Coming into college almost two years ago, I was terrified of not doing things the right way. I believed that there was a strict set of things that I absolutely must study and absolutely must do if my life was to turn out well. Like many of my peers, I did not know what I wanted to major in and spent my first three semesters considering different subjects. I tried all the fields that my parents (and society at large) considered most lucrative until I finally came to accept that my heart was simply not in them. In high school I had a similar mindset, feeling like there were boxes that I absolutely had to check, whether I had any interest in them or not, to get into college. Given the competitive nature of WashU’s admissions, many people here have likely had similar experiences. My experience has led me to realize something that philosopher John Stuart Mill expresses well: the importance of making decisions for yourself.
Some 160 years ago in On Liberty, Mill sought to understand to what extent society — not the government but the force of public opinion — should control our freedoms. This question has only become more important since he was writing. With the rise of the internet, public opinion has become inescapable. You could easily spend a lifetime reading comment after comment on social media. Now-common attempts to cancel people from both sides of the aisle have created widespread controversy. The public mind is powerful and far reaching; it is easier to be driven by it now more than ever, whether we do so consciously or not.
Mill’s argument is that people’s freedom should not be interfered with except to prevent harm to others. The details of what exactly constitutes a harm are less important than why he believes this to be the case. His claim is straightforward: this is what maximizes total happiness. It is only by being able to make decisions for ourselves that we develop the skill of making good decisions and become human in the best sense, rather than simple machines. There’s nothing to say that our decisions are better than what our parents or friends may wish of us nor that we shouldn’t consider their advice, but the point stands: we can learn to make the best decisions in the long run, something that the whole world benefits from, only by actually making decisions for ourselves.
This year we have witnessed a slow emergence from the haze of the pandemic, where the countless rules that have regulated our decisions to the extreme have been fading away. We have escaped the confinement of Zoom to enjoy the countless freedoms, events, and groups that exist at WashU. Amidst these new decisions we face, and the old ones that persist, it is easy to become paralyzed with all the different competing attitudes that hover over us: from our parents, friends, different social media platforms, and what we believe employers will desire. It may be easy to be stifled and go down the narrow path that we believe will be accepted by these groups, not because we reflected and chose it ourselves but out of fear. But things do not always end up as planned, and in doing this without reflection we would rob ourselves of a great skill that we could share in every situation: that of critically making choices.
Reference: On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, by John Stuart Mill. Oxford University Press, 2015.