Election Thoughts [3] | The Terrorising Pressure of Choice | Who Do We Want To Be?

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2]

In the previous two posts I’ve tried to set out a critique of the choice agenda that main parties are promoting, and also the ‘rights’ / devolved power agenda that is a central tenet of the Conservative Party manifesto.

The key question that was rightly asked yesterday was ‘is there a desire in the population for all these devolved powers?’ On top of working more hours than ever before as well as looking after children, do people want to be running their own schools, sitting on the boards of hospitals and police forces, and working out if they should be sacking their MPs? I’ll get to this problem of perceived apathy in a later post, but first I want to return to the issue of choice.

In the first post, I posited two problems with ‘choice’. Firstly, our democratic choice is actually fairly limited, and this is a systemic problem that those in power don’t have much will to change. Secondly, choice in public services must mean surplus capacity, which would imply waste – something that all parties are keen to show they can eradicate.

However, there are deeper problems with choosing that Žižek notes in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce:

The incessant pressure to choose involves not only ignorance about the object of desire, but, even more radically, the subjective impossibility of answering the question of desire.

In other words, not only are we not informed enough about what we are choosing, we are also not entirely sure what we want in the first place. In the voting context: not only do very few people really read party political manifestos in any depth and know the ins-and-outs of the differences in policy, but we are not even sure which of these policies would be best for ourselves and/or our nation anyway.

Beyond even this though, the problem of so much choice actually reflects back on us a deeper anxiety. Not only are we not sure what the choices mean, nor what we actually want – we are also not sure who we are. Using a typically banal example, Žižek gets to the heart of the issue:

Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose – what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room (“Soft or hard pillows? Double or twin beds?) is the much more radical probing: “Tell me who you are?”

This then I think leads us to a much more radical conclusion about our task in these next few weeks before the General Election: not only do we need to probe our representatives for what they are actually offering to do, we also need to reflect carefully on what we really want – personally and as a nation. But even beyond that lies the deeper question that this period of campaigning should prompt us to spend time reflecting on: who are we, and what sort of people do we want to be?

The terrorizing choice is thus not between Conservative or Labour. The choice is between the kind of self that I want to become, the kind of nation we want to be. Whoever can provide the environment within which this self-development can occur is the one who deserves our vote.