I personally believe that all people have a drive, an inner energy that pushes us in the search for greater personal autonomy and obtaining that freedom of self-realization as Maslow said in his pyramid of needs. It is true that we do not always experience this, because many people learn from early childhood to be dependent, to obtain other types of “rewards” by giving up their autonomy, such as the fact of being permeable to adopt the ideas and lifestyle of other people to receive their approval and valuation.
There are many ways of losing our freedom to think, to act, to create, to feel, to decide or to relate to others. Are we born free and losing autonomy or the way is just the opposite, this question is to have it in long conversations and philosophy, however, it seems to me that what is certain and evident is that as long as we gain some capabilities we can be freer.
In this freedom it is crucial to be able to think critically, to ask ourselves the respective questions that help us to stop believing everything we receive, especially in this digital age full of information and things that are not true.
However, thinking is not the only front where we give this process of being really well thinking people, but also the autonomy in our decisions and emotions, being able to realize and act consistently against manipulation, coercion and other processes that we fall day by day, and I am not talking about the relationship with the “power” and in the public dimension, but in the most everyday relationships that we have and that we often compromise consciously or not, after the small prisons of which we are part.
I believe that human beings have always needed to achieve greater autonomy, but this will not be given by a delivery service from the outside, nor by technology, nor the State, nor the market, it will come primarily in the use of our current capabilities, however limited they may be, which are the initial instrument to open the way in a process of continuous and probably endless personal development.
Freedom is not free and neither is the way to achieve it, perhaps that is where the great disincentive lies, in that we want the cake but we do not want to buy things, spend the time, make the effort to do it, that is, we want it in a market logic with the logic of the instantaneous of today’s world, when this, it seems, does not work that way. What are you going to do?