On Choice and Empowerment

A person can only take so much of the existential angst that one encounters from reading blogs relating to Mormonism. If anything ever showed that Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety was a valid theory, it surely must have been demonstrated by the anxiety that Mormonism brings and its accompanying dizziness. This anxiety is a direct result of the freedom to choose that Mormons believe that they have been given from God. It is a power so great that even God himself cannot interfere with it. Even those who leave the Mormon church itself are forever influenced (tainted?) by this idea of choice and freedom. Dr. Viktor E. Frankl called choice of attitude the last of the human freedoms. Regardless of what others try to do to take away our freedoms and our dignity, we always have the power to choose how to respond to the taking away. Short of killing us, no one can completely take away our freedom to choose. But for all of our power to choose, how are we to know that we made the right choice? That we made the best choice? And this is the desire to know and the uncertainty that leads to angst. Despite the advances of science and technology, we don’t know what the future holds. If there has been any failure of the scientific method, it is that it only allows for predictions of the future and not knowledge of the future.

I have to admit that I am confused at the use of the word ‘empowerment’ that I encounter in my readings, as though someone is withholding the power to choose. If we have the freedom to choose, what does the word ‘empowerment’ mean? What does it signify? I submit that it is a meaningless buzzword. It is a subterfuge, an artifice and a ruse. People use it to give the illusion of benefice. If I say that I am empowered, what I am saying? Someone has to grant the power or authority to me so that I am empowered. If I accept the empowerment, does it not mean that the person or group who granted it to me had the power in the first place? But how does another person or group give me the power to choose if I already have that power?