Living in peace in my country is a privilege, I can not appreciate enough. Civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and several other places in the world, are horrible. Cruelty of the soldiers involved and the terrible consequences of their activities are beyond my imagination. These countries are drowing in chaos and rational thinking and acting in a humanitarian way is presumably rare.
But here in Austria we live in peace for seven decades. It’s time to think about, what I like most on our stable society. For me the most important achievements of our civilisation are rules we agreed on and division of labour.
With “rules we agreed on” I am firstly referring to our legal system and secondly to our social rules. Irrational behavior and loosing control are considered as properties of a weak personality. Even in an argument in public most people stay calm and focused on the desired outcome, rather than let their emotions flow and break every bone in their oponent’s body. We developed cooperation, as Martin Nowak pointed out. The animal in us is properly domesticated, even though the driving forces behind, the social bundaries, are getting weaker in particular in larger cities.
The division of labour was stressed by my friend and colleague Manfred during an after-lunch coffee break. I am not referring to cultural achievements like specialization, economic systems, and monetarism. I would like to point out one small but important topic: There are state officials taking care of our security demands. We have police, which is called, if the agreed rules are not respected. For international situations we have an (presumably not too powerful) army. I am so glad, I don’t need to enforce my (well defined) rights with a pistol in my hand, which might bring me into dangerous situations with other armed citizens. The general absence of weapons in everyday’s life, gives me a feeling of security. And this feeling is supported by crime statistics.
In the United States of America, this very convenient division of labour leading to low crime rates is not among the highest goals of civilisation. A strong and powerful lobby acting ower almost 150 years, placed the strong belief into american brains, that a weapon at home – no, let me rephrase – doing the dirty work of taking care of one’s personal security is a cultural achievement and a citizen’s duty. I hereby invite everybody to listen to reason and end this gigantic lobbing campaign headed by Allan D. Cors (who took a rifle to school, when he was a boy) and co-workers against the interests of the population.
Even if the whole american population follows my appeal straight away, it takes many years until weapons are extinguished from peoples minds. Maybe it even helps curing the schizophrenic US-politics, that is abusing heroic terms like freedom and justice to bring instability and war over the world in order to serve economic interests of a few thousand financial leaders.
I wish there was somebody taking care of my digital security. I am most worried about financial transactions via swift, intrusion into privacy, and attacks on infrastructure like electricity and transport.
