Who the Hell Is Making Your Choices? What Does Freedom Even Mean?

I raced outside to greet him. I was eight or nine, an age when I still watched for my father to come home. That night he came home in a white pickup truck. A Ford. He pulled down the tailgate, revealing a go-kart. I kind of heard the lecture about never again riding Michael Yampolsky’s YZ80. Riding the motorcycle meant losing the go-kart. No helmet, lose the go-kart. These were my choices. Making the wrong one would cost me my newfound autonomy. Best gift ever! Unfortunately, it was one-wheel drive in soft desert dirt.

I wanted to be like Michael, so I still rode the YZ80, telling him not to mention it because his older sister Gail had told my sister, Lora, who told my parents.

The motorcycle was autonomy in defiance of authority. The go-kart was autonomy granted by authority.

The prophet Samuel warns the Israelites who want a king that he will take their sons for military service, daughters for labor, fields, harvests, and their wealth. They didn’t listen. Their hunger for a monarch came with a thirst for surrendering freedom, choosing authority that restricts their autonomy. A king. (1 Samuel 8:10–20)

Judaism often reads Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit as a door to freedom, the freedom to choose and the freedom to be responsible for their lives. Responsibility is hard, often punishing. Freedom doesn’t mean living free from the consequences of one’s choices. Quite the opposite. Being autonomous isn’t easy.

Can we remain autonomous in our judgments when we do not control the circumstances that shape them? According to Stoicism, yes. For Epictetus, freedom isn’t about unlimited choices. It’s about managing our judgments and responses to circumstances we cannot control. Stoics work with the conditions of life instead of forcing them.

But what happens when capitalism, religious institutions, algorithms, and social systems shape the conditions under which we judge?

We like to think autonomy means being left alone to make our own decisions. You make yours. I make mine. Neither of us interferes with the other. It sounds simple. But we live in a world of mutual dependence. When does protecting one person’s freedom begin to diminish someone else’s?

Consider religious traditions. They provide meaning, identity, and belonging. They also make demands about how people should live and what they should believe. Does belonging increase autonomy or diminish it? Both.

A person might be born into or choose a religious tradition that restricts individual behavior. But what happens when that person begins to disagree? When does a community’s effort to preserve itself intrude upon the autonomy of its members?

Political philosopher John Rawls argued that freedom requires more than being left alone. Institutions must provide the conditions under which people can exercise their liberties. Having a right means nothing when circumstances make exercising it impossible.

That brings us to capitalism.

Does cowboy capitalism create more autonomy or less? It creates opportunities. People can start businesses, accumulate wealth, and change jobs while living lives unimaginable to earlier generations. But this same system creates dependencies that restrict the autonomy it celebrates.

How autonomous is someone free to leave a job but unable to lose health insurance? Or someone with countless consumer choices but little control over the economic conditions governing them? We may have more choices while exercising less control over the circumstances in which we make them.

Cooperation can make people freer than they would be acting alone. But what happens when systems of cooperation become so extensive that participation is no longer much of a choice?

Systemic approaches may both increase and diminish autonomy. But how do we measure the difference? Is there a scale? We can imagine autonomy on one side and authority on the other. More of one means less of the other. But is that how autonomy works anymore? And who decides what counts?

Do statistics speak the language of autonomy?

Statistics identify patterns and probabilities. They help institutions make decisions but also turn individuals into categories. What happens when the category becomes more important than the person?

What about algorithms? An algorithm can anticipate what we want to buy, read, watch, or believe. But it also shapes those preferences by determining which choices we encounter. Are we exercising autonomy when we choose from possibilities that someone else, or something else, has already selected for us?

Increasingly, the decisions shaping our lives emerge from institutions, markets, and technologies whose operations we barely understand. Who do we argue with when the systems that make us more autonomous also make us less autonomous? Bots?

We first need to ask what autonomy means when no one is really making decisions alone. But where will we find an answer when everyone is exercising some measure of autonomy, but their decisions keep determining the choices available to someone else?

When I came home from boarding school, I wanted to take a spin in my go-kart. It wasn’t there. Ellen, another older sister, told me she had given it to Linda Fosdick’s little brother. She said, “You can’t take it back. That’s mean.” I was fifteen and he was around eight to ten.

Two weeks later, my mother told me she wouldn’t keep Springer, a wandering, collarless dog I had found that week and named. I worried he’d be eaten by coyotes.

Springer and I then went to the Fosdick house, where I put Springer in their car and placed a note on the door from Springer, asking them to be his forever home. “My name is Springer. No one wants me. I want to live here. Springer. PS I’m in the car.” I rang the doorbell and ran.

They owed me.

Springer was loved for many years at his forever home.