Fahrplan

Zwei wichtige Einsichten finden nun auf der Ebene der Gesellschaft zusammen und liefern die Grundlage für ein völlig neues Menschenbild. Erstens: Die meisten Probleme der Erde entstehen durch die Auswirkungen von Eigeninteressen auf Kosten des Interesses der Gemeinschaft aller Menschen. Der Ökologe Garret Hardin formulierte diesen Gedanken bereits 1968 in einem Artikel in Science nachdrücklich unter der Bezeichnung „The Tragedy of the commons“. Zweitens: Unser Versuch unser Verhältnis zur Natur allein durch unseren Verstand und unsere Logik bestimmen zu wollen ist dazu bestimmt, dass wir ihn immer mehr als Gefängnis empfinden. Richard Powers bringt diese Einsicht 1989 in seinem Roman „The Prisoner´s Dilemma“ auf den Punkt, in dem er einen Wissenschaftler folgende Erkenntnis zukommen lässt – die, wie wir sehen werden, später von David Foster Wallace weiter in die Kultur hinein getragen wird: „…a handful of semesters into his career, while standing up in front of thirty-two at best indifferent pubescent teenagers, lecturing about the importance of the XYZ Affair, he has a revelation. Dad suddenly sees that every one of these fifteen-year-olds has reached this classroom and will leave it for places unknown through a series of small and unnoticed decisions – thousands of them a day. More often than not, these incremental decisions are made in complete ignorance of the Big Picture. All at once, the traditional teaching of history as assorted facts means nothing. The only thing that matters is to reveal to that pasty boy in the second row that he is the inheritor and future of the world.“ (ebenda S. 244)

Konnte schon gegen 1980 formuliert werden welche Falle der etablierte akademische und journalistische Diskurs darstellt – so etwa auch bei Niklas Luhmann („Das Auflöse-und Rekombinationsvermögen des wissenschaftlichen Diskurses ist gerichtet, so können wir zusammenfassen, auf die Grenzvorstellung eines geschlossenen-selbstreferentiellen Systems (Ich denke, was du denkst, wenn du denkst was ich denke in beliebiger Umwelt.) In der wirklichen Welt des realen Lebensvollzugs ist aber geschlossene Selbstreferenz ebenso wenig möglich wie beliebige Umwelt.“ „Ideenevolution“ S.181 Suhrkamp 2008) – dauerte es noch bis zum Jahr 2005 bis die Schlussfolgerungen aus solcher Erkenntnis wirklich für eine ganze Generation formuliert werden konnten, auf eine Art, so dass sie diese auch mit Breitenwirkung erreichten. Hier ein Ausschnitt aus dem Text „This is Water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life“ von David Foster Wallace, der eindrücklich das Dilemma des alten Menschenbildes und die Möglichkeit eines neuen für die jetzige Generation beschreibt. (Alan Watts nahm diesen Appell von Wallace bereits 1966 eindringlich vorweg in seinem Klassiker „The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are“ .)

„Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about „teaching you how to think“ is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: „Learning how to think“ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about „the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.“ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. (…) Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the „rat race“ — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: „This is water, this is water.“

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.“1)

1) Siehe auch die in diesem Zusammenhang wichtigen Bücher von David C. Korten „Agenda for a New Economy“ , Gar Alperovitz: „America Beyond Capitalism“, „The Uprising“ von David Sirota, die Dokumentarfilme von Adam Curtis: Century of the Self. sowie The power of nightmares, „Life Inc“ von dem Dokumentar-Filmemacher und Wiessenschaftler Douglas Rushkoff, der aufzeigt wie die Menschen die Werte, die die großen Firmen propagieren zur Grundlage ihres Lebens gemacht haben, ohne sich dessen überhaupt bewusst zu sein, sowie natürlich „The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power “ von Joel Bakan

nummeriert

in der deutschen Übersetzung gibt es natürlich auch keine Kapitelnummern; die Angaben sollen nur zur Orientierung dienen