Constantly, I read about strife and polarization. That we face each other as two camps, because there can only be one winner. That there can’t be any other way, or that there has never been a third way*. To me, it means that the poison of free market thinking has seeped into all levels of society and is doing its destructive work there. Making our common sense immune to more reasonable alternatives.* This under the false pretense that if all people compete with each other, a competition acts as the main incentive to take one’s own initiative. Leads to a mutual increase in performance as everyone tries their hardest to win.
In essence, it is nothing more than an unjustified one-sided praise of the individual with all his shortcomings and moral flaws. This assumption that profit maximization is the main pursuit for business and the individual as the foundation for contemporary reality ignores the negative social consequences for the loser. * The fact that the loser is mostly gobbled up and consumed, you can safely assert. Losing constitutes the bitter food for victory. That all his followers also belong to the losing party.* Whereby, with the right of the strongest, entire (weaker)* civilizations lose out.
Whereas, it is a fallacy to assume that the right of the strongest equals the right of the best. Indeed, the best is not a right but a too-right gift from all to all.* It is the interaction between the good of some and the good of others, and with that, I would say if I were deeply religious; a sign of God’s grace and love that should guide us in all we undertake. As a humanist, I think pretty much the same way. Only I believe more in people, in Die Macht zu wollen*, which is peculiar to us humans. Only against oppression awaits renewed discovery.
Yet in recent years I have neither heard nor read about the concept of peaceful coexistence. Being seemingly from the old box, I will explain for you what this concept from the time of the peace movement and the struggle for equal civil rights means.
Broadly speaking, it means that countries that are each other’s political rivals strive to cooperate and relax in such a way that conflicts remain manageable and do not end in a military confrontation, which neither side can win without the certainty of mutual destruction.
In a social context, that despite cultural differences, you can distill from that the best for both social populations. Which can only succeed if you can put aside initial negative prejudices and see what bounds us. How we need each other. Without the idea that new population groups must fully integrate because this will make cross-pollination impossible. *
In economic terms, what we saw in the development of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.* An infectious disease that threatened to engulf the world. Which led to a global collaboration to get the knowledge needed to ensure the survival of humanity within the shortest possible time.
A collaboration that required a mental and social upheaval: from profit as the greatest financial gain for the tech companies to profit as the privilege of the best. That profit belongs to those who have humanity’s best interests at heart. I admit it immediately a landslide within the chronicles that mainly tell of the constant competition between those in power. Myths of self-power in which the winners attribute history to themselves. Whereby the story of the common man never received that no attention to which the story of all of us as the probably best have no more than full right to.
Ludo
* the third way; current in social democracy, which tries to reconcile the welfare state with (neo)liberal principles.
* See the scientific articles on the psychological consequences of losing.
* opposed to the principle of the philosopher Nietzsche, die Willen zu Macht.
* In a democracy, the aim is to minimize loss for everyone.
* alternative to the worldview of Thomas Hobbs.
