Choices & Freedom
Choices, what are they and how do they serve us? Is it true what they say about choices?
I started pondering upon this once again and decided to write a blog post about it with my thoughts on this. First I want to bring up a popular quote since that’s what started my pondering upon this.
They say “choice not circumstance, determines your success.” But that’s not true, your options limit or empower your success rate far more. Because we are not always given the options of our choice.
Lately, there are various videos and clips going around demonstrating how manipulation works. Then they continue the video with a fast build-up story with “facts” they give you and comparisons of their choice. They make it all sound very reasonable. They will bombard you with a number of truths of various sources and use those in one story to steer your thinking in a certain direction. With all the information they give you in such a short time you have little to no time to truly think and research if what they are saying is even comparable.
Now let me shine a different light on these tactics and tell you that while they are trying to convince you of how a certain people, organization, or whatever is trying to manipulate you, that THEY themselves, in fact, are trying to manipulate you at that very moment.
This video starts out with the person who has built up their presentation asking you to make a choice between two things. These can be circles, squares, or whatever item or shape. and they tell you that one of these items is bigger, rounder or more square than the other, and tell you to make a choice of which one of the two this is. Note that you are not given the choice to not make a choice and of course everyone or most will try to abide and do as they are told by the creator because we want to hear the end of his story, while in a real situation they may have decided to NOT make a choice and choose neither because we do have that option normally too.
The creator of the video then continues to tell you that the choice you made is wrong and tells you that in fact like you already thought, both the items are exactly the same size. that this is how manipulation works. Well. it is a very good example. That is very much a form of manipulation but what they do next, the summing up of all these true facts and the direction they steer you in is an even greater form of manipulation. Think about that.
To sum it up in short: We are given a story with facts and let them do the thinking for us throughout their whole presentation, telling us how the party of their choice is manipulating us, while in fact, that is exactly what they are doing at that very moment, manipulating you into thinking the other party is manipulating you.
Keep in mind three things: Just because part of what they tell you is true, doesn’t make the whole story they feed you truly, research and rethink what they are truly telling you and if the math they do for you in fact adds up because not always what sounds right, is right and lastly, you often, have another choice that they don’t always give you.
To get back to the start of my post, we are not always given the options we want to choose and that is not only in the above example. Real-life deals us these choices constantly. There have been situations where we had no option left then to break the law or go against the rules. Something which a lot of us don’t see even as an option because this may bring us in a situation that we are even further away from the option of our choice or the result that we aim for.
For example during the world war in Europe people had to make a choice between life and death. Often this meant we had to abide by something bad in order to stay alive. Neither of our choices would have determined our success rate because we didn’t reach what we wanted to reach. Understand that whatever is the law is not always just and the law is for sure not always on your side. And not always do we have the options we want to choose.
Sometimes choices are being made for us, without our consent or even without us knowing and having any control over this simply because we don’t control other people and we are all in one way or another depending on other people.
Whenever I start writing a blog post I seldom know at the beginning how and where it will lead me and this time that was the same thing. As I write my story forms and grows and sometimes completely goes into another direction than I originally had planned. I am okay with that, however that made this post longer then I had wanted to so I will conclude with one more quote, One I actually do stand behind to an extend.
“You are free to make the choices that you want but you are not free of the consequences of that choice.”
Thank you. Luna
