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When I was preparing for this talk, I went to search for a couple of quotes that I can share with you.
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Good news, I found three that I particularly liked.
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The first by Samuel Johnson, who said,
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“When making your choice in life, do not forget to live.”
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The second by Aeschylus, who reminded us that,
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“Happiness is a choice that requires effort.”
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And the third is one by Groucho Marx who said,
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“I wouldn’t want to choose to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
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Now, bad news, I didn’t know which one of these quotes to choose and share with you.
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The sweet anxiety of choice.
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In today’s times of post-industrial capitalism,
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choice, together with individual freedom and the idea of self-making,
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has been elevated to an ideal.
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Now, together with this, we also have a belief in endless progress.
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But the underside of this ideology has been an increase of anxiety,
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feeling of guilt, feeling of being inadequate,
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feeling that we are failing in our choices.
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Sadly, this ideology of individual choice has prevented us to think about social changes.
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It appears that this ideology was actually very efficient in pacifying us as political and social thinkers.
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Instead of making social critique, we are more and more engaging in self-critique,
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sometimes to the point of self-destruction.
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Now, how come that ideology of choice is still so powerful,
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even among people who have not many things to choose among?
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How come that even people who are poor very much still identify with the idea of choice, the kind of rational idea of choice which we embrace?
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Now, the ideology of choice is very successful in sort of opening for us
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a space to think about some imagined future.
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Let me give you an example.
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My friend Manya, when she was a student at university in California,
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was earning money by working for a car dealer.
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Now, Manya, when she encountered the typical customer,
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would debate with him about his life style, how much he wants to spend,
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how many children he has, what does he need the car for?
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They would usually come to a good conclusion what would be a perfect car.
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Now, before Manya’s customer would go home and think things through,
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she would say to him,
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“The car that you are buying now is perfect,
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but in the few year’s time, when your kids will be already out of the house,
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when you will have a little bit more money,
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that other car will be ideal.
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But what you are buying now is great.”
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Now, the majority of Manya’s customers who came back the next day bought that other car,
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the car they did not need, the car that cost far too much money.
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Now, Manya became so successful in selling cars that soon she moved on to selling airplanes.
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And knowing so much about the psychology of people
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prepared her well for her current job, which is that of a psychoanalyst.
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Now, why were Manya’s customers so irrational?
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Manya’s success was that she was able to open in their heads an image of an idealized future,
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an image of themselves when they are already more successful, freer.
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And for them, choose that other car was as if they are coming closer to this ideal
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in which it was as if Manya already saw them.
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Now, we rarely make really totally rational choices.
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Choices are influenced by our unconscious, by our community.
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We’re often choosing by guessing, what would other people think about our choice?
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Also we are choosing by looking at what others are choosing.
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We’re also guessing what is socially acceptable choice.
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Now, because of this, we actually even after we have already chosen, like bought a car,
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endlessly read reviews about cars,
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as if we still want to convince ourselves that we made the right choice.
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Now, choices are anxiety-provoking.
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They are linked to risks, losses.
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They are highly unpredictable.
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Now, because of this, people have now more and more problems that they are not choosing anything.
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Not long ago, I was at a wedding reception.
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And I met a young, beautiful woman who immediately started telling me about her anxiety over choice.
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She said to me, “I needed one month to decide which dress to wear.”
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Then she said, “For weeks I was researching which hotel to stay for this one night.
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And now, I need to choose a sperm donor.”
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I looked at this woman in shock.
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“Sperm donor? What’s the rush?”
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She said, “I’m turning 40 at the end of this year,
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and I’ve been so bad in choosing men in my life.”
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Now choice, because it’s linked to risks, is anxiety-provoking.
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And it was already the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
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who pointed out that anxiety is linked to the possibility of possibility.
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Now, we think today that we can prevent these risks.
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We have endless market analysis,
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projections of the future earnings.
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Even with market, which is about chance, randomness, we think we can predict rationally where it’s going.
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Now, chance is actually becoming very traumatic.
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Last year, my friend Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago organized an event,
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a conference on the idea of chance.
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He and I were together on the panel, and just before delivering our papers,
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we didn’t know each other’s papers, we decided to take chance seriously.
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So we informed our audience that what they will just now hear will be a random paper,
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a mixture of the two papers, which we didn’t know what you know, each was writing.
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Now, we delivered the conference in such a way.
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Bernard read his first paragraph.
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I read my first paragraph.
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Bernard read his second paragraph, I read my second paragraph,
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in this way towards the end of our papers.
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Now, you will be surprised that a majority of our audience
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did not think that what they’d just listened was a complete random paper.
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They couldn’t believe that speaking from the position of authority
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like two professors we were, we would take you know, chance seriously.
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They thought we prepared the paper together
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and was just joking that it’s random.
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Now, we live in times with a lot of information, big data,
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a lot of knowledge about the insides of our body.
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We decoded our genome.
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We know about our brains more than before.
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But surprisingly, people are more and more turning a blind eye in front of this knowledge.
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Ignorance and denial are on the rise.
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Now, in regard to current economic crisis,
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we think that we will just wake up again and everything will be the same as before,
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and no political or social changes are needed.
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In regard to ecological crisis, we think nothing needs to be done just now,
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or others need to act before us.
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Or even when ecological crisis already happens, like the catastrophe in Fukushima,
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often we have people living in the same environment with the same amount of information
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and half of them will be anxious about radiation and half of them will ignore it.
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Now, psychoanalysts know very well that people surprisingly don’t have passion for knowledge,
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but passion for ignorance.
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Now, what does that mean?
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Let’s say when we are facing a life-threatening illness,
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a lot of people don’t want to know that.
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They rather prefer denying the illness, which is why it’s not so wise to inform them if they don’t ask.
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Surprisingly, research shows that sometimes people who deny their illness live longer than those who are rationally choosing the best treatment.
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Now, this ignorance, however, is not very helpful on the level of the social.
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When we’re ignorant about where we are heading,
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you know, a lot of social damage can be caused.
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Now, on top of facing ignorance, we’re also facing today some kind of obviousness.
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Now, it was French philosopher Louis Althusser who pointed out
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that ideology functions in such a way that it creates a veil of obviousness.
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Before we kind of do any social critique,
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it’s necessary really to lift that veil of obviousness
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and to think through a little bit differently.
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If we go back to this ideology of individual, rational choice we often embrace,
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it’s necessary precisely here to lift this obviousness
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and to think a little bit differently.
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Now for me, a question often is,
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why we still embrace this idea of a self-made man on which capitalism relied from its beginning?
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Why we think that we are really such masters of our lives
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that we can rationally make the best ideal choices,
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that we don’t accept losses and risks?
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And for me, it’s very shocking to see sometime very poor people,
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for example, not supporting the idea of the rich being taxed more.
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Quite often here they still identify with a certain kind of a lottery mentality.
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Okay, maybe they don’t think that they will make it in the future,
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but maybe they think, my son might become the next Bill Gates.
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And who would want to tax one’s son?
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Or, a question for me is also, you know why would people who have no health insurance not embrace universal healthcare?
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Sometimes they don’t embrace it, again identifying with the idea of choice, but they have nothing to choose from.
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Now, Margaret Thatcher famously said,
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that there is nothing like a society.
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Society doesn’t exist.
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It is only individuals and their families.
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Sadly, this ideology still functions very well,
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which is why people who are poor might feel ashamed for their poverty.
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We might endlessly feel guilty that we are not making the right choices and that’s why we didn’t succeed.
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We are anxious that we are not good enough.
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That’s why we work very hard, long hours at the workplace
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and equally long hours on remaking ourselves.
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Now, when we are anxious over choices,
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sometimes we easily give our power of choice away.
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We identify with the guru who tells us what to do, self-help therapists,
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or we embrace a totalitarian leader who appears to have no doubts about choices, who sort of knows.
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Now, often people ask me,
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“What did you learn by studying choice?”
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And there is an important message that I did learn.
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When thinking about choices, I stopped taking choices too seriously, personally.
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First, I realized a lot of choice I make is not rational.
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It’s linked to my unconscious, my guesses of what others are choosing,
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or what is a socially embraced choice.
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I also embrace the idea that we should go beyond thinking about individual choices,
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that it’s very important to rethink social choices,
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since this ideology of individual choice has pacified us.
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It really prevented us to think about social change.
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We spend so much time choosing things for ourselves and barely reflect on communal choices we can make.
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Now, we should not forget that choice is always linked to change.
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We can make individual changes, but we can make social changes.
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We can choose to have more wolves.
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We can choose to change our environment to have more bees.
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We can choose to have different rating agencies.
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We can choose to control corporations instead of allowing corporations controlling us.
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We have a possibility to make changes.
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Now, I started with a quote from Samuel Johnson,
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who said that when we make choice in life, we shouldn’t forget to live.
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Finally, you can see I did have a choice to choose one of the three quotes with which I wanted to start my lecture.
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I did have a choice, such as nations, as people,
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we have choices too to rethink in what kind of society we want to live in the future.
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Thank you.