I never understood, why our so called civilization creates so many devastating problems. Studying philosophy was a try to find an answer to that question; actually, I did not find it there. Instead, after graduating, I had to deal with personal problems; surprisingly, this turned out to be a big step on the way to that answer. Another step was, that I already found a lot of literature that helped me with getting another perspective on our society, especially concerning the underlying judgment about human nature.
Since the 70s of the last century, environmental destruction got more and more into focus. Non-governmental organizations took care of forcing governments all over the northern hemisphere to realize more and more of the problems the industrial sector was creating. Industrial processes cause pollution of air, water, and soil; the products, when thrown away, cause more pollution. Behind this are patterns of thinking and behavior that responsible managers, politicians, in one word: decision-makers, still do not question. In case a certain chemical substance turns out to cause environmental damage, it is replaced with another chemical substance - until the latter is also shown to be causing severe problems. Side-effects, interaction with other substances, etc. - as long as any effect is not documented "the right way," in the eyes of decision-makers (and many scientists, too) it does not exist.
The political recipes with regard to these problems, if they still aren't ignored, are often nothing else than evasive action (for example, the recurring international conferences on climate change). International agreements like those for so-called free trade aggravte the situation: more products of the same kind travel back and forth over the whole world, which means more pollution and more CO2.
Why, after Tschernobyl, did managers of the nuclear industrie go on with this dangerous technique (and why is Fukushima still not good enough a reason to stop it)? Why do people go on using automobiles for their daily errands, in spite of all the warnings, concerning smog in winter and ozone in summer? Whereas people with health problems as well as children (and people who do sports) are warned to not exercise outside or just stay inside? Why do people wait for the government to take action on a problem, instead of adjusting their behaviour to the given situation?
Finding the right answer to the question, why people act with ignorance to the facts, is crucial for being able to dealing not only with environmental problems. Because politicians usually focus their attention on "the economy," solidarity is more and more eroding. Hostility and resentment against just those people who, because of social structures and other circumstances, are economically already left behind, are increasing - nationally, and internationally as well. Our governments and, of course, the profiting corporations, don't want to accom-modate fugitives from those parts of the world, where these very same governments etc. aim at destroying local markets, so that products made in our countries (and made by our people) can be sold in their's. (And ignoring the question of who, if they go on with this politics, will be left in an economically appropriate position to buy those products.) There are, of course, a lot more examples for this kind of action.
The reason for all these undesirable deveplopments cannot be found in any practical constraints; the latter are already the result of the former. A lot of circumstances are not easy to change, but this is no reason for acting submissively. Also, it is no way to make things better by complicating the situation through more rules, laws, and international agreements - from this, we get an even more opaque net of connections and intertwined dependences which makes it more complicated to simplify the system.
At the ground of this are personal deficites, passed on from generation to generation for hundreds of years. In this blog, I will try to look into this through different subjects. Not every essay will contain anything there is to a subject - it would get much too long and confused. It may also take a second or third essay, to make a subject intelligible. Sometimes, my concern is just to put things in the right connection, where official labels seem just twisted. I will seldom translate German text into English (or vice versa). Instead, I will deal with one and the same subject in different ways. I hope, little by little, to make myself clear so that you will be able to get the whole picture.
Since the 70s of the last century, environmental destruction got more and more into focus. Non-governmental organizations took care of forcing governments all over the northern hemisphere to realize more and more of the problems the industrial sector was creating. Industrial processes cause pollution of air, water, and soil; the products, when thrown away, cause more pollution. Behind this are patterns of thinking and behavior that responsible managers, politicians, in one word: decision-makers, still do not question. In case a certain chemical substance turns out to cause environmental damage, it is replaced with another chemical substance - until the latter is also shown to be causing severe problems. Side-effects, interaction with other substances, etc. - as long as any effect is not documented "the right way," in the eyes of decision-makers (and many scientists, too) it does not exist.
The political recipes with regard to these problems, if they still aren't ignored, are often nothing else than evasive action (for example, the recurring international conferences on climate change). International agreements like those for so-called free trade aggravte the situation: more products of the same kind travel back and forth over the whole world, which means more pollution and more CO2.
Why, after Tschernobyl, did managers of the nuclear industrie go on with this dangerous technique (and why is Fukushima still not good enough a reason to stop it)? Why do people go on using automobiles for their daily errands, in spite of all the warnings, concerning smog in winter and ozone in summer? Whereas people with health problems as well as children (and people who do sports) are warned to not exercise outside or just stay inside? Why do people wait for the government to take action on a problem, instead of adjusting their behaviour to the given situation?
Finding the right answer to the question, why people act with ignorance to the facts, is crucial for being able to dealing not only with environmental problems. Because politicians usually focus their attention on "the economy," solidarity is more and more eroding. Hostility and resentment against just those people who, because of social structures and other circumstances, are economically already left behind, are increasing - nationally, and internationally as well. Our governments and, of course, the profiting corporations, don't want to accom-modate fugitives from those parts of the world, where these very same governments etc. aim at destroying local markets, so that products made in our countries (and made by our people) can be sold in their's. (And ignoring the question of who, if they go on with this politics, will be left in an economically appropriate position to buy those products.) There are, of course, a lot more examples for this kind of action.
The reason for all these undesirable deveplopments cannot be found in any practical constraints; the latter are already the result of the former. A lot of circumstances are not easy to change, but this is no reason for acting submissively. Also, it is no way to make things better by complicating the situation through more rules, laws, and international agreements - from this, we get an even more opaque net of connections and intertwined dependences which makes it more complicated to simplify the system.
At the ground of this are personal deficites, passed on from generation to generation for hundreds of years. In this blog, I will try to look into this through different subjects. Not every essay will contain anything there is to a subject - it would get much too long and confused. It may also take a second or third essay, to make a subject intelligible. Sometimes, my concern is just to put things in the right connection, where official labels seem just twisted. I will seldom translate German text into English (or vice versa). Instead, I will deal with one and the same subject in different ways. I hope, little by little, to make myself clear so that you will be able to get the whole picture.
