Introduction

Every reality seems, at first glance, intelligible and ordered. Still, what truly distinguishes the human being from an informational machine is intelligence — the capacity to manipulate knowledge creatively. Raw knowledge, by itself, is static: collections of data, organized or not. Intelligence, however, takes us beyond mere accumulation of information. It is what allows us to alter, add, or remove variables in our world models, discovering new phenomena, deducing hidden possibilities, and transforming the already known into fertile ground for innovation.

For example, when we look at a circular blue star, our senses acquire an unmistakable datum. But it is intelligence that makes us suppose the possibility of a circular yellow star, even if we have never seen it. It is the engine that drives us to extract from static observation (“round star, blue in color”) the dynamic hypothesis (“could there then be a round yellow star?”). In short, intelligence is the road along which knowledge walks: without it, we would be like inert records; with it, we advance toward creative horizons. In this sense, one may assert that “knowledge itself is static, while the process of manipulating knowledge is dynamic.”

However, both knowledge and intelligence function better within organized systems. Every structured system of thought demands order: without organization, we have only a random collection of ideas. Aristotle taught that to know is more than to accumulate; it is to order and understand. Paradoxically, though, most people seem to refuse this mental organization. By way of illustration, let us check everyday life: before making the most trivial decisions — “Whom shall I vote for? Is that individual pleasant or unpleasant?” — the instinctive tendency of many is to seek ready-made answers from others. This outsourcing of thought is a form of intellectual laziness, and it gravely compromises the individual's sovereignty.

Intellectual Laziness, Mass Manipulation, and Polarization

When an individual prefers others to think for them, they surrender their autonomy. It is common to see people who, when faced with a personal or political problem, immediately ask someone else “What should I do?” and accept the answer without questioning — until that answer fails. This commonplace habit ranges from choosing lunch to making political decisions of great impact. For a long time, printed newspapers and television programs had almost absolute power to shape opinions because they presented themselves as quick-access means of information and offered the “solution” of informing what the truth was for nations; they literally suggest in a camouflaged voice “you are so weak that you are willing to believe anything someone says on television.” Elections, for example, have been decided by the speeches and images the media present to us: not because voters were ill-intentioned, but because they simply did not want to think. They preferred to hand over their capacity for judgment to presenters and journalists, thereby failing to genuinely feed a critical mind and reach an independent conclusion about which candidate to vote for.

When the citizen does not cultivate original critical thinking, they begin to consume superficial or manipulated information. Media outlets produce for them a “diet” of poorly nutritious data: jokes, sensationalist headlines, and content designed to entertain or alarm without clarifying usefulness. It is a vicious circle: the individual exerts effort only to assemble collections of data and repeat ready-made narratives and services, instead of structuring systems of knowledge that are truly intelligent and original. The result: TV series and programs can dominate national opinions, and more than 99% of the information transmitted by newspapers and social networks ceases to be objective truth, free from the biases of the informants' personal perspectives — it is built to manipulate the masses. Some time ago, few people and governments understood that by not questioning, we are all hostages to a daily programming that always aims at a hidden objective: influencing voting, consumption, or opinion decisions.

Today, this influence has taken on new faces. Digital influencers have become even more powerful than the TV anchors of the past. Each influencer adopts a persona close to the public, communicating in a familiar language that creates strong identification. They do not deliver raw data; they deliver a perspective — their own opinion or the message their sponsors wish to propagate. Therefore, their followers do not develop critical thinking but share a collective belief, and they like it because the information arrives ready-made and they do not need to spend time analyzing data to reach their own conclusion and decide for themselves whether to act.

When an influencer commits inaccuracies or spreads misinformation, followers tend to defend them blindly or attack a chosen victim. This is how phenomena like the cancellation of reputations arise: an influencer can recontextualize a fact — omitting aspects or manipulating narratives — to incite their followers to “demand justice” against someone. The influenced masses then begin to stone that person online, often without knowing why or without having knowledge beyond the information they believe to be the true perspective on a given scenario. It is a phenomenon of polarization: on one side, followers of an influencer “accuse” and attack; on the other, the masses mobilized by another influencer “defend” the target, accusing the first group of injustice. In this game, political issues are also grouped into monolithic blocks: those influenced by more “progressive” voices will adopt a certain left-wing ideology, while those who follow more “conservative” opinion leaders will align to the right.

However, amid this chaos of ready-made opinions and polarizations, a small minority that thinks genuinely still exists. A tiny handful of individuals, separated by a literal distance that prevents a single thought from uniting the masses, truly intellectual and autonomous, gather “pure” information — free from the interests of those who pay the media or impose narratives — and construct original reasoning. But they are so few and isolated that their ideas rarely gain the power to influence large audiences. Thus, polarization remains: on the one hand, those who think without questioning yield to the chorus of the crowd; on the other, a few outlier thinkers try to illuminate different paths, almost always without success in altering the course of the masses.

The underlying reason for all this is clear: people do not want to think. If the people avoid thinking for themselves, they cannot exercise true mastery over their own lives. Deprived of this intellectual sovereignty, individuals come to obey those who accept thinking for them. And in that vacuum of autonomy, the true rulers emerge. The common person, out of laziness or complacency, voluntarily gives up their freedom of judgment to those who hold the power of communication — first to influencers, then to politicians and governments.

Individual Sovereignty and State Power

When someone ceases to be master of their ideas, space opens for another to assume their place of command. At the threshold of social power stands the government, which has seemingly unlimited resources: taxes, money and laws. The State motivates people's work through financial rewards, but in doing so, it entirely subordinates their wills. In exchange for a salary — enough to survive, of course, after taxes and fees — the individual becomes a voluntary slave to a routine of memorization and repetition. It is as if the citizen can only eat and remain alive while doing what they are told: produce well, repeat well, memorize well, and they will receive some return; otherwise, survival is threatened. This dynamic converts trust in the government into collateral for currency and power. When minds cease to be sovereign over themselves, those who seduce determine the services they must perform; as my mother used to say, “he who does not govern himself is governed by others.”

It is this situation that leads me to question and assert something that seems paradoxical: how can the Constitution say that all power emanates from the people if the people have voluntarily transferred their sovereignty to those who think for them? Once in power, of course, the government ensures that things remain this way to stay in power (power is the capacity to be sovereign over someone else's will beyond one's own will). Like the reign of a prince who does not wish to abdicate, it invests in limiting access to independent information. It sponsors an educational system that is incomplete and often incoherent. Not by chance, in Brazil, a large proportion of teachers assume positions without adequate preparation, generating students who are uncritical; students who merely reproduce prefabricated ideas instead of questioning them.

And what happens to those who insist on thinking for themselves? There are two main destinies: they are either swallowed by the system — silenced, discredited, or discouraged — or they prosper individually to the point of leaving the country where they were born. Some find fame by denouncing inconvenient truths and begin to disseminate genuine knowledge; others simply depart, taking their ideas to new audiences. The former can, on the margins, save some free souls, keeping the flame of reflection alive; the latter leave a void among the masses but carry with them the hope of higher thinking.

Consider this analogy: if the people possess their own sword, why then do they accept obeying a king who decides who lives and who dies? The answer lies in belief. The people believe that the king has power — and indeed, that power exists only because people believe in him. It is the thoughts ceded to the monarch that confer upon him his real authority. When the people hand over their capacity for decision to another, that other governs them. Therefore, I conclude: free will is a human responsibility, not something granted or denied by divine forces.

People are mistaken in thinking that freedom in their decisions is lacking because of a divine will or destiny. Generally, they project the cause of their choices onto the past or onto God, as if we were pieces moved only by external forces. In reality, the greatest influence on each person's choices is tied to their own intelligence and education.

Intelligence, Education, and the Development of Thought

How free we are in our decisions is intimately related to the quality of the intelligence we exercise. We do not deny that the past of ideas — philosophers like Plato, historical experiences, established theories — exerts some influence. However, for those who truly think, that influence is partial: the most brilliant human mind can see beyond the walls built by its predecessors.

Imagine a man with extraordinary intellectual capacity. He may consider all knowledge available today extremely impure, imprecise, or even laughable. He might find Tesla's ideas naive, or Plato's unreal — simply because his own vision of truth is as clear as that of any sage who has ever existed. Such an individual does not let himself be crushed by the dominant influence of the past, unlike the majority of humans today.

On the other hand, many do not train their minds. Why are people mentally lazy? In truth, we are all born with some potential for reasoning, but upbringing shapes us. If a child always grows up hearing ready-made answers and reproducing knowledge mechanically, they never develop the curiosity to question. Someone who, when facing problems, receives only easy solutions learns to expect pre-fabricated answers, creating a habit of intellectual reproduction. This limitation is only overcome by the intellect itself: individuals with high IQ may suffer this influence of repetition up to a point, but at some point those with intelligence above roughly 130 to 145 will decipher the world for themselves and begin to formulate original understandings, however modest they may be.

Even among the very intelligent, the pattern is similar: people with IQ between 145 and 170 suffer less from this intellectual inertia, but they can still absorb ready-made concepts. Above 170, more genuine thinkers already appear, although even they carry fragments of others' mistaken views. There are reports of geniuses with an IQ of 247 — as Albert Einstein's is estimated to be — who made inaccuracies due to an intellectual arrogance developed over time. In those moments, the tone of ideas becomes confused: a genius's conclusions can equate to those of a fool when moved by arrogance, becoming mere personal opinions, not facts. Intuitively, I risk saying that someone with an IQ above 290 would, by means of moral logic, be less subject to this trap of arrogance; however, even common geniuses can resist it depending on how they were educated and the challenges they faced.

Furthermore: most complex questions admit multiple answers, all dependent on context. The “absolute” answer would therefore be a common systematization that encompassed all those possibilities. Even if the answers appear diverse, we could organize them into a standardized system or into several interrelated systems, according to the reasoning that originated them. However, if the conceptual bases are fragile, this union does not occur, and fragmentation persists.

It is worth noting that it is not only negligent education that impairs free reflection. People with lower innate intellectual capacities tend, statistically, to have less curiosity and willingness to immerse themselves in knowledge. In addition, severe physical disabilities — such as blindness or deafness — create real barriers to access to information. The deaf, for example, live in a world of images and sensations and therefore can still deduce much by direct observation; the blind, deprived of sight, are restricted to what others tell them. Braille books exist, but they are few and often of limited content. In these conditions, both have free will, of course, but in practice they suffer greater external influence, as they depend on others to obtain most information. The result is that, when adequate inclusion measures are lacking, these individuals are at greater risk of having their thinking manipulated or of failing to fully develop their own ideas.

Still, we are not saying that IQ measures courage or conscious resistance to laziness. On the contrary: as IQ increases, the disposition and intellectual curiosity naturally grow as well. It is an inner impulse, not a calculated effort. The more intelligent individual tends to resist ignorance spontaneously and demands more of himself in terms of the search for knowledge.

Books, Bitcoin, and Other Possibilities for Freedom

Once governments dominate the scenario because the people think little, the next question is how to recover independence of thought. Some turn to technological and decentralized solutions: cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, social networks without censorship or without oversight by large corporations like Nostr. These are tools that can circumvent traditional government control, giving the individual means to act without needing state approval. However, it is observed that many who criticize the government and want to free themselves from it do not even know why they feel that way. If they knew, the government would no longer think for them but would still think for others, and they would perceive and see it.

Governments, for their part, take advantage of the passive nature of much of the population. They offer omnipresent social services — health, education, transport, benefits — precisely because they know that the majority do not make themselves available to seek alternative and private solutions. This paternalism gives them more influence: the citizen becomes accustomed to depending on the State to solve even simple problems, which reinforces their surrender of thought.

Digital influence also exploits this. When an influencer uses the common indignation of the masses, they speak to an innate moral sense of the population, deliberately shared, and instigate people. If skilled at provoking these emotions and extracting the desired reactions, they can even temporarily capture audiences that were not originally theirs. But that conquest is fragile: in essence, they merely channel a momentary collective emotion; they do not build authentic thought, they only increase the power of one side of a given polarization.

The central point remains: yes, free will exists. Every human being has, in principle, the capacity to decide their own course. However, in practice, many limit this free will by lack of mental exercise. They give up freedom when they refuse the effort to learn and to question. Failing to seek knowledge — not only to memorize but to understand deeply and even to modify concepts — is the greatest self-impediment to free will.

Therefore, the answer to the initial question is affirmative and complex: free will exists, but it depends on us using it. It is worth remembering the lessons of the ancient thinkers: the truly free man is the one who governs himself by reason, instead of being governed by the wills of others. Only he, by keeping his thought in his own hands, will be sovereign over his life — and not merely a spectator on a stage that others decide.