Making choices is one of the most fundamental and significant actions of human beings. It is one of the most important processes of the human brain and our choices often determine our future. It is the very heart of humanity.
Choosing is also about individual responsibility. Remember that the word responsibility is about our ability to respond to what is happening in the reality in which we live. With our ability to respond comes the pressure of choice. Much of that pressure is external and it comes from those who would like us to abdicate our personal human responsibility and transfer that function to them. In most cases these are leaders, experts, superiors, or those who see themselves as guides.
The apparent beauty of abdicating personal responsibility is that it absolves us of guilt for what happens. If things turn out well, it gives us the sense that we took part in making a wise decision by giving that responsibility to others. If things turn out badly, we can say it was certainly not our fault; we had given that responsibility to others to act on our behalf and they failed to deliver.
In our modern American society, we are told that our greatest responsibility is to follow our leaders, whether or not we chose them. We are told that we have been absolved of any real responsibility except, perhaps, to vote. After that, our job is to watch how things play out, cheering or booing from the sidelines.
We are, however, nearly always held responsible for the outcomes of our own lives. In this strange reality, we are somehow responsible to find ways to succeed in an environment that has been determined totally by others. If we find a way to succeed in that environment, we are deemed successful. If, on the other hand, we cannot find a way to succeed in that environment, that is our own fault.
In our current world, a new level of distance from responsibility and choice is being added, that of technology. Not only computing technology with its ability to be much more inclusively expert in deciding certain things much quicker than humanly possible, but also the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which seems to replace the very human ability to make intelligent choices and decisions within the human environment in which we live.
We are aware of virtual reality products and artificial intelligence within the array of technology from which we can choose. But the key words are virtual and artificial, which means they are not real, but only some mechanized substitute for the reality of human choice. They are at least once removed from human reality.
My wife and I were recently listening to a performance of a choir of young voices, including our grandson. It was beautiful and it could probably be replaced by an artificial replica through AI. What would be missing? The human meaning of knowing that it is being produced by someone to whom we are connected. Once you take that human connection out, it becomes a hollow shell without any real meaning. It is that meaning the gives it the real value.
It is similar to what happens when things begin to be monetized. A forest loses its meaning within the web of life and is replaced by so many board feet of lumber, representing a certain amount of monetary profit.
The more we allow economics, national interest, elected officials, experts, technology, or even leaders to act as though they have the right to make decisions for us, the more we abdicate our personal responsibility. In the process, we are giving up the most basic of human rights, the right to decide for ourselves about our lives and our future.
In order to preserve our humanity, we must reclaim our right to make those decisions for ourselves as we are embedded in a world of changing realities.
