On being human
To be human today often means to be different. To be human means that actions are not driven by the struggle for the golden calf, but by usefulness – to others, to society, to nature.
To be human means not to work behind one's back against others, but to work openly together with others (who can be different and increasingly must be different): because otherwise it is not virtuous – not human.
To be human means not to be part of a uniform herd, but to be an individual within the community: and to excel within it in making the most of one's individuality.
To be human is not to be a Christian, but to be Christ.
For many years, I have been preoccupied with the question: What is normal? Raised with an understanding expressed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his poem Das Göttliche (The Divine) – that humans should be noble, helpful, and good – I find it increasingly difficult to measure human activity against this standard, which is similar to the meter and the kilogram, without having to conclude that a normality is developing and being taken for granted that is increasingly losing its connection to the normal: Being normal without normality makes being normal the norm.
In our society, which is primarily oriented toward self-interest rather than the common good, the values to which we are committed based on Christian and humanistic understanding are increasingly being lost. Appearances determine reality: words are increasingly worthless; convictions are feigned and serve self-interest and manipulation; silence becomes a protective facade against actual or potential failure; freedom favors the right of the strongest and conceals the lack of freedom in the mind; democracy becomes the greatest lie of the 21st century.
The loss of moral and ethical substance goes hand in hand with the challenges of our time – such as climate change, demographics, mass surveillance, artificial intelligence and technological progress in general, the education crisis, monocultures, debt and armament. The lack of engagement with these issues, or the flawed engagement that does occur, driven by self-interest, is exacerbated by a head-in-the-sand mentality that retreats into the private sphere, from where, like politicians, people shoot at anything they don't understand, anything that is different, anything that seems dangerous or anything that tries to lure them out from behind the stove. The resulting social tensions increase the costs of dealing with any challenge and postpone its resolution to a future that may never arrive.
What our country's political and economic elite, exemplified by Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Volkswagen, Siemens, and Wirecard, have demonstrated in terms of failure, fraud, enrichment, turning a blind eye, defamation – by no means an exhaustive list in the NSA affair, the Reformation anniversary, the coronavirus pandemic, the flood disaster in July 2021, the crisis enrichment by politicians, the Cum-Ex scandal, the emissions scandal, the construction of Berlin Airport, foreign policy – is only the tip of the iceberg of what our society looks like. It is the normality of our society that allows all this to develop in the first place. And it usually goes unpunished, because it arises from the prevailing norm, which legitimizes and protects itself.
In my books and the texts found on this website, I endeavor to trace the constitution of our society. However, this serves the sole purpose of creatively searching for ways to show the prevailing normality paths that lead it to the normality that exists in the realm of thought but survives only rudimentarily in the harsh reality. These paths must be found if we want to lead our country into a prosperous future in which our children and grandchildren also thrive, if we want to maintain our country's position in the world, and ultimately so that humanity can survive in all its diversity.
I wish readers who turn to my books and texts an interesting, entertaining, and stimulating read. When British writer Aldous Huxley says that those who know how to read possess the key to great deeds and undreamed-of possibilities, I hope to contribute something to the interest in reading as well as to the willingness and ability to break new ground.
This applies not least to my aphorisms, which I regard as an open-source operating system for analyzing and shaping individual, entrepreneurial, and social processes, and which I have been using successfully in my work for years.
I am happy to engage in any dialogue on the substance of my observations and their application to specific problems.