Remember when telephones were a state monopoly and it used to take three months to get a new one installed? - but it is also a wholly natural one. This may seem an ungrateful response to all the miracles the Thatcher revolution achieved. But we're not, are we? Instead, we're mostly wishing we could turn back the clock and return to those innocent, choicefree days when Saturday night meant Morecambe And Wise, and when Heinz's 57 Varieties sounded like an awful, awful lot. If freedom of choice really were the route to contentment, we ought by now to be experiencing hitherto undreamt-of heights of ecstasy. Think of the crazy variety of courses now on offer at university, from windsurfing to the semiotics of EastEnders. Think of the blink-and-you've-missed-them, cheap, instant fashion trends we can buy into at Topshop, Gap, Primark, Zara or Tesco. Or the mindboggling number of new airports to which we can now fly cheaply, from Stansted, Bristol, Manchester or Prestwick.
#Tyranny of choice tv
And that's before you get to the aisle with 154 flavours of jam, or the one with 107 varieties of pasta.Ĭonsider, too, the spectacular variety of TV programmes we can flick through now that most of us have cable. Some of it is flavoured with strawberry, banana or Belgian chocolate some has active bacterial flora some has extra omega-3 and some, quite possibly, is a bit like the white, plain, unmuckedabout-with, milk-flavoured stuff we all used to drink happily in the days before we turned into paranoid health freaks. Choice means competition, and competition makes us all richer.Įven so, recently, I've begun to ask myself whether we're enjoying too much of a good thing.Ĭonsider, for example, that in Tesco it is now possible to buy no fewer than 38 types of milk.
If it's all for our benefit, how come it often ends up making us frustrated?Īs an unashamedly Thatcherite free-marketeer, I never thought I'd hear myself railing against the tyranny of choice. Renata Salecl is a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a Recurring Visiting Professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York.Whichever the aisle, we've all been there: a routine trip to the supermarket has ended up taking three times longer than it should because of the stupidly large range of varieties we have to wade through. With wisdom, humour and sensitivity, Renata Salecl examines the complexity of the essential human capacity to choose which has become mired in consumerist ironies."-From publisher's website. The Tyranny of Choiceexplores how late capitalism's shrill exhortations to 'be oneself' can be a tyranny which only leads to ever-greater disquiet and how insistence on choice being a purely individual matter prevents social change. But paradoxically this seeming freedom to choose can create extreme anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Like the products on a supermarket shelf, our careers, our relationships, our bodies, our very identities seem to be there for the choosing.
#Tyranny of choice full
We are encouraged from all sides to view our lives as being full of choices.
"A brilliant study on the nature of choice, and how limitless freedom can lead to despair.
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