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A short time ago, I projected the term “dementor” from the fairy world of Harry Potter into our real world through my article “Dementor Alarm” in the IF blog. Now someone asked me how I would fight dementors.

Whenever dementors appear in my vicinity, I get desolate, my heart plummets, everything seems to be pointless and dark fantasies pull me down, so that I feel like giving up! Fighting this is no easier in our world than in the world of Harry Potter.

For me, the great outdoors and activity have been helpful. Mostly, after half an hour of playing soccer, riding my bike (against dementors even through the rain :-)) or swimming, the dementors’ power over me weakens and I already feel better. While I experience my own body as something pleasant, my self-esteem grows, my sorrows get less desperate, and I get new courage for facing the dementors. So here is my advice in case one of the dementors makes his appearance in your life:

Get out of the house, enjoy the great outdoors and go for a walk, climb a mountain, go jogging, ride a bike or go swimming!

Then there was the next question: can we immunise ourselves against dementors?

We will never be a total success in that respect. We can probably overcome dark hours during which dementors want to take away the meaning of our lives a little easier by trying to live our lives in a self-responsible manner. We should be happy with what we have achieved. The people in our social environment love us, all we have to do is appreciate it enough and reciprocate. Then our immune system against all kinds of dementors will become quite strong.

I am afraid I, too, do not have much more to recommend.

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Children like their parents to read to them. This is how I, thanks to being a father of seven, know many fantastic, beautiful stories. There is Lotta von Astrid Lindgren”, who can do almost anything, even get a Christmas tree if there is none left in the entire city, the small Icebear (Hans de Beer) living at the North Pole and constantly being in trouble, (unintentionally) journeying and winning many friends in the process, and the little witch (Otfried Preußler) and many, many more.

Now my children are grown up. They read their own books by themselves. Only Maresa still loves it if I read to her. Now that she is twelve, Harry Potter is on the agenda. So these days, I read a few pages of Harry Potter to her twice or three times a week. Always a few sections and then continuing another several dozen pages further on (because the pages in between have been read without me). In this manner, I will never know the entire story, but it is enough to make me appreciate the world of fantasy created by Joanne K. Rawling. And I discover breathtaking similarities with our real (?) world. When I last read to my daughter, the  dementors made a particularly huge impression on me.

Here is the definition by wikipedia (characters in the Harry-Potter novels):

Dementors are soulless and evil creatures. They glide over the ground and breath deep and raspy. In their victims, they rekindle the worst memories and slurp up happiness wherever they appear. If exposed to them too long, you will be stripped of your mental power and consequently get afflicted by dementia. Due to these characteristics, they probably came by the name dementor as derived from the Latin “dementia” (dementia, idiocy).

When reading to my daughter, my perception of the dementors is as follows: their very closeness makes the room go cold, deprives you of courage, makes you hopeless and feeling absolutely powerless. A dementor is the (exact) opposite of a good mentor. At an aside, rather than experiencing a dementor, you “feel” it (But that is an addition to the official definition I do not consider relevant enough for entering into wikipedia :-). Apart from which I would also have a problem citing my sources).

Unfortunately, in my everyday life, I “feel” more and more dementors and dementorism, both in my environment and in our entire society.

Non-personalized systems, global developments that cannot be understood, incomprehensible laws, senseless rules and absurd processes, an inhuman bureaucracy, and much more take away our courage and cost considerable strength. Unproductive but powerful departments of big enterprises have become autonomous. Positions that cannot be traced develop from a strange mixture of fear, mistrust and the compulsion to conserve an advantage that is often just imagined. And in the end there are only losers.

Systematic rules override personal promises, the “queen is higher than the knight”, yesterday’s agreements are forgotten, trust and reliability dwindle. We try to guarantee moral and ethical behaviour by “compliance” regulations using formalization and processes but achieving the opposite. Lies prevail and insincere behaviour alone makes survival possible. Corruption is replaced by pressure, blackmail gets to be a favoured way to achieve one’s goals.

Individually, we suffer from non-individualized leadership and behaviour that apparently runs contrary to rational thinking. The prevailing disorientation makes us fearful, the panic generates conflicting and inadequate attempts at problem solving. And often we are liable to become agents of the system ourselves and act against our innermost conviction. Excess reigns, even when it comes to the use of our intellectual resources.

I therefore have a wish for the New Year: may InterFace like my own personal environment and that of my friends be spared such dementorism in 2009. And here are two Christmas wishes for my readers: if you know a dementor or find dementorism anywhere, write a comment to us. Wouldn’t it be nice if the IF blog brought a sort of “gallery of dementorism” into being where we could occasionally de-mask a dementor, thereby taking away his power. And here comes another wish: if this (or any other) of our articles appeals to you, why don’t you recommend it (along with the IF blog)?

Many, many thanks!

RMD

(translated by Evelyn Gemkow)

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Here comes an article by our guest Florian Prange!

Turbulences of the international financial market causing a world-wide economic crisis again clearly show us one thing: our monetary and financial system is one of the basic motors in today’s society. Consequently, the basic rules of the financial market have a huge influence on our activities. They also eventually determine whether we succumb to a short-lived profit-orientation in a speculative capitalism defined by gambling, or if we turn to a path of development that encourages long-term and responsible economical behaviour.

Tax and financial politics work similarly, in that they - apart from directly regulating the public budget - also strongly influence the activities of economic players through a number of strong - and sometimes contradicting - motivational incentives. In doing this, politics often have more influence on the basic developments of our society than through formulating and executing goals in the political decision process. This is extremely evident when you look at environmentally detrimental subsidies and tax benefits granted through the federal budget under the aspect of motivation (in fact, it is evident as soon as the subsidies appear in the federal budget, rather than later when you look at them).

For instance, the constantly propagated important future goal of our government to invest in climate and education is grossly contradicted by what our money is actually used for in the federal budget. However, the actual dimensions of this aberration are only evident if, instead of just consulting the facts as written down in the federal subsidy paper, you also take into consideration the exceptions as written down in the various federal laws. Here, economically rational behaviour is hindered by a lack of transparency.

In order to document the actual extent of misdirected federal incentives, the forum ecological-social market economy (FÖS) sponsored a survey on the balance of all federal subsidies detrimental to the environment and climate done by Greenpeace in 2008. In all, we are talking approximately 34.5 billion Euros, which is about 13 per cent of the federal budget of 2007. If they were separately listed, ecologically counterproductive subsidies would therefore - along with what we spend on employment, social services and the federal debt - have a top position on the list. For instance, they are several times higher than what we invest in education and science, which is around 8.5 billion Euros.

For the big stone coal and nuclear power companies, the situation is particularly profitable: even though the direct subsidies for stone coal - currently around 1.8 billion Euros - slowly come to an end, the federal budget is still deprived of around 3.7 billion Euros because the environmentally detrimental coal is not or hardly subjected to tax. Brown coal, the most environmentally detrimental of all heating material, is subsidized with at least 200 million Euros. The directors of nuclear power plants profit several times over: being exempt from tax, they safe 1.6 billion Euros per year. Another 800 million Euros gets back to them through the tax exemption they are granted for planning a future nuclear plant deconstruction.

In the section of transport, the commuter bonus currently under intense discussion and meanwhile re-established by the federal constitutional court is only the tip of the iceberg. The lower mineral oil tax on Diesel petrol means 6.15 billion Euros less in tax every year, even though Diesel petrol emits more CO2 and carcinogenic particles than normal petrol. Petrol for airplanes being tax free means another 8.7 billion Euros. Airlines also save 600 million Euros in taxes because they pay no value added tax for long-distance national flights, while the federal railways have to pay the full tax. The federal bursar also does not subject privately used company cars - they often need enormous amounts of petrol - to much tax, which means another half billion Euros lost to him. Not to mention the billions of untaxed Euros claimed as depreciation when the cars are bought.

As opposed to this, the federal investments in education and science look gloomy, regardless of what the political elite tries to make us believe. Especially in an area that is extremely important for a country of few natural resources, the Federal Republic of Germany is near the bottom of the world-wide list. A study by OECD again revealed that Germany’s investment in education, at 5.3 per cent of its GNP, is significantly lower the average among the 30 most important industrial nations. According to the survey, the gap between Germany and other countries investing more into education continually grows. For example, in order to average the international standard of 5.8 per cent of the GNP, we would have to invest an additional 16 billion Euros. “Germany is losing ground”, is the laconic comment of the OECD survey. And yet we continue to accept that environmentally unfriendly behaviour consumes several times as much as the entire budget for education.

On the other hand, however, this misallocation of public funds also shows that a rigorous reduction of wrong financial incentives can open capacities for significant future investments. But in order to achieve this in the interest of the common good and future generations, politicians would have to be courageous and oppose individual interests of powerful lobby groups. Which, when all is said and done, is the encouraging message inherent in these originally depressing numbers: there is financial margin for a constructive future policy, and this chance is one we should use well

It is possible to conserve future resources!

The entire subsidy survey can be found at Greenpeace.

FP

Florian Prange is a mathematician and founder of ProjectComplexity in Hamburg. Since 2007, he has also served as board member of the Ecological Social Market Economy e.V. (FÖS), initiating the black book on ” subsidies and tax reductions detrimental to climate and environment” published for the years 2006-2008 by FÖS and several environmental organisations.

(translated by Evelyn Gemkow)

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

In December 2008, at prime TV-time, a camera team accompanied the fatally ill Craig Ewert during his act of suicide. Members of the anti-euthanasia movement “Care not Killing” were not the only ones who reacted with indignation at this. They say the only purpose of the film was to improve quota and that it was a cynical and barbarian act of inhumanity by reality TV. Moreover, in their opinion it is a glorification of suicide. The speaker of Mediawatch UK, John Beyer, also said that probably the moment of death is not a matter for TV at all and that this topic should not be treated like entertainment.
As always, the widow still sees that differently. She let it be known that her husband, when he let himself be filmed during his last moments, wanted to “face the end of life honestly”. (Die Welt, December, 11, 2008) “If death is private and concealed, people repress their fear of it. My husband was a teacher, and in a way he made this film as a teacher”.
Public suicide has a long tradition. The most famous example in western cultural history is the suicide of Socrates in the year 399 before Christ. He was forced by court of law to drink the cup filled with hemlock. He consciously talked to his friends about every single moment during which the poison slowly affected his body, and the friends wrote down what he said. More effective than any TV program, the world has remembered this suicide at the worst of all TV-times for more than a thousand years. However, we never heard indignation at it. Rather, to the moralizing consciousness, this act of suicide by Socrates is one of unrivalled courageousness by a person who set moral standards accepting the verdict of the court of law in Athens. Because his situation was nowhere near as desperate as the illness of Craig Ewert in Great Britain.
Socrates could have bought his freedom. His friends had offered to provide the necessary money. His situation was not desperate. He could easily have lived in perfect health for another dozen years or more. But with his autonomous decision, Socrates wanted to commit suicide as an invitation for all autonomous persons. By doing so, he wanted to point towards himself and the mortality of humans, along with their ignorance of moral issues in a more publicly effective manner than any TV program so far.
The witnesses of Socrates’ suicide documented every moment of his demise. In not commenting his deed with moralizing accusations, they showed respect towards the friend and the corpse. Why not give a similar signal to Mister Craig Ewert and his widow?  It is not the suicide of Craig Ewerts that shows a tendency towards barbaric human attitudes but the accusations he is subjected to.
KJG

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.