The Fetish of Choice: A Requiem for the Self

November 2020 

We are told, relentlessly told, that we are free because we can choose. Between Pepsi and Coke. Between left and right. Between the tinsel-strewn altar of tradition and the godless vacuum of modernity. This, we are assured, is liberty. This, we are taught to believe, is agency. But it is not liberty. It is theatre. Bread and circuses for the soul.

Scratch the surface of any such preference and what you’ll find is not freedom, but neurosis. The human mind, ever addicted to categorisation and conflict, cannot help but mistake its own compulsions for independence. Like a man shackled to a wheel who believes he’s taking a stroll, we call it choice when all we’re doing is spinning the dial of desire, dread, and delusion.

To prefer, we are told, is to be human. But to prefer is also to be enslaved, to outcomes, to appearances, to the fool’s errand of identity. What masquerades as a decision is often nothing more than the reflexive twitch of a mind conditioned to pick sides. And pick sides it must—lest it be thought unserious, or worse, undefined. Yet every side chosen is a side lost, a narrowing of perspective in the name of belonging.

This habit, this addiction to side-taking, has a long pedigree. One finds its shadow in every shrine, every border, every doctrine. East or West, mystic or rationalist, it is a collective affliction: the urge to construct a self out of preference, and then defend that self with holy fervour. But what if the self, the chooser, the striver, the anxious architect of allegiance-is-not is not a foundation, but a fabrication?

It is here that the great philosophical heresies begin. Not in denying God, but in denying the self that insists on choosing Him, or rejecting Him. What we call the "I" is less a sovereign entity than a sediment of thought: layered by memory, prejudice, mimicry, and fear. It is not that we think, therefore we are. It is that we think, and so we invent the one who thinks. A conjuring act. A bureaucrat in the mind, filing papers no one reads.

And thought, our cherished faculty, our Promethean flame betrays us too. For in its very brilliance it fragments, divides, and conquers. Good and evil, sacred and profane, self and other. In every noble dichotomy lies the seed of fanaticism. Even virtue, when claimed as a possession, becomes vice. Especially then.

One is reminded of Siddhartha, who tried on doctrine and decadence like costumes and found them all ill-fitting. His epiphany? That peace is not a matter of acquisition, but of abandonment. The river, unlike the preacher or the politician, does not choose. It flows. It does not cling to either bank. It moves, but it does not seek.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky poses a question that still haunts the dim corridors of Western conscience: if God is dead, is everything permitted? But perhaps this is the wrong inquiry. Perhaps belief and unbelief are both caught in the same snare the obsession with sides, with statements, with certainty.

It was T.S. Eliot who wrote of the still point of the turning world, where movement and rest are reconciled, where all is still yet nothing is static. But we are rarely still. We are perpetually voting, not just in polling booths but in our heads, where a referendum on the self is always underway. And the result, invariably, is more division.

“To be or not to be” is not a choice; it is the illusion of one. The real emancipation comes not from opting for “to be” over “not to be,” but from seeing that both are conceptual traps. The better path, it turns out, may be no path at all—just the quiet realization that there was never a maze to begin with, only the mind tracing its own reflection in the hall of mirrors.

True freedom is not found at the end of some dialectical tug-of-war. It lies before the war began. It requires no manifesto, no prayer, no position paper. Just the audacity to see that the chooser, the chosen, and the choice are all part of the same hallucination. When that vision clears, what remains is not belief, nor disbelief, but a raw and luminous awareness. Unbranded. Undivided. Free.

And that—more than any god, guru, or grievance is enough.