Interesting essay on the gaps between perception and reality, the conviction of being free and actually being so.
An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
The notion of having choice is generally a convoluted one at the individual and collective scale. The assortment of choices a person believes they have is already filtered by their tolerance for risk. I may be very attracted in abstract to the concept of someone who takes a couple of years off from their job without a plan, sells all their belongings and sets out to see the world. They are then transformed by that experience and find their true purpose in life, live happily ever after. There are many who have exactly gone down this path, but I never will. I have some choices too but this is not one of them. And that is just the start of it. Every fork in the road, people pick an option that is within their range further restricting options going forward.
Maybe in America we are inclined to prefer some choices over others and that defines our overall quality of life. Maybe we prefer that we be hoisted by our own petard because that is a choice but refuse to have a "nanny state" look out for us as if we were incapable of decision-making. If that leads to poor health, insolvency and working multiple jobs just to get by, maybe that is choice we are capable of based on what we fear the most.
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