How much of our lives are controlled by external forces without our knowledge? 20%? 50%? 90%?
It controls how you feel, and subsequently what you think about. It can manipulate what you want, so it gets what it wants. It’s been linked to obsessive compulsive disorders, Alzheimer’s and autism.
It’s not an external force, like advertising. Insidiously, this manipulative being is internal. This creature is inside you.
Its effects on you make it sound almost like a demon possessing the body. It’s actually your microbiome – the trillions of gut bacteria residing within you, that have untold influence on our everyday lives. I can’t give too much away, but Eoin’s found a company harnessing the power of the microbiome to create “living drugs” that work with our guts to heal various medical afflictions.
Eoin gave an example of the power bacteria within us have over us, without us knowing. When he tried to cut chocolate completely out of his diet, he began craving beer – his gut bacteria wanted sugar, and switched strategy to get it another way.
In this way, it’s as if we’re just vessels for them – pawns, in a game we don’t even understand. If you’d like to see Eoin’s research, you can get a trial of Frontier Tech Investor here.
What other forces are working to control us without us realising it? Let me know: [email protected].
Some individuals, living at the fringes of our society, believe that we are all living in a cage – but oblivious to it. They claim the reality we’re inhabiting is a prison that we only believe is normal because we have known nothing else.
As we are raised in captivity, we have no comprehension of what freedom is, or what it would feel like.
If we do live in such a cage, I wonder what it looks like.
If none of us are noticing the steel bars before our faces, they must be heavily camouflaged. It must wear the colours of the everyday, the uniform of the socially acceptable.
The cage must look benign, and be so common that normal life would seem impossible without it.
Where would you even begin to look for a cage that you have been trained from birth not to see?
I’m not sure.
But when I see toddlers glued to the ruddy glow of a smartphone… surveillance capitalists attempting to control what people read and think… and a monetary policy committee in a central bank effectively controlling the price of everything in the country…
I can almost feel my fingertips brush steel bars.
I once worked with a man who, whenever he met somebody he found interesting, would ask them the date and time of their birth.
The reason he did this was because he believed he could swiftly ascertain the essence of anybody’s character through astrology.
Provided he knew their “moon sign” and “star sign”, he argued, he had the measure of a man – their temperament, desires, what they were good at and who they would get along with.
Funnily enough, time occasionally proved his assessments correct.
I’m not sold. But I can understand why some hope the stars control their lives. After all, stars are an awful lot prettier than gut bacteria.
Have a great weekend!
All the best,
Boaz Shoshan
Editor, Southbank Investment Research
Category: Economics