Decision-Making Compulsion
The psychological system must continuously decide. Deciding means choosing between alternatives (guiding processes!). This continual need for self-preservation, through choosing a new event – perceiving, thinking, feeling, acting, evaluating, wanting, resonating and understanding – makes the psychological system unstable. There is no time-sustaining security for stability. Nobody can know if he will find the answers he needs to be able to survive tomorrow. Heidegger called this element of being-in-the-world ‘care’. For him, this was the fundamental purpose of man. Having to continue ‘inventing’ oneself again and again for an open, unknown future (autopoiesis), can be experienced as freedom and scope, but also as care and anxiety. One always has less information than needed and everything can also develop differently than hoped for. For this reason, every person needs insecurity tolerance – the more complex the environment, the more it is needed. The compulsion to decide, as an autopoietic system, cannot be avoided by the psyche, quite the opposite: decision-making compulsion is the answer of life to an open future.