Choosing is losing. I expect my government not to follow the trend of a fashionable discourse

‘It’s very simple. You can choose to either submit the permit application and wait, or not to submit the application, but then nothing will be honored.’ Because I was considering an extra window in my home, one morning just before Easter I suddenly found myself back at the municipality of Rotterdam. After a long wait, I was now apparently faced with a choice: whether to submit a permit application or not.

However, as I walked away with the form in hand, I suddenly realized that there was no choice here at all. It reminded me of an anecdote from a colleague who once went to his municipality for a dormer window. Once there, the official said: ‘Ah, you would like a dormer window? Then you need a permit.’ To which the colleague retorted: ‘No, you need a permit.’ And he was right. The state always has an astonishing ability to appropriate words that violate reality.

This also applies to my permit application. The ridiculousness starts with the location. I am standing here this morning at a ‘city shop’, where I can come – as the municipality describes it on its website – ‘for all kinds of products’ because ‘customer-oriented work is our number one priority’. My municipality is therefore completely in the customer trap customer service orientation graduated, where the state treats citizens as customers.

It is not without reason that the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG) now offers a knowledge base, white papers and methods that offer municipalities insight into real ‘customer journeys’. Mind you, no one goes all-inclusive to Tenerife, but ‘a customer journey is a method to make municipal services customer-driven’.

And so my municipality of Rotterdam no longer has a ‘town hall’ for ‘citizens’, but ‘city shops’ for ‘customers’. And with that the state has completely lost its way. Because stores have customers, and customers have choice and a choice comes from suppliers in a market. I would say, ‘choose’ your passport next time in another country. Or else I will buy my ‘product’ (permit) in Dordrecht. No, people will say, ‘it doesn’t work that way, sir’.

It is better to say: ‘But it doesn’t work that way, municipality of Rotterdam.’ Pretending there is a choice, ‘playing shop’ and feigning choice is nothing less than a renewed contribution to the organization of one’s own disappointments. Where a customer is king, a citizen is a subject. A customer has needs, citizens, rights and obligations. Other roles and powers.

And so I expect my government to take itself seriously and not to follow a fashionable discourse that does injustice to what it is there to do on earth. Who deliberately misleads citizens and thereby creates expectations that they themselves cannot meet. This neoliberal distortion is not only in the local idea of ​​’city shops’, at a national level it shows itself in Mark Rutte’s metaphor of the ‘BV Netherlands’ and in Brussels policy where goods, services and people must move freely in Europe as a ‘market’ .

And that discourse does not just appear out of the blue. Because if anything determines our modern condition, it is our belief in free choice. Whether it concerns musical taste, education or love, everything can be understood as choice, even if in practice those choices are limited and predetermined. Modern people experience life primarily as the result of choices. Especially since sex has been separated from reproduction (contraception), reproduction from sex (artificial insemination) and gender from sex (transsexuality), ‘the self’ is now also seen as a choice. But as the Slovenian sociologist Renate Salecl shows, the cultural trope of choice can now be seen as an ideology in which modern people want themselves, but above all must to understand. The result is a ‘tyranny of choice’.

Our state does not have to conform to that fashionable but limited figure of speech. In fact, fortunately the government is far removed from that tyranny of choice. There the choice is not huge, there choosing is mainly losing. Because a state has no customers, does not consist of shops and offers no choice. And that’s a good thing. Then don’t pretend.