I think it's a powerful but also an extremely double-edged sword, the amount of responsibility we ascribe to the existence of personal choice. Yes, belief in the power that individual choice wields can be quite empowering, but an over-arching belief that everything in our lives is chosen by us can be very poisonous, when we can end up with no option as a result except to feel unquestioning responsible for even dangerous and traumatic events that may occur and can certainly be entirely out of our control.

There's an example that Barbara Ehrenreich gave in this talk about her book Smile or Die, about an occasion when Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret (re: the Laws of Attraction) was asked about the Indonesian tsunami in 2006, and she had responded that the people living in that area must have been putting bad tsunami-like vibes out to the universe in order to have drawn that event upon themselves, because nothing happens to us that we haven't attracted into our world.

A horribly discompassionate example if ever I heard one, showing the faultiness of this kind of thinking (but also the lengths people will go to in order to maintain unfailing public commitment to their own personal cash cows). Having grown up in the 70s with all kinds of ridiculous "you chose your own parents"-level thinking around me, I have had to work quite laboriously to extract the fallacy of such unfortunately absolutist thinking from creeping through my own psyche-memory.