The burden of choice is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It proliferates in a world that no longer has any God or gods, nor even any sense of what is sacred and inviolable, to focus our understanding of what we are. What we have seen just now, though, is that not every way of resolving choice is equal. Although willful self-confidence and addictive loss of control are both ways of shirking the burden—the first because it refuses to recognize alternatives and the second because it is incapable of doing so—neither of these conditions characterizes the experience of the unthinking heroic actor.
