Choice

I was texting with a friend yesterday about the dumpster fire which is the end days of the Trump presidency.  He’s Canadian, one of the people whom I’ve desperately missed in the last year as the likelihood of an end to the border shutdown continues to recede into the mists of the future, so his perspective is a little different – but he’s an Albertan.  Keeping in mind that Alberta is the Texas of Canada, that means he leans a bit to the right in his politics.  That’s like saying San Antonio leans a little left in the political spectrum of Texas, though: just like even the Democrats in San Antonio carry concealed sidearms, the Tories in Alberta still love the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

We were trying to unpick the psyche of the real Trump supporters . We weren’t talking about the types of supporters who are bluntly cynical – the rich who want tax breaks, corporate managers whose jobs depend on the tax breaks, the health insurance industry employees whose jobs depend on ensuring the indefinite deferral of an intelligent health care system. And we weren’t interested in the lifer Republicans who might stay home if they really didn’t like a candidate, but they’d never cross the aisle. We also weren’t talking about the anti-abortion lobby or other single-issue voters; every electorate has people who are so blinkered (I’m talking to you, UKIP voters) that they seemingly can’t exhale without announcing their cause. No, this was about the people who just like Trump “because” – that enduring 30% of the American electorate that just hates all the folks who are keeping America down, whatever that means.

My friend’s theory is that Trump represents what he termed the “übermensch deplorable” – that is, he is the Zarathustra of that class of America that Hillary Clinton famously derided, the group that Barack Obama said clung fiercely to their Bibles and their guns.  There is much merit to this theory, I think.  There has been a tension between what used to be termed the establishment class and everyone else for a long time in American politics.  Whether I like it or not, I’m associated with that establishment; I went to Harvard, I’ve had a successful career, but more importantly I’m well read, reasonably well spoken, and I write with conviction and diction (albeit without adequate editing, to be sure).  Even though I’m from Maine, and grew up shoveling snow and delivering papers and stacking wood, and now once again live in Maine, where to get through the winter I’ll need to shovel snow and stack wood (the papers are all electronic these days), I’m still in the eyes of my neighbors one of the elites.

The tension in American politics is that our national myth – and to a lesser extent, our actual Constitution – says that all of us are created equal, and we shall be treated as equal under the law and in the field of commerce where we pursue our happiness.  That myth is revered especially by the disenfranchised, for whom the very existence of an “elite” is a direct affront.  Those elites – so think the non-elites looking from the outside – are drinking coffee and big smoking cigars (to quote Johnny Cash), are looking down on the rest of us, they don’t think of us as even being real human beings, real citizens, even though we fight their wars and operate their heavy machinery and serve them their coffee and burgers.  In that world, I think, my Albertan friend is right: despite his grasping wealth, Trump plays effectively as one of the masses of the non-elite.  He hates the elite as much if not more so than the oil rats in Louisiana or the Appalachian convenience store workers or the Nebraska ranchers who stand behind him.  Trump famously, desperately, insecurely wanted to be a part of the New York social glitterati, but he also knew that high society secretly or not so secretly despised him as a vulgar papier mâché version of an arriviste – or sorry: a gimcrack wedding crasher.  He hated the fact that they knew he was a fraud enabled by an even more despised but at least independently successful slumlord father.  The fact that Trump wears his casual and ingrained racism with ease, that he lets his appetites for fast food and sex and television rule his moral personality, just makes him that much more familiar to the non-elite and elite-hating strand of the American populace.

I was thinking about this in particular with respect to my parents and many of their friends.  They are “elite” in the sense they have college degrees, and enjoyed professional careers and enough financial success to be comfortable grandparents in retirement.  But they aren’t quite as “elite” as their children, who (because of the very success of their parents) attended costlier name brand universities, got jobs in the knowledge economy (and not just in marketing!) – indeed, the pride of many of my parents’ circle is the fact that they have raised so many newly emergent elite children despite coming from far more humble roots themselves.  They dislike the casual arrogance of the elites in the same way I can’t stand Susan Sontag.  

This elite isn’t the thoughtlessly arrogant aristocracy of pre-war Britain. No, these are the insecure American elites, who know all too well that their grip is fragile in the best of times. They desire glamour and recognition, but don’t want to show it and, ironically, end up being that much more gratingly offensive. They have much the same insecurity that Trump has but with better manners – to use The Philadelphia Story as the core American morality play, they are the Tracy Lords of the world. Such people see it as part of the means of being recognized that others must be shown to be common or mediocre or less than human.  It’s the Nietzsche-Ayn Rand thing, exemplified by the New York Times and The Guardian on the left but just as much by Globe and Mail and The Times of London on the right.  

Meanwhile, Trump – and his core Trumpian supporters – are very much of the George Kittridge variety. In the movie, George is a coal mine owner who has earned his way into what he thinks is a right to be part of the upper class, but the elite disdain him as they view class as being something more than simply money. The Kitteridge crowd is viewed as deplorable by the Lords and the C.K. Dexter Havens of Philadelphia, much as the common and traditionalist middle class is so viewed by many of the elites of today – again, the deplorables clinging to their Bibles and their guns of Obama’s disdain, the “48% of the population who are takers” to use Romney’s diagram. My parents are not “deplorable”, though; they don’t own a gun and never would really think to do so, and while they are definitely Christian, they are thoughtfully so, and reject the knee-jerk faith of Christians who claim to know Christ and proceed to ignore everything he says.  They teach a language of love that would seem like hippie garbage to the average MAGA cap wearing Trump revival show attendee; indeed, the idea of wearing a MAGA cap fills my parents and their community with disgust. But they are also unrecognizable to the global knowledge economy elite, who view their concerns as trivial and backward.

So while I think the “lord savior of the deplorables” theory has real merit, there’s something else that’s supplying the 46% of the voters who went for the guy who looks like a Cheeto in a baggy suit.  My theory is that it comes down to choice: there is a decent slice of modern Western society that has reached its limit on being given choices as citizens and as human beings, and simply wants to be told what to do.  There are simply too many of these damn choices, and every time something new is offered as a choice, lingering in the background is a new vector of accountability for making a “good” choice, if not the “right” choice, and that accountability is exhausting.  Surely, these votes think, someone will come around and just make the choices for me, and take me off the hook for having to reason for myself what the right choice is.  That’s the guy, they think, that I’ll vote for.  And Trump, with his narcissistic ability to deny any possibility that anything he does could ever be wrong, and his deep insecurities which allow him to gleefully terminate anyone who might challenge him, is the right-enough man for the job, especially compared to the alternatives offered from the left.

My theory of – let’s call it for what it is – the persistent appeal of the fascist leader is not just American, though.  You see it in the appeal of Boris Johnson in Britain, in Marie le Pen in France, in Berlusconi in Italy, Putin, Xi Jinping, Bolsonario, all the identikit centre-right autocrats in Eastern Europe… you name it.  Only a few of those have anything in common with Trump, really – all are a little comic, I suppose, in the way that their all-encompassing selfishness allows for satire to have a field day – but they all appeal to societies which, like all of humanity these days, have become overwhelmed by possibility, overwhelmed by choice.  They offer comfort to that part of an electorate that doesn’t want to choose, and doesn’t really understand why the choices on offer are worth fighting for or legislating in the first place.

I find this fascinating, because the project of humanity since we emerged from the fog of intellectual and moral self-awareness could rather easily be distilled into a narrative of increasing choice.  Indeed, the very concept of choice as we define it is uniquely human: choice is not instinctive, it is considered.  It may not be well-reasoned but it is thought out; it by definition allows for the construction of accountability because we had an opportunity (whether we exercised the opportunity or not) to make a difference choice in the moment of choosing.  We don’t ascribe that to animals, generally speaking – and indeed, a lot of our own “choices” likely come down to habits that have been ingrained in us by training or discipline – but I don’t know of any literate civilization that doesn’t place the concept of conscious choice at the centre of what it means to be human.

One can imagine, though, that the historical construction of choice would have been a fraught process.  We can see this in the evolution of our myths, especially our creation myths.  Older traditions usually impose a rigid set of orders endowed by the creators or the Creator that “must be”, which enable the society to justify things like slavery, gender roles, family structures, political elites, you name it.  As the world has grown and changed, the creation myths have either become less and less relevant – Christians and Jews still read Genesis, but very few of them cite it as justification for returning to slavery despite its clear endorsement of the practice – or else they have migrated to modernity’s creation myth narrative, that of the various Darwinian evolutionary theories. It’s not just that evolution required the HMS Beagle and its staff naturalist to come about; it’s that humanity couldn’t have emerged into self-awareness, into a world which it couldn’t possibly initially comprehend on its own terms, without first trying to put some order around things.

Let’s at least give this thought experiment a try. You’re a human being living in Anatolia roughly 10,000 years ago.  You have a language which allows you to navigate the natural world and to work with other humans in your community, and to express emotions like love for your child or your parent or your sibling, like hate or fear of the other or of beasts in the dark.  You have all of the curiosity and the emotional capacity of you and I today, but a much more limited ability in terms of tools to express it – you can create tools, though, and you have some ability to try to show others how your new tools work and how they might use them.  Nothing permanent, mind you – it all will come down to stories, told in this far simpler language with far simpler word-tools.

Oh, and you’re constantly faced with the possibility of death and hunger.  Our understanding of the physical environment 10,000 years ago seems to indicate that it had greater available resources at hand than the monocultures we’ve created today, but those early humans still didn’t have the ability to transfer resources through time through things like physical or virtual storage.  That means at any time, you had plenty, but only a few months later it could – could even be expected to – flip and change into famine.  Your concept of time would be limited to day and night, cycled regularly but without frames, and to seasons of the year – maybe not even the latter if instead of in Anatolia you found yourself in equatorial Africa or Brazil. 

Fundamentally, you would have had a lot of choices to make – but it probably wouldn’t have felt like it, and in terms we would use today, you probably weren’t really making a lot of choices.  Indeed, most of your choices would have probably just been instinct – you would have been trained (not taught with intention, but trained like one would train a dog) to do X when Y happens.  You would not have been acting in a considered way, because that’s the nature of “choices” in a world which doesn’t have intellectual context and which represents primal existential threat at all times.  You would have had the capacity to reflect on what you’re doing – indeed, that’s the fundamentally human thing about your mind, the big recursive, self-aware spark which seems to separate humans from even other sentient animals like dolphins and dogs and chimpanzees – but reflection would have taken place only after the fact, and potentially not at all, given that the requirements of survival in an environment beyond comprehension, let along susceptible to conscious intervention, would have meant that you wouldn’t have had a lot of time to sit around and think about things.  

You would have had some time, though, and in those times you’d have been most likely first thinking about what will be most helpful for survival and, with luck, a little more than survival.  You may have turned yourself to devising some extra security, both from the environment and from other smart people who are trying to do the same.  You may have thought about what would explain weather cycles, say, and what signals might exist which will make it easier to avoid the next torrential rain or wintry cold – or at least gather wood and berries and kill the rabbit and deer such that it will be easier to survive that next bout of weather.  You would likely have reflected on past actions and think about whether they worked or not, and if they didn’t, what alternatives might have been possible to have done better.  

The nature of those reflections, though, in a world with a high degree of mortality risk at all times, is that those that survive will naturally think what they “did” was right, and those that don’t won’t be around to reflect on how they could have improved their choices the next time.  Such a world is therefore subject to a particularly acute form of survivor bias.  Those that die are unable to offer their wisdom forward, and those that survive will be reinforced that their “choices” are not just good, but right, correct, and will thus stop making “choices” in the future (a choice being a considered selection of one alternative among multiple equally viable options) and will simply act on instinct (instinct being a reflexive linear response to an input).  

Taking this as a starting point, one can understand how it would take a good ten millennia to reach the point where real, actual reasoned choice would come to a tipping point and start to dominate our daily life.  Think about it: with high mortality and low intertemporal transfer mechanisms, the massive survivor bias inherent in such a human information system will limit the development of any real choice mechanisms, and in fact would bias the creation of non-choice systems, in which passed-down traditional knowledge would be accepted as fact and as unchanging and unchangeable.  Because of the self-aware and recursive nature of human beings, there would be some slow development of concepts of choice, but it could only be slow as it would rely on individuals not only reflecting and developing mechanisms of active choice, but having them survive and train others, which would be enormously slow until the development of better intertemporal transfer mechanism.  

Language would be first such mechanism, of course; spoken language would have to evolve complexity but do so only through the slow creation of words, verb forms, time expressions and tenses, declensions and conjugations, which can only be done across groups even though the neologisms will by definition be only thought of by individuals (who may die at any moment before their innovation can catch).  It seems as though value mechanisms – endowed physical objects which would evolve into money and art – were next, or perhaps concurrent, as you can endow a natural object with value without any real technology being required.  Food storage would come around at some point – both actual storage, building vessels which can keep food edible for extended periods of time, and virtual storage, through domesticating animals to “store” energy in the form of meat and milk for use in the future – and this would start to lessen the mortality curve.  Written language would seem to have been next, and once it exists with some modest refinement, now the acceleration can really begin, because then our innovations can be stored across time – they can be transmitted even without needing to find someone immediately to tell them to before we get killed or die. 

But all of these wouldn’t really lead to a revolution in choice making.  For that to happen, people would need to start to see the potential for multiple viable alternatives in decisions which had in the past been subject to instinctive training.  That, too, would take time, and would involve an assertion of the possibility of choice in areas which previously had not been so subject.  Privilege being an inherently conservative social construct, such assertions would by nature be resisted by those for whom alternative choices would disrupt existing structural outcomes.  Little by little, it would probably erode, but what I think we’ve seen is that only the development of massive new technologies of energy and information transfer made sustainable the meaningful erosion of social privilege structures.

Reasoned choice allows for people to exist more fully as individuals – they become defined not by their place within a structured society but by their own self-constructed framework of choice.  If one values other individuals as one values oneself, then this is a good (although there is a counterargument made in a number of philosophical traditions that even as one value other individuals as one values oneself, all individuals have a responsibility towards a larger collective good, and thus must be willing to sacrifice some or all of what makes one a valued individual towards that good – that’s a topic for another essay).  It makes for a more complex society but also a society capable of faster learning and faster responses to change – because the mechanisms by which society maintains itself are themselves dependent on the choices of its constituent members, who are each capable of reasoned choice in new directions at any time.  That is the promise of a constitutional democracy which is made up of citizens who are capable of making reasoned choices, where the legal framework is a kind of information storage device which stores the accumulated choices of what is right and what is good (and their opposites), and which allows for modification through the reasoned decisions of its members.

I think this is a viable narrative for the rise of reasoned choice in human societies, and the reason for the emergent success of constitutional or parliamentary democracy.  It also gives us a reasonable explanation for why such a political society would have taken so long to evolve successfully.  What it doesn’t explain is why we find ourselves in 2020 facing not so much the consequences of an acute, mild, but globally widespread pandemic (compared, say, to cholera, local but severe until treatments evolved, or AIDS, which was chronic but severe until treatments evolved) as we are facing a crisis of choice.  A substantial number of the citizenry of many of the advanced parliamentary or constitutional democracies are choosing to elect and support individuals who wish to limit or even substantially eliminate vast swathes of choice “spaces” in areas such as gender and sexuality, and who wish to reverse the trend towards universal education, health care, and access to economic resources which for more than two centuries been expanding the subset of those humans who are “capable of reasoned choice to women, historically oppressed minorities, and racial groups beyond those who have historically dominated access to power.

As noted above, the spread of the possibility of choice to new realms will inevitably bring those who recognize such possibility into conflict with those who have benefited, even indirectly, from the maintenance of structures which otherwise make such “choice” instinctive and unreflective.  I say indirectly here because in some areas of choice, the benefit isn’t an actual tangible or even value benefit.  Take, for example, citizenship – societies developed “citizenship” as a legal extension of “inclusion within the tribe”.  Many countries still associate “citizenship” with a vague kind of idea of either historical attachment to the land (that is, being born in a given physical location), or an actual concept of bloodline (think of Germany, which allows those whose grandparents migrated from Germany to immediately become German citizens upon application).  In a highly mobile world, though, it could strike you that citizenship should be choice based: if I want to be Irish, or French, or Canadian, shouldn’t I just be able to move there and assert it?  Sure, there will be some taxes, and fees, and new laws and rules and cultural norms like being required to wear pants in public, but just because you were born in France doesn’t mean you have any unique right to “citizenship”.  After all, Frenchie, in a world of choice-based citizenship, you could always move to Quebec or St. Morinville and I’m sure you’d love it – hey, lower taxes and better TV!

In addition, a choice-based citizenship regime would likely benefit most countries because their citizenry would be more likely to be civic-minded if it had been their choice to become a citizen in the first place, instead of just a passive gift attached to birth.  Or, for that matter, a passive curse – it’s been well noted that the most fertile breeding ground for terrorists is among the children of Muslim immigrants to France.  They got stuck in France, whether they like it or not, and thus feel an active distaste for a citizenship they would just as soon as reject.  

And yet citizenship – immigration issues – are powerful motivators for those who seek to eliminate political choice.  Those who actively choose citizenship (via immigration and naturalisation) are inherently suspect, because the act of exercising choice upends the traditionalist notion of what citizenship is – at least, in the rhetoric of the politician seeking to wield it as a weapon.  In fact, making citizenship a choice focuses attention on what it is.  The act of choosing to be part of a different polity in a different place actually turns the mirror around, from the immigrant to the passive citizen by birth, and implicitly forces a question: why do you choose to be here?  

That, indeed, is the “power” of choice – it’s not the power to make a choice for oneself, because it’s non-sensical to “exercise power over me”.  “Exercising power over me” is the existential state, and I only cease to do so when I die.  Even when others are using force against me in an attempt to make me exercise my power over me in a manner of their preference, I still have a choice.  No, the power inherent in choice is the power to force others to ask why they have made the choice they have about their own state.

That power is often minimized: after all, how much “power” really existed among dissidents in Stalin’s Russia, who would just get shot and buried and forgotten?  Today, Stalin is returning to the favor in the memory of Russia – even among those whom he sent to the Gulag.  But ironically, Stalin understood this dynamic of the power of choice incredibly well – that is indeed why he tried to kill all the dissidents, why he tried to eliminate anyone who showed the capacity for choice.  It was also what Beria and Khrushchev and others realized when they tried to make any of their own decisions look like they had, in fact, been ordered by Stalin.  Fascism is a doctrine of the elimination of choice.

And there are, oddly, a lot of people who don’t want to be offered choices – or at least, not nearly so many as are on offer in the 21st century.  They don’t want to select citizenship, or their career, or whether or not to get married, or how to stay married or to get a divorce.  Many people – many people I know personally – simply want a selection of material choices of what to wear, drive, or eat, but basically wish to have the existential decisions made for them by a knowing expert or, even better, by traditions and customs which are considered inviolable because they are endowed with sacred force.  Having embarked on that thought exercise from earlier in contemplation of how this could come about, I’ve come to realize that they are not afraid, and they are not lazy – they are in fact deeply and anciently human, their emotive wish for certainty being a bell ringing from a time where choice was only luxury, and tradition was all that was possible in a world of direct threats and with time only for survival. Do that as a society – or tribe, or collectivity, or nation, or empire, or the combination of all of those across a small planet – for enough millennia, and it just feels natural – it’s intuition. Not choice, that is – it’s an intuition that is almost impossible to overcome, even when exercising the power of your reasoning, self-aware, recursive mind.

Moreover, they are right when they reflect upon the undesirability of the accountabilities that attach to acknowledging that choices exist in one’s life.  It is not fun to realize you have made poor decisions, including big decisions.  It’s even harder to realise that by blindly running along doing what tradition and the adults who raised you told you to do, you made a decision and lost the future ability to find alternatives to your current state.  It’s even more annoying to realize that your success was actually due to your deciding to take advantage of traditional exploitation of others, not simply your own pluck and determination.  But that accountability stares you in the face when others point out to you the existence of alternative choices.

One final observation about the historical narrative of choice as an existential state.  I don’t think there’s any accident for what kind of choices evolved and in what order.  The first arena of choice was with respect to what we do – fundamentally, do we accept slavery, or do we accept freedom of contract and of association?  Different polities have found different ways towards the latter, although the journey is not over in much of the world.  The second arena, though, is more fraught: it is a choice of who we are.  Fundamentally, it asks us to define ourselves – and to take responsibility for our choices – or demands that we face as human beings that we accept that are we vessels which are defined by others.

This latter journey, of viewing our identity as an independent choice, is newer for all of us – no society really accepts, yet, that we should define who we are as individuals with comprehensive choice, and even those that are moving in that direction often rebel against the personal accountability that such a regime demands.  What I see in Western populism today is both a confused rejection of the value of that scope of choice, but also a well-placed frustration with the reluctance to accept the consequences of such personal choice by those who demand it.  

Thus the “elites” create their own target.  I mentioned earlier that many who are grouped in with the elites are themselves often disenfranchised politically and economically.  But just as those who are reluctant to see choice as a good create an opening to be exploited by authoritarian leaders, so do those who embrace choice create an opening for those who see no responsibility for the wider world.  Think of companies who avoid taxes ruthlessly, and whose leaders move money offshore or into tax-sheltered trusts to avoid helping society elevate itself more broadly.  Think of the Internet companies who have turned privacy into an obstacle, and whose profits are based on data taken without fair exchange.  Think of the neo-liberal wave of the 1990s which applied libertarian principles without the protection of the rule of law across the emerging and post-Soviet worlds.

By pretending that choice exists in the absence of accountability, those exploitative elites give validity to the fears of those who see choice as unnecessary.  In a narrow sense, actually, those who have such fears are right: choice without accountability is unnecessary, indeed it is dangerous because it perverts the learning process that choice is supposed to create.  Accountability is the reward mechanism that teaches us what a good choice is while simultaneously punishing us for bad choices and, in so doing, signals the nature of the choice.  

To return to The Philadelphia Story: the very 1930s element of the script – the play was written in 1930, and the movie made in 1940, that strange limbo in the United States between fascism being an active existential threat and the country actually recognising it as such and joining the fight against it – is C.K. Dexter Haven, Cary Grant’s part in the farce. C.K. is rejected by Tracy Lord as a drunk, and he takes their sailboat and abandons her. And eventually, offscreen in back story, he takes responsibility; he cleans up, gets himself roughly together, and when the Lord family is threatened by scandal, he makes sure everything works out well. Including, for that matter, that Tracy Lord recognise her own responsibility for everything, from the divorce, to luring in the deplorable coal mine owner, to the farce itself. The only truly sympathetic characters in the film, indeed, are C.K Dexter Haven, a drunk; Uncle Willie, who is a willing abler and abetter of the farce, also a drunk; and the ace reporters who willingly let their scoop fall apart and acknowledge that while they may have a call on the elite due to their status as knowledge workers, they don’t actually want to be a part of it. In other words – the characters who know best both accept responsibility, think about their choices, and drink – are the ones who merit our moral sympathy as modern human beings, who are capable of choice, who are self-aware, recursive, and accountable. The ones who don’t – Tracy Lord, who needs to be coerced into acknowledging her responsibility; Kitteridge, who simply demands to be included among the elite purely due to his financial success; and the Lord family more broadly, who only wish to maintain their privilege – are all more or less truly deplorable. None of them, it should be noted, can hold their liquor, either.

There are several reasons The Philadelphia Story is one of my favourite films of all time. The ranking those reasons by importance changes through time. Ahem.

In any event, I don’t think my Canadian friend and I are that far apart.  My view, basically, is that the populist wave in the West broadly consists of people who are uncomfortable with the grinding evolution of humanity’s existential choices, their inexorable expansion in number and in scope with respect to our existence as individuals, collectively as a society, and broadly as part of a limited planet.  I don’t think he disagrees with me. 

Where I think he’s gotten it right is in the extension or corollary to this theory.  A lot of people don’t like the accountability that comes with acknowledging the full range of choices we have as human beings in 2020, and they are tired of having those choices reflected constantly on them by people who are electing to make conscious, reasoned decisions which diverge from traditional norms – and who then aren’t held accountable for the impact their choices create.

Then, along comes a guy with absolutely no regard for the elites.  He makes little effort to hold them accountable – indeed in many cases he’s relying on their tools for his own path to power – but he’s completely willing to disregard them whenever he doesn’t get what he wants.  That’s deeply satisfying for that part of society which has felt powerless in the face of being given choices that they never thought they asked for – and the fact that they are now aware the choices exist makes their lives even worse because they are becoming aware of their own failure to exercise their own agency as individuals.  Would you vote for that guy, even if he’d be leering at your daughter and telling your wife she’s ugly?  Even though he’s making bank – or in his case, avoiding foreclosure on his real estate empire – only because of your vote?  Hell yeah, I’d also buy him a cheeseburger for good measure, and he even looks good in a baseball cap!  Boo yah!

Insert nationally-appropriate end questions, food item, attire, and celebratory yell for your country as appropriate.  Then enter the ballot box, mark your selection, and pull the lever.  But remind yourself: whether you like it or not, you are accountable for the choices you make.