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Generalization is easy.
But just not helpful (icon image)
Photo: Dmitriy Bilous/Blend Images / Getty Images/Tetra images RF
In the traumatizing last few years, almost everyone was looking for support - in family, with friends, in distraction, while streaming, gaming or in a clear position.
It's understandable when everything on the outside blurs, the familiar falls away, life seems threatening and uncertain, the world is going crazy and the news isn't very reassuring.
It takes an opinion, a point of view, clarity to get through it all.
What began years earlier with "Uncle Rudi chooses AfD, we won't invite him to his birthday anymore" was accelerated in this way.
People no longer associated with friends, family members, colleagues who had an opinion that contradicted their own, read opinion.
Many had collected such a solid, half-knowledge about the most complicated topics that they could not tolerate the slightest uncertainty.
It has not improved.
exclusion of dissenters
Humanity has not embraced.
On the contrary.
The exclusion of dissenters was increased by turning away from people who had contact with other people.
Hans used to have a Nena record, and Aunt Hilde was a Greta fan.
Artists who, from their own point of view, had a false pro- or contra-bullshit opinion were removed from the cultural program of individuals and ultimately also rejected by organizers if at some point - say 10 years ago - they had had unpleasant contacts with someone.
Or once signed a petition that someone else had also signed.
For a long time, the BDS association, which is critical of Jews, has maintained the tradition of excluding athletes, artists and scientists from Israel, i.e. rendering those who make the most effort to engage in dialogue invisible.
Since the war in Ukraine, Russian artists and athletes have been hectically buried under the barn of oblivion.
Partly understandable, so as not to hurt Ukrainians' feelings, but still worth thinking about.
If you know what offensive protest means in autocracies - imprisonment, unemployment or leaving your familiar surroundings - you can question yourself and your own courage.
Apart from losing their own power, autocrats fear little more than art and culture.
It is often artists and cultural workers who, at their own risk, try to create something unifying, to point out grievances, to think utopian, and that despite all the dangers.
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Sibylle Berg
RCE #RemoteCodeExecution
Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch
Number of pages: 704
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If you exclude the culture and science of dictatorial systems from your own thinking and experience, you run the risk of removing whole countries from the intellectual map: the warmongering Ethiopians, the Saudis, the Brazilians, the Hungarians, the Poles, … you put it any country that is at war, living under a regime of terror, not sufficiently democratic, or whose governments are generally known to be making questionable decisions.
The problem with knee-jerk general condemnation is that one no longer differentiates.
Does not see the individual, his work and performance, and that this cements his own distanced view of current affairs.
The world is so fragmented and complex, so difficult to understand, that one longs for clarity.
Good and bad, for or against.
This is the soil on which narrow-mindedness and self-aggrandizement thrive when things get uncomfortable.
Or just two-dimensional thinking, the inability to engage in dialogue, and in the end an even greater sense of insecurity than the one you actually wanted to avoid.
It is easy to generalize, to reject hasty and to exclude everything that contradicts one's own view.
But simply not helpful at a time when, on the contrary, one would have to be more open than ever before - in order to save what is still possible.
