Decisions, decisions

Life occasionally presents us with difficult, seemingly impossible choices. We're forced by circumstance to choose between one form of agony and another. Get burned by fire or get frozen by cold. How do we make these decisions, and how responsible are we for their outcomes?

Let's say you are faced with a Sophie's Choice situation. You have two children, Child A and Child B, and you must decide which of them will live and which of them will die. What criteria do you use to make your decision? Do you simply flip a coin, and if so, does that absolve you of any responsibility for the choice? Do you try to approach it rationally, reasoning out which sacrifice would be the greater loss or which life would be the greatest gain for yourself or the world?

The way I see it, whatever way you go about making the choice, you are ultimately fully responsible for it. The death of one child falls squarely on your shoulders. However, the saving of one child's life falls there equally. It is your burden to bear. Does this sound unfair? After all, someone or something has placed you in this impossible situation. It isn't your fault, is it?

No, of course not. The fact that you are in such a situation is not your fault at all. However, the choice you make is entirely yours. Even if you refuse to make the choice, your abdication is on your shoulders. It matters not whether the situation was forced on you or you got yourself into it. What you do with the situation you are in is fully on you.

By what reasoning? By this: Your decision, whatever it is and however it is made, is a necessity for the carrying out of its consequences. Child A will be put to death only if you choose so, and Child B will live only if you choose so. Regardless of how you reached such a terrible crossroads, the journey forward is a choice you must make. It is a choice that you cannot escape, for every option has an outcome, and you are entering into this one knowing clearly what the outcomes are.

Let's try it with a somewhat less atrocious predicament. Imagine two young men, Zanzibar and Paco.

Zanzibar has grown up in a good neighborhood. His parents have a lot of money and sent him to the best schools. Though very bright, he did not apply himself very well and had mediocre grades. By virtue of his mother's connections, however he got into a good college. He graduated around the middle of his class. Due to his school's pedigree, however, he was able to land a well-paying job that required far less intelligence or knowledge than he had, allowing him to spend his days unchallenged.

Paco grew up in a slum. He was raised by a single mother, a drug addict, and had to help raise his two younger siblings. He was very smart, but his sense of duty to his family caused him to drop out of high school and take a job as a retail clerk. He was promoted to a supervisory position, but his lack of a college degree prevented him from promotion to management. Eventually, once his siblings were older, he took courses and was able to become a store manager.

Both men are now thirty years old. Zanzibar enjoys a cushy office job that pays well and has several rental properties inherited from his deceased parents. Paco is a retail store manager struggling to make ends meet. His younger brother still lives off him and cannot hold down a job. They share an apartment in the same neighborhood where they grew up.

How responsible is each man for his situation?

I say fully. Again, this may seem strikingly unfair. To clarify, neither man is responsible for the situation into which he was born. That is not a choice. But both men are fully responsible for what they have done with what they were given. Zanzibar certainly had many choices along the way that could have led to a variety of different outcomes, both better and worse. The same is true for Paco.

What a person does with what he is given is entirely up to him. The playing field is always uneven from the start. Those who refuse to improve their situations due to the very real unfairness into which they are born are fully responsible for what they become. Those who are handed a good situation and coast by are also fully responsible for what they become.

Life will continually place obstacles along the paths we carve out for ourselves. Unforeseen tragedies and unexpected prizes shape our lives in many ways. Each poses us with a question: how will you handle this? Our response is our own, and we must accept full responsibility for it. We surely make some mistakes and miscalculations. We intend one outcome and achieve another instead. It can be tempting to throw one's hands up, to quit on life. That is always an option. Each moment we are alive, we are choosing not only to continue living, but to do what we do with the lives we have.

Each of us has the option to stop playing the game at any time. It is fairly easy to simply stop. If we choose not to, however - if we choose to continue playing - we accept the rules of the singular game we have been invited to play. We may look around at others playing other games and think we'd rather be playing those games, but we have not been invited to those games. We can choose either the game to which we have been invited or no game at all. If we choose to play, we are responsible - fully responsible - for that choice.

I will continue this with my ideas on how to make difficult decisions in a later post.