Tag: philosophy

Financial mathematics has something cruel about it. When studying it, it is not difficult to see that it works, that is, that the long term really does confirm the theory of multiplication. Although recent, it already has sufficient historical data to estimate with some certainty the results of different scenarios, including those that are unforeseen. Risk, too, can now be quantified in fairly reliable figures. But all of these calculations, all of these estimates, all of this sufficiently safe way of operating, with more than satisfactory results, is always based on percentages. No matter how sophisticated the calculation or how powerful the computer, it is impossible to escape this constraint: a percentage is always relative to the principal.

It is never easy to visualize the present moment and calculate how quickly it will have been an opportunity that has gone. Some decisions mature much sooner than expected, and when one realizes it, the hesitation itself has already borne fruit. A mere five-year interval creates a new reality, in which the past has materialized into visible consequences from which one can only learn. One learns, of course, but the knowledge acquired does not help much in overcoming that initial difficulty in the present.

A worldview that eliminates the non-measurable and non-understandable from reality, as well as being childish and sterilizing, tends to enable man to commit monstrous acts and make him a supremely treacherous animal. His misunderstanding of the world distorts the importance he attaches to himself, undermining notions of dependence and fragility. But the worst thing, without a doubt, is the illusion of feeling liberated, isolated, empowered to all knowledge and all action. This is how the most destructive self-love imaginable takes root. Nothing holds him back, no one watches him and there is no accountability. Such a man is to always have him far away and not pay him the slightest attention.

The man who nurtures the ideal of freedom tends to become very bitter, because freedom is never complete and sometimes it only appears in conjunction with a restriction. It is pointless trying to solve the problem: in everything there is the undefined and the determined. Man is free within certain conditions and under certain aspects from which he can never fully free himself. To believe that one day he will finally be able to do so is simply stupid. But there are choices that cannot be given up; there are essential freedoms. Only to these should attention be directed.