Creating choices in our multiple choice lives

We are living in an age of multiple choices. We can choose our schools, our cars, our computers, our igoogle or blog skins, background colors, etc. But we always choose from the given ones, and our choice is influenced by our ideology/life-worlds.

In his book 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', Althusser writes "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence". He explains this with a simple metaphor. Althusser says that we can think ideology as the water in an aquarium; and, a fish living in this aquarium understands an external object not with its real dimensions but within an imaginary size because of the water in the aquarium.

As fishes in an aquarium we are supposed to choose what is offered to us; but what if we don't want and pass to the other side of the aquarium? Althusser (1970) argues that, it is impossible to live out of an aquarium; whether that one or another you are surrounded by some water. Or from a phenomenological and hermeneutic point of view ‘nobody has a true access to external reality’.

So why do we care about reality? As Dilthey (1976) says ‘what should come first is experience’. Maybe it is impossible for us to pass to the other side of the aquarium and perceive the the objects with their real sizes (i.e. access to reality); but it is still very exciting to travel to the sea, like once Nemo ‘did’. But in order to this, first of all, we should suppress our sweet life-world and cultivate it in order to survive in the other.