What is free choice?

In the book Extra-ordinary, where author Yoshii Shinobu chronicled 12 people leading their unique lives in an unrelenting society, a bookstore owner 25km from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant stated that he had no choice but to stay, as bookstore is vital to a community.

I think by staying, he exercised his free will to make a firm and noble choice. Answering the call of fate is itself a remarkable choice.

Viktor Frankl once said,

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Frankl called this the last of the human freedoms. Within the stimulus and response, we have a moment all by ourselves to choose a response with intention. This is key to Frankl’s theory centered on finding meaning in life as the primary human motivation. By making this free choice, people empower themselves to be subjects rather than objects of their circumstances, thereby maintaining their dignity.

This philosophy was born from Frankl’s own experiences as a Holocaust survivor, witnessing people find meaning and maintain their inner freedom even in concentration camps. Even though trauma and crisis cannot be compared in relative terms, Fukushima survivors like the bookstore owner indeed made a meaningful choice that stands against the utmost environmental and psychological disaster.