On toxins, menus, and choices we did not design
There are clinics in almost every city and village now where a person can sit in a chair and have a toxin injected into their face on purpose. The same toxin behind botulism, purified, in a dose small enough to freeze a muscle without freezing a person. It takes ten minutes. It is called self care. Nobody is forced in. Nobody is stopped. And this, lads and gents, is what freedom looks like.
Freedom as the absence of a hand on your collar
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin split liberty in two. Negative liberty: nobody interferes with you. Positive liberty: you are actually the author of your own life. Ours is a culture that has become extremely good at the first and has thrown the other out of the window. Just like that. Basically If no one is holding your arm, you are free. Case closed. Whatever you do with your arm is your business, and any question about why you wanted to do it is treated as an insult.
But wanting is not a neutral thing that happens to neutral minds. And I tell you, nobody is ever born with a preference for a smooth forehead. The wrinkle is simply part of a face for as long as there have been faces, and then it became a problem, and then a market appeared to solve it. The order matters. First the lack is installed, then the choice is offered. And when the choice arrives already wrapped in the language of empowerment, saying yes feels like an incredible and powerful act of will.
We have seen this before
In 1929 a man named Edward Bernays, working for a tobacco company, arranged for a group of young women to light cigarettes in front of the press during New York’s Easter parade. The newspapers were told these were “torches of freedom.” Women smoking in public was not done at the time, so lighting up looked like liberation, and a product that had nothing to do with liberation was suddenly standing in its clothes.
Nobody was forced. That was the whole trick. You attach the product to something people already want, and then you step back and let them choose. Every woman who lit one up did it in her own eyes as a free act, and in a sense it was. I cannot read that story now without hearing the clinic in it.
A menu is always a menu
Whether you are free between just a few choices, nobody really seems to thinks about it.
The strange part is how sincere it all feels from the inside. Nobody experiences themselves as manipulated. Manipulation that works is invisible by design. What you feel is just a preference. I want this, I decided this, it’s my body, my truth..etcetera. All true. And still the question of where the wanting came from sits there, unasked, because asking it would mean the freedom was thinner than advertised.
Étienne de La Boétie wrote about this in the sixteenth century and called it « voluntary servitude ». Everyone seems to mentally grasp the concept these days. His point was that tyranny does not need chains once people begin to feed it themselves. Nothing in that has aged a single year however the modern version is friendlier. It has good lighting, a booking app, and a loyalty card.
I am not interested in shaming anyone in that chair, shaming is not the point and it never has been. People are tired. They look at their own face after a hard year of keeping up with all the bullshits we are constantly throw at and they do the best they can in their position.
What a free choice would need
If a choice is going to be called free, it should survive a few questions. Would I want this if no one had ever told me I was lacking it? Could I say no without paying for it socially? Do I know what is actually going into my body, and who benefits from my saying yes? What am I losing by doing this? Most of what we call freedom would wobble a little under those. I think wobble is the right word.
That last question is the one that never makes it onto the poster. Here the answer is almost embarrassingly literal. What gets switched off is movement, the small involuntary things a face does to tell the people around it what is going on inside. A forehead that cannot move cannot quite say worry, or surprise, or how tired you are. Maybe that is exactly the appeal. But it is worth noticing that the thing we pay to quiet is the thing that made us readable to each other. That, whether one likes it or not, makes us humans.
On the other side of the menu, the person who refuses what it displays is usually called strange, or extreme, or difficult. Refusing is the one choice that has to defend itself. If that is how it works, the menu was never really a menu.
I do not know how to end this one neatly, and I suspect that is the honest part. A freedom that has to keep being advertised to me makes me a little suspicious of it.
If my words and world touch you, you can
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