Why is it sometimes so hard to choose that it looks like there is no choice, it’s an illusion, a lie? Every one of us, for sure, tried to jump from springboard or rock and remembers his heart beating fast before jumping, his envy to those who already jumped. Who is that inner child that is scared inside of us through all of our life, what affects him and how his fear can be explained — tells our columnist, Russian publicist Stanislav Belkovsky.
Everybody’s choosing by himself
A woman, faith and road.
To serve to devil or to Prophet —
Everybody’s choosing by himself.
Everybody’s choosing by himself
Words for love and prayer.
Duel epee, sword for battle
Everybody’s choosing by himself.
(с) Yuriy Levitansky
There are some things, substances and subjects that frighten man. For example, a dark room, the fictional characters, cannibal Hannibal Lec-tor and vampire Count Dracula — underline these needless fears, but the most worrying, is choice.
As we know, there’s a moment between past and future. Note closely, this moment is always connected to regular living through the situation of choice. To make our future discourse easier let’s insert here our local definition of the word ‘choice’: a willingly made preference of one of the variants in life. A bit sloppy but, say, it makes sense.
Before a man comes to this world he has no choice. At first I don’t exist in body. Decision about my embodiment is taken by others who don’t even know me yet. Then I’m in my mother’s womb and all of my will power preferences are made by her. Then I come out of the hyper cozy mother’s womb to the enemy outer world and since this moment a cosmic responsibility falls on me. As was accurately noticed by Yury Olesha, perhaps, the fear of death is the prolongation and reflection of the fear of birth. It is not by chance, that many people start to get ill before their birthday: it is a subconscious memory of the horror of the physical life beginning, of entering the epoch of independently taken decisions.
Choice is a free will projection. May be, my whole way is predetermined. And incoherent for me in its definition because needless knowledge harms people. One way or another, in myriads of situations I have to choose. Even if decision is already taken for me and I am not able to guess. Every man is born free and our innate freedom is inalien-able from the individual. Whatever we mean by saying “freedom” and “individual”.
The space for free will choice is quite narrow for a child since every child is supposed to have a title adult responsible in the end for the result of the baby choice. This is where the growing inevitable children’s rebellion against the adult world is born.
Nominally, adult cannot escape from the full responsibility of the preference of one possible life variant from all. That’s why there’s always a wish to stay small as long as possible or degrade back to childhood , though majority of people deny it, of course. The exclaim ‘I take my decisions, no one else is doing it for me!’ very often means absolutely opposite: a tremendous self unsure-ness, sublime but inevitable guess that the choice is dictated by someone or something else.
There’s an opinion that the highest sweetness of human existence lays in silence and forgetting. You don’t remember your past that always consists of something bitter, you don’t talk not to make uncompelled mistakes, and you will exist in full harmony for one hundred or one hundred twenty years.
Isn’t refusing to choose sweet too? The happiness of taking the burden from one head and pouring it to another?
‘Yes, I would had become and actor if not for my authoritative mother’.
‘We would had left from the Soviet Union but who’d take care of the graves?’
‘I hate to be a doctor but all my ancestors were doctors, I was left nothing else to do’.
‘I wanted to marry her but that would mean breaking two families. Impossible’.
‘I dreamt of continuing my career, but children were and, actually, always are the obstacle”.
And there was no choice in every situation. One variant from one. What a pity! — We formally assert. How great! — we assert actually. I took a decision, one single of possible. I don’t have a thing to regret or feel guilty for. I’m free of critical views. I’d look at you in my shoes!
It looks especially comforting in politics. What a buzz, we have only one real President in RF and the result of people’s voting is known beforehand. We can fervently love the governor or, on the contrary, demonstratively dislike. But we don’t carry the burden of responsibility of the possibility of changing him. Elections were taken from us! Excuse me, who did it to you? Weren’t that us ourselves? No-no, why? We were on our way to democracy but those bad people, you know…
A good question: why did the habitants of RF in XXI century give up their civil and political freedom? Why didn’t they fight, object, brought victims to the altar of that same democracy we all were waiting for in the end of eighties and almost saw?
The answer is good too: because all of these rights and freedoms were not chosen consciously. We inherited them for free. From the upper level. From Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in the last fifteen years of the XX century. There was no true fight with wounded flesh and blood. And what is given for free is never really valued. God gave, God took.
But there’s also another explanation. We were absolute children socially in Soviet Union. No political choice could be even imagined. Not just political. I re-member the cutting shock that piqued me in a Paris supermarket in summer 1990 during my first trip to the capitalist country. Forty brands of cheese do exist! And how am I supposed to choose one of them if I’m short of money and my desire not to act as a fool is so big?
And then suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of the freedom abysses. When we should always choose, and choose, and choose. And what is it for? Isn’t it better to feel like a small child with a big Household Maniac rising above us? Not loved for her unbearable pressure and beloved for the given right — for irresponsibility.
There’s a known thesis: fear of taking a decision is worse than the worst decision. Yes. The one who is scared of responsibility is better to pull the rubber endlessly. Where do we hurry to with choices? Never procrastinate until tomorrow if you can procrastinate until after tomorrow. From here comes the absence of reforming in modern Russia and even the absence of hope for reforms.
That’s why choice is horrible. That’s why it is necessary. And it awaits. Each of us and all of us. You can’t run from freedom and this is the key mockery of being.
“Praise the Twilight Freedom brothers!”
