About this book
„When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
Miguel De Cervantes in „Don Quixote”
If you are an active reader of a decent newspaper, it must have become clear to you that humankind is failing at a frightening rate. At every moment there are now countless military conflicts going on in the world. Global warming and other ecological disasters are threatening to make life on our planet much more difficult in the future and will lead to large migrations and poverty. Every year a great number of animal species are declared extinct. The wealth gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Political and social tensions are rising in many countries. Even the sexes are having increasing problems to understand each other.
I was wondering if these developments are somehow connected in the sense that they have one or a small number of common root causes. This book is the result of my efforts to answer these questions and it also unfolds a possible solution for the problems listed above.
The book has been written with the following guidelines in mind:
- It is not a science book. Unfortunately, science has not advanced enough to give clear answers to all the questions which are relevant for this book. Therefore many parts of it contain speculative (but I hope very plausible) theories. I sometimes mention this again but not always. I also confess that I am no expert in most of the relevant fields of science. But I believe that this is rather a good thing, because as such an expert I would have never dared to write or even publish this book.
- But I still wanted it to be based on reality and not how I wish things should be. I wanted it therefore to be free from political, religious, emotional or esoteric arguments. I also tried to avoid to use moral in arguments, because moral views vary a lot between individuals and cultures (but I will discuss where needed typical moral dilemmas or human behavior driven by moral). Note that this requirements make the tonality of the book necessarily very rational and „cold“.
- It should be optimistic in the sense that it offers a solution. I personally found it very hard to digest many of my findings. I realized that some results are actually not hard to comprehend, but very hard to accept emotionally. This is the reason why they have been ignored (or repressed) by the majority of people until now. It became clear to me that people will only accept my results if I present a solution to the mentioned problems at the same time. Because of this, it took me altogether much longer to collect or develop all the concepts presented in this book than I expected.
To my own surprise, I ended up one day with a sketch for a possible transition to a new society, which could - I hope - offer a much better life for all humans and could allow us to live in a sustainable balance with nature. Surprisingly even the very rich of today could expect significant gains in their quality of life (as you will see, it is much more than just a simple redistribution scheme). And as a bonus, the sexes could become reconciled.
I am well aware of the fact that this is a huge aspiration and that I must have probably failed. But if someone said 200 years ago that people will one day fly to the moon, he (or she) was considered completely crazy. But to succeed one day with a crazy idea, someone has to start thinking the impossible. Therefore my book is probably inadequate and maybe only corresponds to a naive moon rocket as imagined by Jules Verne. But it was maybe Vernes 1865 book „From the Earth to the Moon“ which made people look up to the moon with new, more ambitious eyes. I hope this text can (at least) do something similar for the development of a fundamentally better society.
I want to warn you that this is a very challenging book to read. The reason is that you probably will have to let go or revise a large fraction of your beliefs. You will find it sometimes very difficult to abandon some of them which have become important to you over many years. Some might even form pillars of your personality.
The book has two parts: a history and analysis of our current society and why it is headed for certain disaster and a second part with a proposed solution. The first part is the one which is very difficult to digest. To make sure you don‘t get depressed or too angry while reading the first part, I have included a short teaser chapter at the beginning. I think it is very helpful to see early how much can be gained by the proposed way of thinking, why it might be worth taking such an unusual and often saddening point of view.
This book covers quite a lot of topics related to sex. Because of the enormous complexity of the subject, I have limited myself mostly (but not exclusively) to the case I know from personal experience: heterosexual sex between man and woman. This does not mean that other forms of sexual orientation are not interesting and worth exploring. I admit that I simply don’t know enough about other kinds of sexuality. I also did not take the difference between gender and sex into account (I lack sufficient knowledge on this complex topic).
This book must remain, because of its large scope and my limited time, incomplete. It is also definitely very far from perfect. Its only goal is to spark a discussion and hopefully further efforts to design and implement a better future society. I hope many minds smarter than me will hop on the train and contribute. Whether this book remains just an interesting thought experiment and an exercise in creative thinking or if it can really help to change the world one day, depends on your contribution.