There is this scientific word out there that refers to how humans interact with choices, it’s referred to as choice architecture. It looks at choice-making as a world-building skill we all have. This term tends to refer to how marketers design products and spaces to encourage consumer behavior. But, in reality, the way we make choices determines not only the next steps in our lives but also gives us clues as to how we got to where we are.
Choices are how our lives are predetermined. I get it, no one likes to talk about the idea of not being free. But, freedom is more a cultural value than it is anything else. The choices we make are determined by the ideology that fuels it. But, what is ideology? Well, in short, it’s a set of ongoing beliefs we have either been given or have accepted as true of how we think the world works and how we all work in relation to it.
The choice is not something that points to how free we are — on the contrary, it’s an arrow that exposes what has driven us to make that specific choice over many others. A major issue with how choices are understood is how we correlate a host of other ideas with them.
Most ideas we think are our own, are really cultural (or environmentally) normalized. So, when we conflate the ideas of choice with freedom it constrains our view of reality - mainly because we then measure our experience of what reality is and what it is supposed by based on those correlations. Let’s make sense of this.
If we are taught as young children that choices have a tendency to lead to dangerous outcomes, then we will think that the correlation between choice and danger is the only way to measure our experiences - and therefore, will keep us from making any choices like that, where we have conflated choice with danger.
See, what I am getting at?
Conflate is a more formal way to say "mix together," and it's typically used for texts or ideas. You probably wouldn't say you conflated the ingredients for a cake, but if you blended two different stories together to make a new one, conflate would work.
The verb conflate comes to us from the Latin word conflare, which literally means "to blow together." So think of using this word when you want to talk about two things getting thrown together and combined. Things that have been conflated often seem mixed up or confused. In fact, this word is also now sometimes used to mean "confuse or mix up." we have to unpack the implications of conflation.
Conflation is a shortcut when the longer route is a much better option. The desire for things to be brief, even ideas, is nothing more than a culturally entrained ideology. Rather than doing the work of deconstructing the values of a concept, we’d rather do the “drive-through” version. Being biased about an idea is not the same as understanding what it implies. Conflating an idea is just another way of saying that we rely on our biases of these concepts to get us through a day.
Notice the definition though, conflation is a form of linguistic confusion. To place the word freedom next to choice isn’t to argue that making choices is a form of freedom, if anything, it just confuses both separate ideas as the same thing — which they are not.
The reason why we conflate ideas together is an extremely subjective practice. Meaning, if someone wants to figure out why they or others create a correlative relationship between words - they have to look to their environment. The environment exposes the ideas that seem to be normalized and that depend upon other ideas to keep them alive.
A simple example is when someone makes the claim that the outdoors are beautiful (I know, a really simple example!). But, the outdoors is one idea, and so is beauty. Both words come with a load of subjective feelings, past experiences, social values, childhood memories, and much more. One person’s beauty is another person’s ugly - yep, I just threw in a cliche! But, it holds true. This is why is too simplistic to take ideas and put them together into an ideological mixin bowl and assume everyone knows what you’re talking about or should agree!
The need for others to agree is the evolutionary desire to be valued and to be long. So, in that sense, the words we use become the currency to experience a tight group dynamic. So, one of the many reasons we fight for certain ideas to be perceived as conflated (i.e., freedom of choice) is because we want to be part of a social group that reinforces our need to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
Language does that thought — it underdelivers and overpromises. Our brain reinforces the flimsiness of ideas by rewarding us for the repetitive experiences we have with the process of conflating a concept.
All the neuroscientific research points to the fact that we get dopamine just for repeating a behavior. Keep in mind, repetition is one of the major ways to make a habit stick. This works the same way with ideas. The more we repeat, the more we expect it, the more dopamine goes to work and gives us that neurochemical high.
In this sense, we are conflation addicts. Our brains want us to create a chain of ideas that may have nothing to do with one another. We not only are responsible for creating them but also for maintaining them. We are the janitors of the dopamine world.
When we get to be a part of a group larger than ourselves, we are willing to give up certain ideals over others so we can feel like we are part of an entity bigger than us. That’s part of the addiction. We’re willing to conflate ideas over others, to the point of paranoia (i.e., folk mythology) and continue the narratives, even if we disagree with them just so we can be a part of the cool club.
Conflation is the heuristic that keeps giving and taking simultaneously. It gives us a sense of control over the world, but then also limits our ability to see it. The task of any human (and scientist) is to not accept conflated ideas as some inherent truth, but are willing to hypothesize something exists beyond it.