Choice-maxxing is bad, actually.
Is an overabundance of choice a threat to individual freedom?
From the magazine First Things:
"The first step is to ask liberalism’s perennial question: W'hat is the chief threat to individual freedom in our time?' The answer is no longer the despotic state, unfettered capital, or traditional norms and an over-regulated economy. It is rather the imperative, now lodged in most of our institutions and social norms, of perpetual choice and self-creation. This cultural consensus is paired with an ideological prohibition on economic policies that aim at anything other than efficiency and growth. In open liberalism, economic affairs are not to be constrained by classical political questions concerning the common good. In a real sense, open liberalism fulfills Rousseau’s call to force people to be free. It constrains them to not constrain themselves."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/08/liberalisms-fourth-turning
Discussion
one of the philosophical bases of #golang is to minimise choices how to do things, that's why there's no macro language or preprocessor, and why there is one standard formatter (there is some flexibility on breaking lines but not in numerous circumstances... the principle is about reducing decision overload and readability
too many languages pander to people's "preferences"
same as like sex... should be only one choice - THE OPPOSITE lol.. and only in marriage - see how that works?
I love how you bring it all back to #golang 😆
I believe St. Pope John Paul III defined true liberty as being free to do what is right. That is different from freedom to do what we please, and may actually entail us giving up certain options.
The real question, and this may be the crux of the "fourth turning" the article discussed, is "freedom for what?"
For example, freedom of speech is specifically meant as freedom to speak against the government, so as to pursue the common good in a democratic republic. If we can say whatever we want but have no actual voice in government, that freedom is neutered.
i bring it back to Go because they designed it right from 40 years of experience running dev projects, unlike all the rest of these idiots that did 5 years and love to pander to irrelevant obsessions
hell, i remember C++ coming out when i was 15 and i thought it seemed cool with those pipe operators and honestly, nobody uses them, but you look at the code and it's so overflowing with excessive descriptive object specs and template this and fuck off... man, i remember dealing with boost back in the day... zero guarantees that different minor versions would even compile... 1.58, not 1.59, or death!
objects are shit, they just make slow compilation and confusing notation, static analysis doesn't work and the compiler uses 12gb of memory to compile. fuck that
Hey, watch it, I'm working on a C++ project right now! 🤣
I definitely see the complexity you're referring to. However, I wanted to learn C++ better, and I've found it a valuable experience so far.
Maybe next I'll do everything in C lol.
lol, C is almost as bad, at least, the way people write it, fuckin unreadable, and it always seems like everything is declared at least 3 times, like, why????
C is static typed, yeah, there's 4 types of ints, two types of floats, strings that are stupid zero terminated, memory is not typed, really, you can simply say it is whatever you like, and then clobber it at will
insane language, 50 years old, come on man
i bring it back to #golang because it's the most cleanly designed, elegant, simple, easy to read, and sensible language that exists, and it doesn't pander to stupid nonsense obsessions about objects or aspects or "run everywhere" (it does anyway) or dynamic linking or functional, or objects, fuck objects, composition > inheritance... use short, concise names, don't write fucking war and peace in your fucking symbol names
also, freedom of speech is important because if you are ruled by or surrounded by narcissistic psychopaths they dictate what you should believe and that's a red flag
for the most part you don't really want to even say anything but some of us are chatterboxes and want to report every thought that passed through our little pea brains, and sometimes it's actually useful, because something really caught our curiosity and turned out to be important, and that's another thing that it's good for
it should never be a crime to say something dumb, but to lie and manipulate and make threats and do all that psychotic manipulation shit
yeah, those bitches can go back outside the walls of the compound see you later
You can't legislate against social pressure, is the thing. Civil liberty is necessary to protect us from the government, but you may have all sorts of restrictions on speech that are self-imposed or enforced by social pressure from family or from peers.
This goes back to "Freedom for what?"
We have to be free to say what we ought, even and especially when that is a harsh truth that the government doesn't want others to hear.
Wen "Golang Popes" community?
I need more of whatever this niche is 🔥
An overabundance of choice is a cognitive burden. Our brains tend to be bogged down by such tasks unless we have clearly defined criteria and goals set before we eye the possibilities.
And even with clear goals, the number of choices may still be overwhelming. Some number of options must be thrown out to reduce the range of choice to something manageable.
Yep.
How many kinds/brands of bread are on offer at you local supermarket like SafeWay?
More than I want to worry about.
Typically my wife shops at Aldi, which reduces prices by offering a more limited selection. Or when we need bread we just go to the in-store bakery at our local supermarket.
Similar with brands. If I know a brand is good, I'm more likely to stick with it just to avoid decision saturation.
As evidenced by me trying to buy #2 pencils on Amazon.
I hate shopping on Amazon for that exact reason 🤣
Good article, thanks for sharing, but I do find the analysis uneven.
Was the Gilded Age of violently-privileged megacorporations really implicit in Classical Liberalism - or was it rather the state-centered system monopolism and favouritism of the Old World belatedly finding an outward form that could inveigle itself into American culture?
And is Foucaultian perpetual self-creation really new, enforced and a threat to freedom, or is it merely the latest elite subculture of self-worship and narcissism such as aristocracies have always produced? And that wiser persons have always opted out of?
To the first point, I don't think the abuses of industrial-era capitalism were necessarily inevitable. However, it seems the author's thesis is that liberalism has, thus far, been flexible enough to respond to the socio-historical trends that it has faced, rather than be overwhelmed by them. Monopolies and abuse of laborers was simply the crisis that emerged as classical liberalism came to its maturity.
I would argue that monopolism and government favoritism are once again some of the primary challenges facing liberalism in our day; if there is a difference, it is that we are now dealing with these problems on a global, rather than national, scale.
The drive to perpetual self-creation described in the article has as many causes as there are authors. I'd contend it has as much to with the popular decline of religious belief as it does with economic factors or the fashionable intellectual trends of the elites.
Where I think the article is strongest is in identifying the challenges present-day liberalism faces, and in sketching some of the considerations we must account for if the liberal order is to be maintained in the face of such headwinds.