure from extraneous, often social, pressures that are specifically designed to coerce. And depending on the magnitude of coercive pressure at play, an individual's capacity for resistance and autonomous choice-analysis will be tested to varying degrees.
If individual autonomy, then, can be defined as an inverse function of coercion level, one can also imagine a full range of solutions, or mixtures, of autonomy relative to coercion, given more or less of each. The autonomy question, then, is one of miscibility: at what points does the coercion:autonomy ratio produce immiscible solutions -- points where the coercion level is no longer soluble within a free-flow of autonomy? And given such varying ratios, when is strategic advertising aimed at Pizza-Hut-lovers who are known to become entranced by the comfort of heart-stopping hydrogenated cheese grease akin to dangling the "fatal fruit"? Are we all adults here, or do some temptations reduce us to children in need of government rescue? | | | "Now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. And we say 'human' to you. We say that one cannot be human without freedom." | | | "Get real. The [irresistible] Entertainment isn't candy or beer . . . You can't compare this kind of insidious enslaving process to your little cases of sugar and soup." --p. 430 | |
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< | Freedom from; freedom to. If the heralded absoluteness of American freedom exists as a single dimension of freedom-from, the tension can be cut with a plastic spoon. Get American or get real. Get to them while they're young, one might say, because a prevailing attitude says that only children need protection. "Adults" in America have a right to encounter infinite seduction and, if they so choose to indulge, the fruits of any and all insidious pleasures? | >
> | Freedom from; freedom to. If the heralded absoluteness of American freedom exists as an entirely singular dimension of freedom-from, the tension can be cut with a plastic spoon. Get American or get real. Get to them while they're young, one might say, because a prevailing attitude says that only children need protection. "Adults" in America have a right to encounter infinite seduction and, if they so choose to indulge, the fruits of any and all insidious pleasures? | | | |
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