The world is full of people who have stopped thinking for themselves. As kids, we held little power. Adults hold power. And few adults treat kids as equals. So we learn that we have limited freedom. We learn to submit our will.
But what if this will to submit no longer serves us? What if we have more freedom and power than we think? Perhaps we hold onto the will to submit because it’s preferable to the will to freedom: freedom is filled with anxiety.
We seek safety over freedom. The hunter-gatherer who sticks with the group is safer than the hunter-gatherer who roams into the wild on her own.
Technology will make safety redundant, eventually. It’ll just be a question of who controls the technology. Meanwhile, technology will scale slavery. Our personal data is constantly being collected and used to influence what we see: the opinions of the powerful.
If we do not think for ourselves, others will think for us.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune
