The complexity of freedom and doing what’s best for you.
I’ve been struggling with the thought of having limitations put on me by someone else for some time now. It’s a bi-product of having listened to a lot of liberals and libertarians in different sets of podcasts, and has influenced my way of thinking. I’ll try to dissect some of the thoughts and look at personal freedom from a more complex viewpoint here.
The thought of someone else, or even a government, being in charge of what I can choose and not has been disturbing to me for quite some time now. It’s been a hassle thinking about taxes, traffic rules or even the curriculum I have at my university. In all kinds of circumstances where the possibility has been laid out in front of me, I’ve seen someone pressing my freedom of choice. That’s not a set of thoughts that I’ve chosen, but rather a bi product of listening to much to other people with these kinds of opinions. And so, I’ve at first been disturbed by the lack of complete freedom, and then been disturbed by being disturbed. Needless to say, it’s consumed a lot of unnecessary thought process and energy.
One of the things that came to me first was the thought of health care and paying taxes. We’ve got free healthcare and one of the best heath care systems in the world. (I’ve got absolutely no sources here, but looking at a macro, I’d say we come out on the top half.) The problem that I saw was a lot of unnecessary health issues that people drag themselves with. A lot of us don’t eat properly, most of us eat too much and exercise to little. Some do stuff they can’t do and injure themselves. And so on. The thought that struck me was that I pay for people getting health care for things that they shouldn’t need health care for. And by shouldn’t, the point would be that we’ve got sufficient information, as well as incentives to keep with the information, to stop many of the deceases that people are seeking health care for.
My rather cynical point of view was that if people would just have to pay for all of it themselves, they’d get their shit together and be more healthy. And then I realised that I don’t eat nearly as healthy as I could given all of the information I have on food and nutrition. I just don’t have the energy, willpower or desire to make healthy food. Then again, I don’t seek medical assistance for it. Yet. But I probably will have to in a couple of years. That’s where the point was made for me. We’re emotional animals.
“If more information was the answer, we’d all been millionaires and have six packs of abs.”
— Tim Ferriss
We’re terrible at making decisions and sticking with them. We all have fairly bad impulse control when put in relation to how well we think we can handle decisions. We’ve all been hungry and found ourselves in front of the chocolate bars in the grocery store. It’s hard battling all those chemicals in your brain.
The solution? Here’s where it got even more tricky for me, as I was still battling my freedom craving libertarian voice that was speaking to me. One solution to most of the problems regarding health could be solved by imposing regulations and incentives by governments. Raising the sugar tax so that chocolate bars would be raised 50% in cost. Raising the tobacco tax so that a pack of cigarettes would cost the same as a full meal out. And so on. There are many things a government could do to regulate behaviours.
My thought was that government regulations is bad, period. That they shouldn’t meddle in our business at all. I’ve started crumbling in that position lately. The reason to that is the sheer power that these things holds over us in therms of neurophysiology as well as how hard it seems to be for us to change behaviours that have a strong hold in our brain. For example, about half of the smoking population in the US states that they’d like to stop. Most of the obese population would probably say that they’d love to loose a bit of that weight to gain the health benefits. And to those problems, I don’t know if the best solution is to punish them if they don’t succeed by making them pay for their health care.
Rather, the humane and reasonable solution might be to have them helped in the decision making process to begin with, and a government could very well be good at that. Raising the tax for tobacco would probably make people pay for their own health care problems related to smoking, but more importantly it’d give the people who are thinking about stopping an opt-out and an incentive to stop smoking before it’s too late.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about in these terms has been the constant debate about whether or not our phones are good to us. More specifically, I’ve been following the debate of phones in schools for a long time now. There seems to be the same kind of problem of kids not being able to control themselves with their phones, and some people wanting to put a complete ban over phones in the school environment. The problem I’ve had with that solution is twofold; the first part being that we’re neglecting the upsides that the technology can bring and secondly, kids aren’t going to learn how to regulate themselves if they’re not given the chance. I think it’s incredibly important to recognise the tough job teachers already have, and giving them another responsibility in terms of teaching kids how to use their phones properly could be another task added to the unimaginable stack of other responsibilities. That’s a problem for another time.
What I think we need to do in these cases is to ransack ourselves. I can honestly say that I’m addicted to my phone and that it’s disturbing my everyday work at many times throughout a week. The thing is that I’m aware of it, and therefore can work with that addiction and seek help both within and external with this problem of mine. I’ve had to handle that addiction and find solutions to the perceived problem, like an adult. That’s what I’d like us to teach our children, and quite frankly our whole population needs to train that skill. It’s not enough to just say that society needs to change, there needs to be strategy to that change as well. Building habits that nudge us in one direction or the other.
In order to battle our bad behaviours, that’s what we need to do: Build habits that benefit us. When battling process so rewarding our brains can’t even begin to handle it, we need to have really strong footholds to keep up. There is an immense complexity to the relation between freedom and bad behaviours, and I don’t think we’ve arrived at any conclusion on how to solve that relation. What I still believe is that we can, if we want to, get rid of many of the bad behaviours and that most of us don’t need to be take care of by a government. What I do think is that we can help each other at many times, and we can use some help from the government at some times.
