Hedonism is the opposite of Freedom.
There are many ideas out there as to what constitutes “freedom”.
Even though I am of the highest conviction that the notion of “free will”, as it is usually being presented, is essentially an oxymoron, I do recognize that, as a feeling, there are some behaviors and ways of being in the world that feel more free than others:
a muzzled dog seems less free than an unmuzzled dog, a caged bird seems less free than an uncaged one, a person with a broken arm seems freer than an amputee, the rich seem freer than the poor, the sick seem less free than the healthy and so on.
I think it is pretty intuitive that those states which we perceive as “free” are exactly the ones in which we recognize many affordances, i.e. many potential ways of acting; the more potential courses of action one recognizes, the freer we would expect one to feel*. Another way to put it is that you feel “free” when you see your future as “open”: a person paralyzed from the waist down has a chunk of all futures inaccessible to them (“closed”), namely, those futures that involve some form of walking regardless whether they would want to walk or not and therefore at least part of their perceived freedom is curtailed.
*- I am well aware of the so-called “paradox of choice”, but the above observation is not about one’s sense of wellbeing.
It is indeed very possible that one’s own perception of “freedom” would feel overwhelming due to an accompanying increased sense of responsibility, increase in the time it takes to choose à la Hick’s law, a sense of FOMO, regret and “what-if-ism” regarding the options that remained unselected and/or other forms of paralysis by analysis, but I doubt people actually feel less free when they are aware of more potential ways for the future to unfold as long as they believe they, as unique individuals, are the ultimate source of their actions. It is probably both the case that “freedom” and “satisfaction” are correlated up to a point and then break apart as you try to maximize one of them, and that one’s sense of freedom rapidly grows and quickly reaches an asymptote as a function of the number of options one has.
“Hedonism” is, the way I would define it, an overindulgence in short term gratification. It is a way of being that focuses on satisfaction for satisfaction’s sake, extreme minimization and/or avoidance of discomfort (and not just of suffering) and very often revolves around satisfying one’s physical urges (capricious as they may be); habitually and repeatedly inducing pleasant, fleeting, corporeal sensations such as orgasms, intoxication, adrenaline thrills and savoring of food.
Somewhat surprisingly, it is common both online and IRL to encounter statements like “people should be free to engage in activities they enjoy, even if those are bad for them”, especially when discussing prohibition of addictive and detrimental products such as cigarettes, alcohol, weed and adult content. Putting aside the fact that, unless you are a hermit, we do not live in a vacuum and that actions like smoking harm one’s environment in the form of second- and thirdhand smoking (and other, even more indirect forms), there is a deeper point here that I think deserves attention.
How free is an addict?-
Imagine two individuals 𝒜,ℬ and a very intense, highly addictive drug 𝕯 that comes with mostly irreversible side effects of cognitive impairment, behavioral changes and other health problems.
𝒜 avoids ever coming in contact with 𝕯 and, while he achieves a version of his goals, finds joy in other things life has to offer (books, board games, friends, sport, etc.) and pursues his hobbies, he never experiences in a single moment the same amount of euphoria as he would have experienced if he would have taken 𝕯, at least until building tolerance and getting hit by the side effects.
On the other hand, ℬ takes 𝕯 on a regular basis and, up to the point of building tolerance, has experienced massive euphoria-like gratification multiple times, but has neglected all other activities, never explores the facets of life in their entirety, never tries out something challenging (learning a language, acquiring a technical skill and so on) and could not have completely stopped taking it even if she wanted to.
Which one would you say is more free?
If we consider the conceptualization of freedom offered earlier, we ought to say that since 𝒜’s future is far more “open” than ℬ’s (he explores most of life’s affordances, avoiding the highly-addictive ones even if they are also highly-euphoric), then he is also freer than she is. 𝒜 can decide to try new things, learn, grow and change, whereas not only will ℬ likely never (since she is unlikely to choose actions that conflict with having access to 𝕯), but her future will also “diminish” even further due to the accumulation of side effects, especially the cognitive ones (the more impaired her cognition gets, the fewer affordances she will be able to recognize). The fact that 𝕯 can, in the short term, induce intense euphoria-like states is a red herring;
(★) momentary satisfaction, as intense as it may be, is not a reliable indicator of freedom.
Putting it all together, addiction can not possibly be a form of freedom. In fact, it is much more akin to captivity, albeit an invisible one.
The addict has huge chunks of their possible futures being gradually eroded due to their ever-growing inability to choose actions that do not end up in them engaging time and again with the object of their addiction (in the case of drugs such as marijuana, there is also substantial damage to one’s cognition, which makes matters worse by corrupting one’s ability to pick up affordances and having a sound judgement in general). This makes addicts some of the least free people in the entirety of society (maybe except individuals with locked-in syndrome or other severe cognitive disorders), since almost every choice they make revolves around maintaining and/or increasing access to the object of their addiction.
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Stating “people should be free to choose to become an addict” is very bizarre, if not even downright self-defeating; it is almost equivalent to the statement “people should be free to become less free” (meaning, have the option to limit their future options), but completely ignores the entire causal chain that brings a person to become an addict:
Someone who is lousy at basketball and never particularly cared about the fact they are bad at it, will be led as a result, semi-automatically, to focus their time, energy and money on other things they do have an inclination for, all of which “prune off” more and more “branches” of possible futures in which they do anything basketball-related. This “pruning” is a natural, healthy result of letting one’s personality unfold as one learns more about the world and themselves. The key differences to the addict’s causal history being:
• At no point have they, the non-basketballers, started consuming a well-known cognition-destroying, personality-altering substance that was specifically engineered on purpose to make them hooked
• Their habits, hobbies and other regular activities did not arise out of “akrasia” or distress when faced with life’s “normal” stressors
• They did not choose their hobbies (and relinquished other activities) as a result of peer pressure as is so often the case with cigarettes, vapes, alcohol and the like
• They could, at least theoretically, try and pick up the thing they have omitted from their life if they wanted to (which, admittedly, they might never do)
• “Sacrificing” basketball-related futures is balanced out by opening up other possible futures that contain more of the things they do care about
We should call all products that fall under “marketable vices”, legal or otherwise, what they really are: traps.
By claiming that “people should be free (from state and/or social intervention) to consume dangerous, addictive products”, you are essentially saying that the environment should not intervene when someone walks into a well-known trap, which is exactly what addiction is: a trap for one’s future.
While not identical, the common phrase from earlier of “people should be free to engage in activities they enjoy, even if those are bad for them”, when used as a blanket statement every time one raises risks to public health, conflates:
1. cases in which an individual occasionally engages in something dangerous out of a sober cost-benefit analysis that results in them accepting some risk for the chance of having a unique experience, joy, excitement or accomplishing some achievement (or at times, it is being done out of necessity); examples might include skydiving, bungee jumping or even just driving a car or flirting with a stranger.
2. cases where the individual’s reward-circuitry has been overwritten by whatever it is that has initiated a pathological, addiction-like, frequent interaction with some object or activity. The individual then repeatedly engages in risk out of an addled rationalization that forces them to keep engaging with said object of addiction even long after the negative side effects outweigh any pleasant sensation they might have felt at some point. The “free” decision to maintain their pathological relationship can then only barely be called a “decision” at all.
Addicts are slaves to their own pathological reward-circuitry, having their possible futures which do not contain the object of their addiction being pruned off, and if they could undo their addiction, they would.
Hedonism IS an addiction-
Now, how does this tie back to hedonism?
Well, the hedonist might not have discrete, ostensive objects of addiction (cigarettes, alcohol, etc.), but they, as those with an “ostensive addiction”, can not overcome a pathological urge, which in this case is their own many small whims: If an urge arises, the hedonist is compelled to satisfy it and if discomfort arises, the hedonist is compelled to avoid it. The hedonist’s addiction is “fractured” across their many desires and disengagements from challenges and/or hardships. To put it differently:
(★) A hedonist is addicted to effortless gratification.
It should be clear that the future of the hedonist is limited; they can not choose challenging actions, actions that require a longer amount of time to unfold, actions that do not obviously end up with reward in the form of corporeal sensations (satiation, orgasm, etc.), actions that entail some amount of enduring pain, nor can they just “flip a switch” and decide to stop putting so much emphasis on and give so much value to easy, “cheap” and fleeting satisfactions.
This can be semi-formally proved by defining “plan” as “a list of actions one takes to achieve a specific set of goals” and realizing that if N>n, then there are more plans with N steps than plans with n steps (if you do not find this obvious, just imagine that for each 3-step plan, you can generate a 7-step plan that is an exact copy of the 3-step version with 4 arbitrary extra steps). This means that all goals that require more than some threshold Mₕ number of steps (the value of which depends on the individual) to be accomplished are beyond the hedonist’s reach including those that the hedonist might actually be interested in if they would have been given an easy, effortless access to them. Those possible futures that contain achievements, experiences, skills, knowledge, relationships and other things life has to offer that require more than Mₕ steps to obtain are all “closed” to the hedonist with many of them probably being beyond what they can even conceive of from a <Mₕ “vantage point”. If it were possible to “dehedonisify” someone and, as a result, they were able to achieve more of the things they want, would it then not be obvious that a limitation to their freedom has been lifted? Acting on every short-term whim, gratification-seeking, hyper-avoidance of discomfort and an overemphasis on pleasant corporeal sensations are obstacles to one’s freedom and not its enablers.
Conclusion-
“Freedom” is a subjective sensation that highly depends on the individual, their personal history, their immediate environment and the situational context they happen to find themselves in.
Nonetheless, it seems like a useful and reasonable conceptualization of the situations in which most people feel free is something along the lines of “possibility” and/or “actionability”; the scenarios in which most people feel free are those rich in options, in courses of action and/or in the affordances the individual can pick up. A cornucopia of possible paths to choose from is not a trivial thing, since one could easily find themselves in circumstances where a handful of decisions (or sometimes even just one) end up essentially destroying one’s future (or at the very least “closing off” many potential paths) with one such example being addiction. Most addictions are ostensive in the sense that you can point to the thing with which the addict has a pathological relationship (drugs, food, etc.), but some are “fractured” and spread across the entire way of being of the individual with “hedonism” being a prime example:
Almost every small whim must be satisfied and almost every level of discomfort must be avoided. However, there also seems to be a genuine sentiment many people have, where “extreme freedom” (in the sense of not limiting the options people have, usually in the context of law and social norms) is always desirable, even if the price to be paid is individuals’ possible futures and everything between not living up to one’s potential (as is the case with the lethargic hedonist) to immense suffering (as exemplified by the drug addict). Imagine how extrapolating an “everything-goes-society” that not only enables, but also encourages radical hedonism and other forms of addiction to its most extreme consequences might look like:
• all humans are a fixed number of brains in vats that receive direct stimulation to their reward system
• a world in which all tasks have been outsourced to robots including satisfying everyone’s needs, doing all labor, creating all forms of art and generating new knowledge, which evidently works when implemented as new tech, but is beyond anyone’s comprehension
• a society in which everyone binges copious amounts of food and always stays idle, but constantly takes pills to minimize negative side effects (both physical and psychological)
• a civilization where no one has friends and no one procreates since entertainment is so captivating, leading to an eventual extinction
• a world where everyone abuses, manipulates, vandalizes and harms each other on a moment’s whim, but regularly wipes clean all negative memories from their brains, believing nothing concerning has ever happened
Do you reckon any of the above is a desirable outcome for humanity?
Would you say that those hypothetical people are “free”?
There are probably more ways the future can unfold than there are atoms in the universe with only a tiny subset of those futures being something most people alive today would actually approve of. We are sleepwalking numbed, drugged, horny and absentminded into something we do not fully grasp with no guarantee we can steer away from any specific set of outcomes indefinitely. If we won’t be vigilant, we would one day wake up, believing we have worked toward freedom by de facto treating people as if it is a human right to “just make bad choices”, only to realize we are prisoners in an unrecognizable reality and this day might be sooner than you think.
