The difference between freedom of choice and the freedom of wants and desires.                                      

(Generally, I am of the opinion that all action is a consequence and dependent on all actions and impressions prior to it, but for the sake of the argument let’s assume there is at least some free will, especially since my opinion as well as academia in this area is far from conclusive)

For the sake of clarity by wants I mean inherent instinctive wants and the freedom of them means to be able to control these inherent wants. Freedom of desire therefore applies to everything that things do not inherently want but still desire as we will see they are part of social constructs. Control over desires means freedom of desire. Sometimes we might want and desire something at the same time.

There is bread, a bucket, and a phone. You are free to choose any and the purpose is unclear. Which are you going to pick? This choice might seem free, but it also helps to highlight in which ways we are unfree. With an actual freedom we would assume a random distribution of choices. If we were truly free in our decision no considerations would play a role. This is obviously not the case. Let’s say you can still pick from the same three objects but this time you are almost starving, or I demand that after your choice you must fill up a hole with water from a near river. You can still freely choose between the three objects but what you want, or desire, is given, it is the bread or the bucket. The same goes for why I assume that today most people will choose the phone if there are no other instructions. We want the phone because we know it has the most value in modern society and maximizing utility is generally what economic doctrines demand from us.

This is what I mean by the difference of freedom of choice and freedom to choose what one wants or desires. This freedom is almost impossible to achieve since we have certain wants, we cannot separate us from: the wants to eat, drink and shit. In that regard humans cannot truly acquire the freedom of wants but only the freedom of desire. I only have control over which toilet I desire to use and not that I want to use one. I have no control over the want to eat but I can decide what food I desire to relieve myself from this want. Coming back the initial example this is why people will choose the phone. We do not need it to fulfil wants but we have a desire to have a phone. Nobody wants a phone people desire a phone. Where does this desire come from?

I think desire is a new concept. Initially all human development was to fulfil wants. We created a variety of tools to fulfil these wants as convenient as possible. The first desires that come to my mind came with the first emergence of the idea of higher beings. We created the desire to sacrifice and pray to our Gods. Here we can also see how the idea of want is being perverted. Some or maybe even all who participated were convinced that this sacrifice is the most convenient way to fulfil the want to live (to put it in broad terms) because doing otherwise will lead to punishment by the Gods and possibly death. This seems absurd from today’s perspective but still we can all imagine that this was how people thought at the time. The same applies to modern consumerism. Most products we consume today are purely social constructs that leave us with no additional value. What want to do we fulfil with a yacht? We only fulfil our desires with it. Thinking about this more it seems modern social constructs in themselves are purely a construct of desire. Early social constructs might have served to fulfil wants since they arguably brought more stability and peace, but today’s complex social constructs have gone far beyond that. Once some were able to fulfil their wants, they quickly moved on to make social constructs accommodate and fulfil their desires.

Since this already quite confusing for myself: Desires are social constructs, wants are inherent. If I grow up in a social construct, I do not have the freedom to decide what I desire but it is put onto me by my surroundings. Only if I can shape the social constructs am I free to shape my desires. Now we enter an odd point since I am already part the social construct. I am product of it and can thus not shaping it will therefore not be changing it but rather the natural development of the social construct. To put it simply as humans we do not enjoy freedom of wants and to gain desires, we must become part of a social construct which ultimately means that I cannot gain freedom from desire since I cannot decide on the social construct, I want to live in, nor can I shape the construct. Or can I? Now if I grew up outside of any form off social construct and could then freely decide which one, I like best based on the desires they created, I am contradicting again since none of the constructs will, to the outsider, seem like anything they would want or need if there is no immanent fear of starvation or violent death. Desires only make sense if you are part of the social construct. The only way I see this moving along is individuals changing minor details of the social construct which in its entirety is changing if enough people share this thought. This means that there is a way to gain some freedom of desire if limited through essentially being part and interacting with the public sphere possibly through some kind of institution.

The idea stands in stark contrast to the liberal idea that free markets and price mechanisms enables more freedom. It does so in the sense that we can now chose between 1000 different phones but the desire to buy any of them is not my own. It is a socially constructed one and it takes away my freedom of desire unless I can in turn shape the social construct that is shaping my desire. Modern economy is not promoting freedom it is to a large extent a social construct that is creating desires without our consent. I cannot choose not to see advertisement, but all advertisement at least attempts to indoctrinate me with new desires. Advertisement as information campaign is fine but I think it is clear to everyone that is not the purpose of it. Companies are competing to create a desire for their product within the social construct or build their product to fulfil an already established one. Essentially the social construct we (or at least I) live in generated companies that shape the social construct and, in this process, take away freedom of desire from everyone else. I think the main question we must ask ourselves from here is who actually shapes the social construct and the consequent desires. Currently I think it is a largely undemocratic sphere of individual actors seeking to improve the social and economic standing. Organising our social construct differently might enable us to have more control over what we desire. This becomes especially important when considering climate crises. It is already absurd to think that it is individual responsibility on many levels but with this argumentation we see what the issue is. Large corporations that are devastating earth tell us that they will stop if we consume less and different while at the same time shaping the social construct so that we desire to consume more from them. This inherent contradiction is in my eyes a main reason why we are still giving our best to kill earth.

(I quickly want to mention that it seems that all we want is what we need. What we desire is what leaves us indifferent or worse off unless we are in a certain social construct. Our desires have brought us so far that they go against our wants. We want to move, think, live but many are dying in the process of fulfilling their desire. Our social constructs have in some way become stronger than our natural and human wants. There are also a lot of confusions. Is their desire without humans? What do I want and what do I desire exactly? If wants are natural but desire is a construct is there any point in it? Why do I still want the yacht then?)

“You must be the change you want to see in the world” – Andrew Mackenzie