"NO" IS A BAD WORD

It's amazing how much of your life you can live, and NOT have any hand in it. Most of us lament about not having any choice about things, we blame other people for "doing" things TO us mostly, or our parents or the Government. Perhaps children differ in the amount of freedom they get, freedom being the ability to choose or be given choices. Most children don't get the right kind of freedom -- they get a choice of which ice-cream flavour they'd like at Haagen Daz, but not of whether they would like to go to the Gifted Education program if they had the choice to turn it down. Or if they'd like to go to school at all for that matter.

Rejection. That is a choice that few are wont to make on their own free will. We seem to have been programmed since inception to reject rejection. Or at least view it with distaste and aversion. Rejecting anything is like a cuss word you are ashamed to be heard saying, unless it's rejecting something universally nasty, like an ugly suitor or a colonoscopy. People are never taught to say no to things that are offered to them, particularly when there's an implicit assumption that nobody would refuse it. Saying no is couched in extremely moral terms, so that rejecting is akin to repudiating something morally bad, no matter how dubious the morality. "Say no to drugs, smoking, premarital sex and multi-level marketeers".

You don't hear people mulling over whether to say no to a free lunch. Mostly due to the logic of gaining something for nothing. So what happened to the adage: You don't get nothing for nothing? Take lucky draw coupons for one, you get offered a chance to win something, nevermind the fact you don't know what you stand to win much less if you care about winning it or not, yet you would hardly stop to wonder if you should say no. For it is ASSUMED that people want to win something, winning implies getting something free and without having to pay any price for it. But the fact remains that people ARE paying a price for this dubious chance.

First, lucky draws are hardly ever transparent, going by the known fact that companies have awarded prizes to their own employees. Second, there is zero protection for you when you volunteer vital information that is required on filling out a coupon. This translates to zero liability to those who acquire your information should they give it away, and currently there really is nothing legislating how businesses and other corporate entities should treat individuals' information. So why do people continue to give away their information when the risks of it being wrongfully exploited for ill-gain is undeniably apparant and actually taking place as I speak?

Because people don't know how to say No. And saying no goes to the heart of knowing your rights and knowing how to choose: two of the least understood and downplayed ideas in Singapore. It goes to the very heart of the issue of freedom. In my opinion, having any right at all presupposes the freedom of exercising those rights. So too is the question of choice, or choosing. The freedom of choice differs from the freedom to choose. The former denotes the existence of two or more options, the latter supposes that one has the ability to say yes or no to those options and the will to exercise that right. You might be given a choice of two options, say chocolate or vanilla, but you hardly are expected to choose NO when a free lunch is offered. It is already assumed that a free lunch is preferred to no free lunch. The right to refuse is almost denied, and most of us deny our very right to refuse.

Then comes the issue of knowing how to choose: knowing that I have a right to refuse the free lunch, should I thereby refuse or accept? Incidentally, vote-spoiling and non-voting are prime examples of exercising intelligence when it comes to choosing, although in Singapore non-voting automatically disqualifies you from the next election, so additional effort need be applied here.

So we come to the problem of deliberation and motivation. Countless geniuses have applied themselves to theorising the how and why of making choices. The theory of rational choice argues that people choose according to a rational calculation of what they stand to gain against what might be lost, a cost-benefit analysis if you will. If people are rational, they will choose rationally to benefit more than to lose. So how would one define such rationality? Is it more rational to take the free lunch because it costs nothing as opposed to having to pay for it? Or is it more rational to pay for a lunch you might enjoy more as opposed to eating a free lunch that leaves you dissatisfied at best and at worst, lurching to the toilet from severe dyspeptia the rest of the afternoon?

So different people are motivated by different things, you argue. Back to the lucky draw: some people are motivated by greed (winning anything is preferred to winning nothing), some are motivated by pragmatism (I might need it later, even if I wouldn't buy it now), some by unconscious ignorance (why not?) and others by conscious ignorance (I don't really care if I win or not, and I'm not going to think about whether I want it at all).

You see, people are well-aware of their right to choose, but they are impervious to their right to refuse any or all options. I believe the problem lies in the logic we use in considering each choice we are presented with. "Having" comes with all kinds of rewards, most of them delightful. But "not having" connotes loss of rewards, even though "not having" doesn't even mean any net loss in whatever you currently possess. It is simply the continuation of present haves, instead of the loss of future (hypothetical) haves.

The hypothetical is the main culprit of this rant. Everyday we are presented with hypotheticals in the guise of religion, career projections and people who got your phone number over the weekend. And we live as if we are surely moving into the future, getting older is one thing but being as healthy or lucid as we are now is really another kind of hypothetical. The sale of hope is the most pernicious conjob ever, followed by the predilection for assuming things.

Which is why I urge all my friends to exercise their freedom to choose with utmost caution when it comes to being horny. Because having bad sex is not a choice you make until you get hit with it.

And then you spend the rest of your week wondering why you didn't think about this.