About Me

My name is Manuel Stelzl, MA BA

Focus areas: Dopamine Economy, Cognitive Psychology, Self-Knowledge and Judgment, Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, Virtue Ethics, Transhumanism

I studied Russian, psychology and philosophy, have since published more than 40 articles on philosophical topics, and have been organizing talks and discussion rounds since 2023 on the themes of self-knowledge, limbic capitalism and societal change. My focus is on clarifying the little-noticed, long-term side effects of novel technologies on our health, cognitive abilities, social relationships, our society, and the stability of our democracy. In particular, I am interested in the long-term side effects of excessive consumption of those technologies in the sense of short-term utility maximization (short-term vs. long-term rationality), because I suspect this holds the greatest potential for harm.

In my master's thesis, I dealt with closely related questions of self-knowledge, the possibility of attaining it, and its significance for our capacity for judgment.

This subsequently motivated me to discuss the question of the good life, in the context of ever more tempting and manipulative virtual worlds, with an ever-growing number of people, since I see this as one of the greatest future challenges for mental health and our social life. Another focus of my work is the discussion of powerful freedom ideologies (neoliberalism, libertarianism, transhumanism) in the context of our tendency to understand freedom as boundlessness (in the sense of „more, better, faster, all the time“). Because this puts us at particular risk of losing stability and orientation, which is why this educational initiative was originally meant to carry the title „Freedom, Technology and Humanity“.

The disruptive changes discussed here in the context of talks affect all of us. The problem is the extremely high pace of these developments. My goal is to share and discuss important, education-relevant analyses and prominent solution proposals in this context - not only with parents and students, but especially also with political leaders.

In my talks, followed by discussion, I invite interested people to engage with the full scope of this transformation process, in order to understand in time how we should adapt, both individually and as a society, so as not to ultimately become completely overwhelmed.