A New Perspective.

Reading sample

In order to make it a little clearer how far the systemic idea can unfold and how the aspects mentioned develop interactions even in very simple situations, I would like to give a small example here. I have deliberately chosen this simple case because it is virtually predestined to expose certain thought patterns:

In an era that confronts us with pictures of tumours on cigarette packets at all shop checkouts, one can rightly ask who is sacrificing everyone’s aesthetic sensibilities in order to manipulate the enjoyment behaviour of individuals, and what objective we can assume is behind this. To explain civilisational and aesthetic regressions solely in terms of health precautions seems to me to fall short.

This brutalisation, and with it the rejection of aesthetics, is carried out by the same people who want to ban other advertising – with the accusation of “sexism” or “misleading”.

Yet advertising is actually a company’s bow to the decision-making capacity of adults. And it can never do without the element of creative imagination, creative exaggeration, hyperbole or even mystification. Real representations are not advertising. Only fiction, understood as the imagination of the real in an exaggerated form of appearance, creates desire, as an expression of the desires and visions of us humans.

To limit this would mean shackling human desire and constantly moving in the banality of ordinary existence. Anyone who wants this has not understood the meaning and purpose of culture: to imagine human existence at its best, knowing that this noble idea is never really attainable and must constantly reinvent itself and manifest itself anew. Anyone who has visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome should know – Michelangelo’s huge, fantastic ceiling painting illustrates the idea perfectly: an exaggerated visualisation of human ideas and fantasies, beyond normality, full of power, dynamism, beauty and sublimity. This work has nothing to do with the real world – and it has to be! Because you get a “realistic” rendering of states of being enough on Youtube, Facebook and Instagram today. Whether this raises our cultural level is for everyone – as an adult thinking person – to decide for themselves.

Only when political decision-makers infantilise the consumer do such pedagogical restrictions make sense in themselves. In doing so, they arise from a questionable attitude: some adults want to dictate to other adults how they should live! This paternalism is unfortunately very widespread, but has never had lasting success anywhere in the world, because it transforms adults into pedagogically needy people. The cultural and civilisational effects that result are more reminiscent of earlier, darker eras than of times in which the freedom of the individual, of thought, speech and images enjoys the highest priority – and with it the individual artistic and imaginative expression of the human being. Such a thing does not look good on a modern society.

My book has only been printed in German so far. Currently I am working on the English version. If you are interested in my book in English, please write me by e-mail or via the contact form.