The Future is Possible!

The Future is Possible!

Against the Zeitgeist of Scare Tactics

By Matthias Horz and the Future Institute

[This 2002/3 manifesto is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.zukunftsinstitut.de/2/Manifest/Mani_intro.html.]

1.

A mixture of hysteria, pessimism, crisis demagoguery and catastrophism has broken out among us. In talk shows, newspaper commentaries, conversations and economic congresses, discussions only circle around monstrous claims. Germany, it is said, is a devastated country, bankrupt, incapable of reform and lost for the future. Superlatives of the negative are used unscrupulously in this discourse from by all sides: collapse, shipwreck, disaster, lies and deceit. The public rhetoric has no inhibitions.

This lewd-shrill pessimism threatens to produce what it seems to warn us about and makes a rational discourse about the creation of a future society increasingly impossible. Constructive ideas and creative initiatives completely perish in the swamp of fault-finding. In this way we risk a mental breakdown where fear has the function of an addictive drug and the vital powers of change are destroyed.

2.

The mass media play an essential and increasingly fatal role in this game. In the escalating media competition, scandal is emphasized as a measure for raising ratings and circulation. Through conscious or unconscious reduction of complexity to black-white formulas, clichés and details, the media contributes to the autism of public opinion. The media escalate conflicts and cynically play with the feelings of citizens. They form an opportunist system in which everyone depreciates everyone else while constantly crying “life is becoming worse and worse”. Citizens can and must resist in this situation. The only tried and tested means of stopping the running amok of the media is pressing the button, canceling the subscription, the refractory letter to the editor and public opposition.

3.

Politics has a great measure of complicity in this situation. The ideologized conflict of the parties engenders a permanent election campaign in which yesterday’s trench-mentality triumphs. Parties and politicians of all shades and colors tend to play with “convictions”, strike populist tones and veil reality with empty clichés. Here they react to the longing in the population for an intact world but run the risk of losing the future of the land and the credibility of politics right down the line.

Citizens are more future-friendly and open to reform than politicians want to believe. Citizens can bear the truth when problems are explained and set in a reasonable perspective. Our society is in a constant and robust change in which individuals gain responsibilities and skills. However the language systems arising in the time of industrialism (“right versus left”) have no words and no understanding for these changes. Therefore we should support those (rare) politicians who think and act counter to the old camps. They are able to unite change with vision and overcome the meaningless phrases of party polemics.

4.

Islamic terrorism is also provided with ammunition by the media hysterism. The only really dangerous weapon of terrorists in their “world war” is the public hysteria that can lead to the paralysis of the economy. Therefore the demonization of danger must be opposed.

Militant Islamism as a social system has lost its decisive battles worldwide. Even fundamentalist “theocracies” like Iran are in a reform process today. Like Al Qaeada, the history of the German RAF shows that radicalization prepared for suicide first starts when totalitarian ideas experience their collapse and seizure of power is no longer a possibility. Terrorism in its nature is always a “last battle” and a marginal phenomenon. The Al Qaeada of Osama bin Laden is a terrorist group as often produced by history. This group is dangerous but desperate. It can hardly move and communicate. The announced great assassination attempts usually do not work. To succeed, we must hold out. The values of democracy and the open society have won and will win.

5.

Unemployment in Germany is bizarrely exaggerated in its dimensions. 7.6 percent unemployed in the West are not a mass unemployment in the Weimar extent, especially on the background of a well-subsidized system (conditions in Eastern Germany are more dramatic, the result of a social agony over decades). Here and in many other discussions, the church should stay in the village and set the problem in its true context.

To solve the problem of paid work in post-industrial society, we need not work to 80 or redistribute work with administrative decrees. All work must be organized differently, more productively, more flexibly and with more personal responsibility. The lines of work must be readjusted or recalibrated. Many socio-graphic trends help us. The increasing paid work of women and the new longevity of people create enormous demand markets for domestic and “personal touch” services. Men ask today about “work-life balance” and part-time jobs. New creative occupational models arise that focus on ideas instead of products in transition to the economies of knowledge. In many areas, labor is far more creative and satisfying today than in the old repetitive labor of the industrial system exhausting people. Labor reemerges from the riverbed of old industrial restrictions and bureaucratic regimentations. Instead of hindering, we must promote, organize and accompany this process.

6.

A glance over the border can give us courage and stimulation in reforming contemporary pension- and health systems. The examples Scandinavia, Switzerland, Benelux, New Zealand and Canada – and many others – show us how these systems can be rebuilt and made dynamic in a solidarian way. Flexibility and security are not in contradiction per se. Basic security with trifling costs for individuals can be part of a sustainable system along with additional private insurances. Even an older society can guarantee generational justice if it frees itself from old institutional encrustations. An expensive health care system can be reorganized according to a care logic and intelligent health management as countless worldly examples demonstrate,

The state security institutions that arose in the industrial age are not suited for the social structures of the future. Their relative strength is a good foundation for a constructive reorganization,

7.

The present “economic crisis” involves a cyclical growth weakness that occurs and must occur at least once a decade. Stagnations or recessions have blessed effects in the evolution of the economy. They are necessary to stimulate innovations and reduce entrepreneurial lethargy. They initiate economic learning processes and renewals. In every recession the “rotten concepts” are separated from future-friendly concepts. Exaggerated profit expectations and technology illusions are revised. Effective management methods and productive value creation survive while old hierarchies disappear.

Only criticizing economic problems and intensifying anxieties is basically wrong. We live in a rich society with great prosperity reserves. We have a diverse tradition of inventiveness and entrepreneurial praxis. The specter of deflation and long-term collapse threatens when the economy and society close themselves to the messages of crisis and attempt with all force to preserve the old structures via subsidies, illusions and redistribution.

8.

The globalized society is “more risky” in many regards than the old national industrial society. However this globalized society can also be more vital, “more energetic’, more diverse and more just. People from other countries come to us and seek their chances. Their determination to advance can be an antidote against our lethargy. Their skills and talents can enrich us.

In times of transition, the danger grows that treats to the status quo may be joined with hatred toward minorities, outsiders and newcomers. However all attempts to protect the domestic markets and assure these markets against others or foreigners will fail in the long-term and produce new global injustices. The global society must learn to use the vitality of the “newcomers” for its prosperity. This does not mean carelessness or ignorance. On the contrary, we must insist more than ever on observing the rules of the game in the global interplay! This means insisting on the basic rules of tolerance and resolute opposition to every attempt to create scapegoats.

9.

We are in an epochal transition from the industrial society to the economy of knowledge. The shift of focal points of social organization is implicit in this transition: from mass organizations to the individual, from the nation-state to supra-national systems and from secured markets to the new global interplay of forces. This change causes pains and uncertainties. Still this change is not a fate. Compared to the last epochal transition – from the agrarian-feudal culture to the industrial society, we can and will shape the transition without great sacrifice.

Education plays a central role in this process in the sense of an “evolving anthropology”. The “industrial man” who experienced an “education” (1) once in his life and then went accepted a largely pre-determined way of life is history. Learning cannot be channeled in “curriculum” but accompanies our life as a central impulse and constant of human inquisitiveness. We need a new “culture of acknowledgment” that sets the teachability and changeability of the individual in the center of social discourse.

10.

We plead for an enlightened, skeptical optimism that takes a future-open attitude to present problems. We plead against the “negative blindness” that sees all phenomena only as threat, loss and decline.

We mount a silent and sometimes loud resistance against the dominant panic-consensus. We urge media, politicians and opinion-makers to refuse the hysteria-mode and to rely on chances instead of multiplying threats. We network with people and ideas that are committed to this basic attitude: creating the future instead of cringing before the future in the vale of tears!