Was just watching a talk by Sheena Iyengar form the TED conference regarding ‘the art of choosing’ http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html and was not giving It my full attention until she said that:

‘When offered to those not accustomed to it choice does not entail a liberation but a suffocation by meaningless minutia', which essentially gave voice to something I’ve been feeling for a long time. An example of the above statement is the experiences of those in eastern Europe who have undergone the transition from living in a communist state wherein product choice was confined to an affirmation or negation of the state brand of soap, chewing gum, beer etc (to which in east Germany many interestingly still retain their loyalty) to now, under democracy, being subject to an overwhelming deluge of seemingly identical possible brands, from which to operate an autonomous choice.

For those of us who have grown up as a part of this late capitalist paradigm we have been able to develop an acute ability to sift through the various possible manifestations of chewing gum or ‘soft drink’ with such fluency that forming brand allegiances and counterbalancing the market choices available becomes an almost instinctive activity that can be a source of pride. It is then however that we will find, when we believe ourselves to have carved a secure niche of brand preferences and loyalties out of the swarm of those commodities and products we could have chosen, and when we begin to derive a vivid impression of our own ‘consumer identity’ as it where, that we are most susceptible to undergoing a crisis of confidence.

The dissemination of the Anglo-American ideal of choice and the implications it has in forcing its citizens to compile a portfolio of freely chosen deals, contracts, brand’s and assorted paraphernalia can make those subjected to this tyranny of possibilities faint-headed. I increasingly feel absorbed by Sartre’s phantasmagorical ‘nausea’, on heading into town, as I start to feel winded by modernity’s unceasing reliance on my personal jurisdiction. To use a common example, any visit to a corporate, or indeed any other, coffee shop now consists of the customer being asked to dictate a carefully scrutinised prescription of how one would like one’s caffeine hit assembled. Surely I am not alone in feeling that this compliance and egalitarianism on the behalf of the coffee makers is enormously tedious? For imagine now how refreshing it would be to remove all the requests and democracy from the transaction and put your faith in the barista to process and comply with the words ‘can I have a coffee please’- what I would give to be dictated my order at a restaurant! On a trip into town I began to feel sweat trickle down my brow, and my consciousness teeming with neurosis as I calculate the price margins that delineate the different brands. A single trip into town will see the consumer sent hurtling from the void towards an onslaught of possible choices, negations and affirmations from which they are required by the late capitalist machine to perform countless exertions of what is actually quite high-level cognitive scrutiny. Only because from an increasingly young age we are initiated into this bizarre ritual, distinguishing our preferred cartoon enterprise, favoured manufactor of sweets etc, does it seem to us to be a natural one. However as Iyengar wittily points out in the video, choice is not an organic phenomenon which is a mainstay every culture, and hence the west is wrong to treat those cultures, such as her example regarding the green tea in japan, which do not bestow upon the consumer a vast array of options, as being aberrations that run counter to the notions of democracy and liberty.

The truth is that I believe many of the people who would triumphantly champion our ability in Britain to freely vote on who governs us as one of the most admirable facets of our culture would still, like me, relish a little bit of autocracy when buying a coffee. Because when absolute liberty infects the marketplace you begin to feel trapped and not freed. Supermarkets, far from being bastions of self-governance are its anathema; countless research having told us that when the range of options provided exceeds 10 we become lazy and disengage from the decision we are making. Multiply this disengagement by one trolley load and it becomes apparent that a reduction in the multiplicity of choice (in reality just homogenous variations on a theme) offered by the market would not leave the modern consumer disempowered and obedient, but would re-empower them by allowing them to redirect their cognitive energies away from shopping.