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Who is really in control of our lives?

Francisco Miraval

I think to remember that Jorge Luis Borges once said something along the lines that freedom is just ignorance of the causes.  In other words, we assume we are free just because we don’t know who or what is controlling us. We don’t see the strings of the puppeteer, but it doesn’t mean the strings are not there.

Why are we asking about our freedom and why we share the likely pessimist answer offered by Borges? It seems that neither the question nor the answer should be part of this column. Yet, everything is changing around us and we feel forced to make decisions we are ill-prepared to make. And once again we are in in yet another election cycle. Hence the need to question our own freedom.

In his several books and in his many conferences, Argentine neuroscientist Facundo Manes explains that most of the people live most of the time trapped in old patterns of thinking and they don’t even know it.

According to Manes, a man who as a child had problems with his mother and was unable to solve them will, as an adult, possible married a woman with whom he will recreate the same childhood problems again and again.  And it is highly probable, Manes said, for that man to repeat the same behavior with his daughter.

In addition, according to Manes, we are also affected by our ancestral DNA. Manes said that a traumatic experience could change one’s DNA and then, that modified DNA is passed to the next generation. The children, then, literally carry in them the traumatic experiences of their parents.

In a sense, we are slaves of both our psychological and our genetic past. And we are not even aware of that. I think it was Aristotle who said that the worst slave is the slave who doesn’t know he is a slave and he assumes he is a free man. Such seems to be our own situation.

Yet, we are very certain that’s not the case. Regardless of the DNA we got from our parents or of the traumas of our early childhood, we feel we are free. After all, we decide what we want to do, where to go, and what to buy.

Not so fast. According to Canadian futurist George Dvorsky, that’s not the case. Dvorsky says that all aspects of our life are now influenced and even controlled by mathematical algorithms. In fact, only ten algorithms are now used to decide everything about us, from which news we can see to who is going to be our friend.

Those algorithms select the pages we will see online, analyze potential threats and criminal patters, see products and services, control our behavior when we watch movies, and govern most financial transactions. In other words, those ten algorithms keep us inside what we already know.

Where are then our freedom and our personal responsibility if our DNA, our unresolved childhood issues, and a few algorithms are in control of everything?

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