“Free to choose”?

While the above is a nice slogan, popularized by Milton Friedman and others, it is hardly applied consistently.

Try, for example, to “choose” certain drugs:

Psychedelic mushrooms can do more than make you see the world in kaleidoscope. Research suggests they may have permanent, positive effects on the human brain.

[…]

This dampening of one area and amplification of another could explain the “mind-broadening” sensation of psychedelic drugs, he said. Unlike most recreational drugs, psychotropic mushrooms and LSD don’t provide a pleasant, hedonistic reward when they’re consumed. Instead, users take them very occasionally, chasing the strange neurological effects instead of any sort of high.

“Except for some naïve users who go looking for a good time…which, by the way, is not how it plays out,” Carhart-Harris said, “you see people taking them to experience some kind of mental exploration, and to try to understand themselves.”

Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.

Nice try, but such a choice can get you placed right into the slammer. The mere possession of psilocybin is a federal and state felony.

When I was a kid, drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, but when too many people chose them, they were made illegal. The more popular a new drug is, the greater the clamor to ban it. (In the name of protecting the public from their “unsafe” choices, of course. As to why some unsafe choices are more protected against such protective measures than others, I will never understand the logic. As if logic has anything to do with such things….)

The net result is that we are free to “choose” an ever diminishing number of things.

In an amazing coincidence, I just saw this on Twitter:

“I’m pro-choice”
“So you think people should be able to choose any light bulb for their home?”
“Don’t be ridiculous”

Haha!

So what is choice, anyway?

I think it was once an ordinary word, but it has been wielded for so long by so many crooked demagogues to mean whatever they want it to mean that its emotionally and politically charged meanings have rendered it useless.

Except for isolated crackpots who still believe in logic.