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| | | Autonomy Framed by Infinite Jest: "Children" & "Adults" in Pursuit of Happiness Pleasure
JonathanBoyer
| | | 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? | |
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> | Too narrow. Your social
psychology has been dichotomized: the influence of mind on mind is
not reducible to a binary alternation between coercion and absence.
Your political theory is also too reductive: Government rescue is
also justified when the decisions adults make are purpose-rational
(to use Max Weber's term) for them, but have collective effects that
are harmful overall. Contemporary law school jargon talks of market
failure and negative externalities as justification for regulation,
but even if the jargon is repulsive the concepts are
relevant. | | | "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."
Vs.
"Always with you this freedom! . . . as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do . . . . But what about the freedom to? Not just free from. Not all compulsions come from without . . . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?" --p. 320
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< | Consumer education and consumer protection, then, converge to define the debate over the pursuit of happiness. And given the implication that both miscibility variables -- autonomy and susceptibility to coercion -- are shaped by education, what then is the appropriate role of government, as adult, in shaping the decision-making process of the greedy child? To what extent should temptations and their advertisement be prohibited or at least mitigated by laws/regulations requiring brutally honest disclosure; to what extent should school curriculum function to indoctrinate/routinize cognitive decision-making algorithms of children from a ripe age; and to what extent can/should those algorithms be shaped to leave room for multiple and equally correct solutions to the same problem of choice (a kind of freedom via relativism)? | >
> | Consumer education and consumer protection, then, converge to define the debate over the pursuit of happiness.
Is this observation intended as cultural criticism or logic?
And given the implication that both miscibility variables -- autonomy and susceptibility to coercion -- are shaped by education, what then is the appropriate role of government, as adult, in shaping the decision-making process of the greedy child? To what extent should temptations and their advertisement be prohibited or at least mitigated by laws/regulations requiring brutally honest disclosure; to what extent should school curriculum function to indoctrinate/routinize cognitive decision-making algorithms of children from a ripe age; and to what extent can/should those algorithms be shaped to leave room for multiple and equally correct solutions to the same problem of choice (a kind of freedom via relativism)?
What is the point of asking "to what extent"? Is the desired answer a number, a range, a formula, a recognition that there's no such thing as a decision given the complexity of the world every child lives in? Is this an operational question, designed to enable policy-makers to decide something, or an illustration, designed to invoke a thought process? | | | "This is the crux of the educational system you [anti-American people] find so appalling. Not to teach what to desire. To teach how to be free. To teach how to make knowledgeable choices about pleasure and delay and the kid's overall down-the-road maximal interests." --p. 429 | | | Freedom from; freedom to. Freedom from government-forced extinction of those joyfully enslaving MCDonald's jingles, 3am get-rich-quick commercials, and those creepily strategic facebook ads that kindly remind us of pleasures we might otherwise live life without, emptily. A freedom entirely opposed to the so called freedom to live one's adult life without excessive temptation -- a kind of autonomy via elimination of coercion. Does one kind of freedom more accurately represent the kind of "American" freedom typically trumpeted boldly and certainly with seemingly unbreakable religiosity, or is there room to experiment and find a miscible balance? | |
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< | If the heralded absoluteness of American freedom, at least for adults, exists as an entirely singular dimension of freedom-from, the tension can be cut with a plastic spoon. Get American or get real. Or get to them while they're young, one might say, because a prevailing attitude maintains that only children need protection: "adults" in America have a right to encounter infinite seduction unfettered and, if they so choose, to indulge the fruits of any and all insidious pleasures? | >
> | Why is this an "or"
question? Isn't it apparent that lives are lived across an entire
spectrum? I have no idea what McDonald? 's jingles you are talking
about, because I've never heard them. I've a very good idea about
how Facebook presents ads, but I've never used the service and I
never will. Between that and all the readers who know exactly what
you are talking about because they have first-hand evidence of the
surrender of consciousness to these forms of sensation there are an
infinite gradation of possible life textures, as there are within the
very group of readers who have surrendered in various ways I have
not. | | | | |
>
> | If the heralded absoluteness of American freedom, at least for adults, exists as an entirely singular dimension of freedom-from, the tension can be cut with a plastic spoon. Get American or get real. Or get to them while they're young, one might say, because a prevailing attitude maintains that only children need protection: "adults" in America have a right to encounter infinite seduction unfettered and, if they so choose, to indulge the fruits of any and all insidious pleasures? | | | | |
>
> | This seems to me a good
start, but just as David Foster Wallace wrote substantially better
than he thought, this essay could use more careful editing of its
concepts. I've tried to note the places where I think the choices
are made that need to be broadened, where the essay takes too easy a
way out, fails to approach the breadth of the possibilities presented
by the chosen starting-point, or allows the "frame" adopted to become
a box. There's something fine here, but it needs to be quarried out
from a too-confining reductionist substrate. | | | |
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