Leave Me Alone: Rejecting Autonomy to Find Flourishment

24 February 2026

The Connelly Center is filled with people all wearing branded clothes following the latest trends, the TV’s behind the Sushi, Soup, and Wawa counters are all flashing constant advertisements of food I should purchase. There are posters and info-graphics covering the walls on every floor, and massive posterboards by different doors. I open my phone, and across Instagram, I see ads for St. Patrick’s Day merchandise. The bright colors, moving people, and flashing lights are all grabbing my attention, pulling me away from talking to the person across from me and from my paper. Perhaps I can go to the bathroom for a moment of silence and solace. However, even there the stall door has an advertisement “The Stall Street Journal” advertising an AI program that will help my mental health, fix my sleep schedule, and talk to me in an emotional crisis. Is there no escape? How did it get this bad? Why do I have to write papers before 9 am in my bedroom in the dark in order to be left alone?

Our attention is constantly being grasped at, whether through social media ads, the ads behind the Wawa counter, or the posters lining the academic buildings. There is a fog of choices that seems to plague us with an inability to have control over our lives. Our attention is constantly being pulled away from our ownership. There becomes an increasing desire not to be addressed, to be left alone.

This paper will argue that there needs to be a national discussion about the right not to be addressed, for which we find the language to have the conversation through Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, Plato’s The Republic, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. To gain and protect our right not to be addressed, there needs to be a deeper understanding of what the current condition is and how we have gotten here, what human nature is, and how we can create solutions to constructively move forward.

We all agree that there are things to be shared, and things that belong to us. This includes access to clean water, clean air, access to shelter, clean food, and access to medicine. However, we can and should expand this to our attention. Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, argues that there is an attentional commons, where the absence of noise is a resource of sorts (11). We have a right not to be addressed by the advertisements, by corporations, and by things trying to convince us to buy.

We live in a crisis of self-ownership, which is rooted in the splitting of our attention. Our attention is no longer simply ours; it is being directed in hundreds of different places at every given moment. Whether it is ads while scrolling on social media, flashing ads behind the Wawa counter, or posters in the hallways of the classrooms. There is a fog of choices that seems to plague us with an inability to do anything or take control or ownership of our lives. It seems that our distractibility indicates that we have become agnostic to the question of what is worth paying attention to, which is really the question of what has value (Crawford, 5).

It is through this agnosticism of the good that noise has been smuggled into our lives. Political authority in the liberal regime we find ourselves in is premised on public safety, and that alone, there has been a complacent expansion into our attention, under the guise of the telos of modernity. It is not a telos of happiness, virtue, and flourishing. Rather, the telos of modernity is of constant expansion, economic growth, and above all, efficiency (Crawford, 10). This decision, both at macro and micro levels, was not made by one person, rather it was allowed, since it seems sacrilegious to oppose efficiency, as it seems illogical. “Nobody decided on behalf of the public. Someone made a suggestion, and Nobody responded in the only way that seemed reasonable: here is an “inefficient” use of space that could be used to “inform” the public of “opportunities” (Crawford, 10-11). Crawford highlights that it has seemed logical to allow for the constant efficiency of the space, whether it is putting ads on the bottom of the security bins in the airport or ads on public transportation.

Crawfords asks the question of whether we need to change something in ourselves or whether we need to change how we view the world to see what the issue is. “We have no public language in which to articulate it, and we search instead for a diagnosis of ourselves: Why am I so angry? It may be time to adjust the meds” (Crawford, 11). Is it that I am unreasonably angry, or do I need to adjust the meds to see the world more clearly? For once, I see the world clearly, I begin to see that we have sold more and more of our silence and self-ownership to corporations to profit off of us. I find myself in a cacophony of noise that I cannot exist in, nor do I have the words to explain why I think that this noise is wrong.

Crawford attempts to give words to the dialogue by explaining that modernity measures personhood through one’s ability to be free, which is to say the ability to satisfy one’s preferences. The authentic core of the person is the freedom to realize and actualize these preferences. Modernity calls for us to be silent as to another’s right to preference, out of respect for the autonomy of the individual (Crawford, 17). The preferences of the individual become sacred, the representation of the authentic self, and therefore are unavailable for rational scrutiny (Crawford, 107). To be human is to make decisions, to consume as one desires without restriction, and to pick amongst seemingly free options. However, there is something deeper and more profound to being human. A different view, such as flourishment or reaching enlightenment, as Plato suggests with the Allegory of the Cave. Through this lens of liberal agnosticism about the good life, we have preserved the right to make any decision, and criminalized suggesting or recommending to others some substantial ideal that will necessarily be controversial, such as flourishing or virtue (Crawford, 109).

The issue of the right not to be addressed, and the struggle for self-ownership as well as what true freedom is, is successfully outlined by Crawford. However, this conversation has been going on since the dawn of philosophy with Plato in The Republic, in which Plato discusses different types of governments and which is the best with Glaucon. It is here that Plato highlights that democracy–rule of the people–is the worst type of government before tyranny, citing freedom–the ability to do anything without restraint or restriction–as the weakness of democracy. “Freedom,” I said. “For surely in a city under a democracy you would hear that this is the finest thing it has, and that for this reason it is the only regime worth living in for anyone who by nature is free” (Plato, p. 240, 562b12-c3). Democracy will have you think that what is most important is freedom; however, Plato grabs at a greater concept that perhaps freedom or license to do anything without restraint is, in fact, not a good or virtuous thing. That this type of freedom is the same type of freedom that allows for ads in all domains and places, and the same freedom that actually enslaves us to desire and instant gratification, opposed to helping people reach flourishing and enlightenment.

Plato argues that in the condition of no restraint, man goes on gratifying the desires that occur to him, whether that be drinking, listening to the flute, gymnastics, or idling. Man then chases the desires in career, whether it is to engage in politics or become a soldier, he is endlessly pursuing his desires in a hope to satisfy them. “I suppose that when a democratic city, once it’s thirsted for freedom, gets bad winebearers as its leaders and gets more drunk than it should on this unmixed draught, then, unless the rulers are very gentle and provide a great deal of freedom, it punishes them, charging them with being polluted and oligarchs” (Plato, p241, 582c4-d3). Once man is initially quenched by freedom, they desire it endlessly and demands more of it. The leaders have to be immensely gentle with restricting freedom in any capacity, as they risk looking corrupt or being ascribed as a fascist or oligarch. It becomes impossible to rein in the freedoms without looking tyrannical. Whether it is the legalization of drugs, the expansion of the gambling industry, or ads in all domains, it seems impossible to say no.

When laws are proposed to wrangle in the freedoms, the tender citizen calls it slavery. “Do you notice how tender they make the citizens’ souls, so that if someone proposes anything that smacks in any way of slavery, they are irritated and can’t stand it? And they end up, as you well know, by paying no attention to the laws, written or unwritten, in order that they may avoid having any master at all” (Plato, p242, 563d3-e1). Crawford and Plato both argue that people believe that pure autonomy and preference picking appear to be human nature and the essence of what the government should preserve. This is a mere appearance; by attempting to be masterless, they become slaves to their desires. “Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city” (Plato, p. 242, 564a2-3). Desire guides the will of the people, the community, and the polis. In a ruthless attempt to prevent oligarchs and masters, they usher in the biggest master–the expansion of their desires–and it becomes the beginning of tyranny.

If freedom from restraint leads to slavery to our desires, and speaking out against the license to do anything appears to be fascism, tyranny, or oligarchy, what is necessary to have a discussion about the telos of forming citizens and living the good life in relation to the right not to be addressed? Plato and Crawford give language to the diagnosis and prognosis of our current condition and how it can be changed. Fundamentally, as a nation, we need to open our eyes and our hearts to the discussion of what it means to live a good life. Is it a stimulus drive pushed by the vice industries, social media companies, and constant advertising? Or is it goal-driven, focused on your flourishment and ability to achieve a state of happiness? However, this is not happiness as Mustafa Mond in Brave New World puts it. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t” (Huxley, 205). Mond uses happiness as the emotion, whereas happiness is a state of character of the soul, in which we are excellent. A focus on flourishing re-aligns the desires towards truth and beauty, which Mond and the corporate elite would claim is not stable and is worthless in the chaos. “What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?” (Huxley, 205). Mond, like most people in modernity, is making a false dichotomy. They suggest that truth, beauty, and goodness are worthless and not beneficial to you in the chaos, and therefore, you should give up on them and give in to your animal desires and unbridled freedom. Crawford and Plato are making precisely the opposite argument.

There will always be chaos, there will always be conflict and problems, and there is no reason to give up on the true, the good, and the beautiful. “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin” (Huxley, 215). John Savage exclaims this to Mond, rejecting Mond’s comfort, “freedom from restraint,” and the Brave New World. He was not interested in their freedoms and their way of life, and wanted something deeper. To move forward constructively, we have to discover what it means to be human individually and bring that to the community. As a community, we can go forward in living in a deeper, more flourishing way. Once there is an openness to changing the current state of affairs in the pursuit of higher goods, true change and public language can be ascribed through education. Plato begins Book VIII on the topic of education. “All right. This much has been agreed, Glaucon: for a city that is going to be governed on a high level, women must be in common, children and their entire education must be in common, and similarly the practices in war and peace must be in common, and their kings must be those among them who have proved best in philosophy and with respect to war” (p221, 543a1-6). Education is for the common, and then all that is in common is together in the pursuit of higher goods, and for the flourishment of humanity, there becomes language within the community and public language on how to address widely felt feelings such as self-ownership, purpose, meaning, and the right not to be addressed.

Respectfully,

AS

Biblography

Bloom, Allan, and Adam Kirsch. The Republic of Plato. 3rd ed. Basic Books, 2016.

Crawford, Matthew B. The World beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. First edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Huxley, Aldous, and Christopher Hitchens. Brave New World: With the Essay “Brave New World Revisited.” Modern Classics. HarperPerennial, 2010.