Where do we come from and how can we build a familial democracy
E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7568-2615-5
Verlag: Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Traditional Physics vs Unified Physics
Traditional Science vs Unified Science
Recognising our cosmic home
Our Cosmic Hierarchy
Universal Cosmic Time Scale
Our cosmic future
Our cosmic climate
Shaping our future better
Demographic Spectrum
Extended familial life
World administration
Immediate measures
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Foreword
Our most important tasks in the 21st century
We must do everything possible to enable our further evolution, and the further evolution of as many other species, genera, and families of living beings as possible. That is what I see as the meaning of our lives. And I very much hope that I am not alone in this world. Humanity has always been, and will remain to the bitter end, a plaything of Nature. Whether we finally want to realise it or not, we cannot escape our fate. Our fate is inextricably linked to the only Earth that shelters us. We can continue to exploit its resources for a few more decades as we have done so far. Or we can try to improve ourselves and, in harmony with Nature, make the next millennia here on Earth bearable, perhaps even beautiful. Not for the individual, but for all of us. That is what I see as the main problem of human beings. As the only species on Earth, we have learned to enjoy malicious joy (German: Schadenfreude). Many of us say to ourselves: I can bear a lot of "bad" when I see that others are worse off than I am. With this maxim, deeply anchored in our inner being, we support the existence of the enormous differences between individuals. Especially, the differences between the amounts of resources available to each one of us. While millions of people starve to death year after year, we admire the few who can be shot into space to be able to look down on the rest of humanity from above from an orbit around the Earth. How the famines of the millions and the trips into space of the few are connected, we do not want to know. Even if most of us have no real chance of following the multi-billionaires into space at some point, the main thing is that we are not among the starving ones either. Thanks to this weakness of our character, we "breed" not only the super-rich, but also dictators. Anyone who denounced an opponent of the regime was given a new flat by Stalin. But Stalin was not the first and not the last who knew how to exploit this weakness of ours. That the method has always worked is proved by the existence of the dictators of past civilisations. The method still works today. How many innocent people died as a result, nobody knows today. Or do you really want to know? Another thought. German language is quite precise. Taking one's own life is correctly called (in German) Selbstmord (suicide), that is, a murder of oneself. But taking someone else's life, against their will, is also murder, and always and everywhere. I know of no exception. As long as the other person can express his will. Carrying out a death sentence must therefore also be seen as an exercise of murder. Only in such a case is murder justified by the "will" of society, which has obliged its own legal authority to sentence particularly serious crimes against society (that is, also against its members) to death. Today, however, fortunately only a few societies still share this "murderous" opinion from the past. But what about cases where the other person is unable to express his or her will? A coma patient, for example. No matter how hard we try to find a legal, ethical, moral excuse in this case, switching off the medical-technical devices that sustain the life of a patient in a coma state is also murder. As relatives of the coma patient, we will be very reluctant to allow such a designation. But basically, it's almost always the question of cost. Can we (as a society, as relatives, as life partners) still afford to continue treating the patient, or not? At some point, the costs are always too high. Then we are ready to decide in favour of murder. Fortunately, such fates are relatively rare, so hardly anyone has to worry about their importance. Is "not thinking" also permissible in the millions of other cases of others "condemned" to death? This time it is about the children who are born into such poor conditions that they are threatened with starvation from birth, and actually have to die millions of times because we all others do not feel obliged for them. Is it not the case that the rest of us, through our "non-thinking", through our inaction, through our acquiescence to convenient consumerism, are denying these very children life-sustaining measures? But what about the parents of these starving children? Very often they are just the "happy" survivors of the previous generation of starving children. Without food, without education, without any perspective. There are even around the world, democratic societies we all know well, where the impoverished parents try to limit the number of their children. Very often the only option left to them is murder. The murder of newborns, especially if they are girls. Or murder by abortion. Here we come to the point that will probably even shock many of the readers of this book, because so far we discuss this problem with each other far too little, and if at all, then very superficially. I also agree with most of the women in this world that the decision to abort a child that cannot (or must not) be born for really important reasons belongs only to the expectant mother (preferably with the consent of the expectant father). Society, however modern it wants to call itself, must not interfere in this. But here, and here my opinion differs greatly from the usual opinion, one must see every abortion exactly as what it actually is. Namely, a murder. A murder of a human being who cannot yet freely express his will to live. The clear naming of this fact is therefore necessary so that every expectant mother (or ideally, every pair of expectant parents) realises how important, indeed extremely extraordinary, their decision is. Namely, vital. In that moment, they decide about life and death. No more and no less. Here, in passing, a comment on the disgusting tendency to distort the natural facts. The reasons for the distortion are only secondary here. The life of a human being always begins with the implantation of the maternal egg fertilised by the expectant father in the uterus of the expectant mother. Calling a growing human being a lump of cells (or an embryo or a foetus) a few weeks later should, in my opinion, be punished as a crime against human dignity. And there is another important idea to which we want to pay special attention in this book. It is about the structure of our world community. No matter what our own world view is at the moment, we all agree that several thousand years ago there were far fewer people living on Earth. It is also almost certain that they lived together in certain groups. Otherwise they would not have been able to survive permanently. In order to bring one's own offspring into the world successfully and also capable of survival, one needs a group of people of a certain minimum size. Sociological studies suggest that an optimal size of a human group requires about 140-150 members. The first humans were hunters and gatherers. That is, they secured their food base by hunting the available wild animals and gathering fruit and other edible wild plants. If a group found too little to eat, they almost always had the option of moving to another area of the Earth and setting up camp there. It seems possible that from time to time there might be a fight between neighbouring groups to claim better territory for themselves. But basically, each group of early humans had the choice to avoid such a fight and move on. A pre-programmed violence between the different groups of early humans can therefore be rather excluded. The wild animals still demonstrate this behaviour today; if we don't close them off too narrow. However, in the more recent history of the last millennia, one observes a sharp increase in violent clashes between almost all human groups. Why has there been such a rise in the propensity for violence? One very strong assumption links this propensity for violence to the spread of sedentarisation in this period of history. When people became sedentary, their individual groups had to be able to defend their territories against potential enemies. One could postulate a thesis here that it was the sedentary people who invented borders, wars and war leaders. Some of the war leaders soon discovered that it was easier to take vital resources by robbing them from their neighbours than to laboriously produce them themselves. This hypothesis seems very plausible, even typically human. In my eyes, however, it would be far exaggerated. People's propensity to violence is not innate. Rather, it has been reinforced by certain circumstances of our coexistence. In fact, we have observed a clear decrease in people's willingness to use violence around the world in recent centuries. So one has to go a little deeper into this question. What motivated early humans to make the transition to settlement? Why did they feel compelled at some point to settle in a fixed place? This was connected with the final abandonment of the hunter-gatherer way of life that had worked well for thousands of years. They were forced to define a "property". The first consequences were one's own fields, which one had to cultivate, one's own plants, which one had to harvest, and one's own animals, which one had to domesticate and slaughter. To increase the yield, one had to have more offspring in order to have more labour. Why all this? Why did they decide to take such a step, which certainly restricts the freedom of each individual? This is precisely the "sticking point" in the evolution of the structure of our world community that we want to deal with in particular detail in this book. I will put forward the thesis that the structure of our world community has historically evolved in this way, and not otherwise, because in the individual steps of our past over the...
