One of the consistent phenomena of our time is the explosion of choice. Whether this means hundreds of television or satellite radio choices, besides the proliferation of information sources for a person, there is no longer a monopoly or even a stable oligarchy of choices for entertainment and information. Try as they might to buy up their competition, the growth of independent and self-appointed authorities has fractured and fragmented choices to a degree that has thus far proven fatal to central control, unless that increasingly insecure central control has taken the step of seeking to censor that space and drive the thoughts and free expression of their people underground.

And yet this choice presents dilemmas as well. Growing fragmentation makes it easier for the most cohesive coalitions to gain and hold power if their rivals become fragmented. Our response to the choices we have depends in large part on how our choices are aggregated and lead to decisions on power and influence. Let us compare two republics to examine how this is the case in the political realm. In the United States, the presidency is won through a majority of the electoral college, with those electoral votes won through a plurality in each state (and the District of Columbia). In such a circumstance there is a strong inducement for the building of an internal coalition that can hold an electoral majority, and a strong discouragement of ideologically pure fringe parties. In Israel, however (and other countries, like Belgium and Greece), proportional voting actively encourages fringe voters to unify around single-issue or ideological-based parties which then force more broad-based and moderate mainstream parties to grant concessions in order to achieve the electoral majorities needed to rule through coalitions. In such a circumstances, minor parties can maintain power because their position as kingmakers allows them to be able to gain the achievement of an electoral program with only a few percent of the vote that happens to be the decisive majority.

The optimal choice for a voter would therefore depend greatly on the structure of the political system that they are in. In a proportional system, there would be a strong incentive to vote for the party that one was the closest to in order allow them to have leverage over coalition-building. In a winner-take-all system that we have, there is a strong incentive for the rational voter to find the closest broad-based coalition to support in order to provide that margin of victory for one’s allies. Those who cannot cohere with others show themselves to be antisocial, not because they are necessarily wicked, but because they are unwise and refuse to play by the rules of the game. Once you concede that it is acceptable to engage in political behavior, a concession that forces one to make choices, one has the responsibility to make the wisest choices possible, to engage in behavior that makes one’s decisions meaningful and purposeful in the larger picture, to accept that one has the responsibility not only to seek one’s own best interests but the interests of everyone.

Where we see less power at stake, we see less of a forcing of dilemmas in present society. We see business pursuing coalitions with each other to ensure common benefit–whether that is restaurants and soda companies or retailers and the makers of the equipment that they sell, or computer manufacturers and makers of chips. Even with regards to time, the explosion of DVR and On-Demand technologies has allowed people to watch what they want to watch on their terms, without having to accept the schedule of a station. These choices certainly fragment people into smaller groups, but the wise (companies like Pandora and Amazon seem to do a good job at this) are still able to figure out the larger groups that people belong to based on the choices they make. We still need to recognize that as individualistic as we are that we are still part of larger trends and larger groups of like-minded people who face the same struggles and have the same sort of longings. And that ought to make us less alone in a world that seems to push us towards isolation and atomization.

And that appears to be the biggest dilemma of the choices we face. In seeking to be authentic to our standards and our personalities and our inclinations we face the truth that we require cohesion and cooperation with others to achieve those goals. Being ourselves requires a community and a context where our work is rewarded, where we have influence based on the quality of our thoughts and the decency of our sentiments, yet where we can be ourselves without fear of coercion and rejection. Given the sorry state of our institutions, we face the difficulty of being greatly in need of functioning institutions (family, community, church, society) while needing to rebuild those institutions at the same time. We face the opportunity to choose ever more for ourselves and the simultaneous longing to find others to share that time and those choices with. Let us therefore choose wisely, recognizing that we always have to balance different concerns and seeking balance rather than extremes. If we must counteract the spirit of our times to do so, so be it.