This article is written for those who see room for improvement in the way we organize our society and our coexistence on this planet. As soon as two or more humans meet, we must decide how to deal with each other. Those who live in a city or have visited a city might get the idea that we are pretty good at ignoring and avoiding each other. The huge number of people in a city forces us to liver side by side without connecting. It would simply take too much time to greet everyone who comes close to us. And we cannot remember so many names, even fi we wouldn’t constantly walk past people who we have never seen before. However, who lives in a city will also notice that very little food ist produced there and very few resources are extracted. At the same time, a huge demand for food and resources is fulfilled. This is only possible thanks to people who most inhabitants of a city have never personally met, and will never personally be grateful to. And many see no reason for it, because a human has a right to be provided for. If there is not enough living space, if the food would become scarce, then the politicians would have failed and the accusations would be loud. Is that correct? Or have the people simply overlooked that candidate in the past elections who would now decide in their interest, and are therefore to be blamed?
The sense of entitlement described above is the result of the division of responsibility. We have not only gotten used to a division of labor, specializing in distinct and focused professions, but also to a splitting of responsibility. Everything that we believe to not be responsible for is out of our hands, and we feel powerless about it. On the other hand there are those who seem to have a lot of power, and we can feel protected or threatened by them. And if something disturbs us, it is often not easy to find out wehere to address our complaint. And then, if someone tells us that we are responsible and should try harder to solve our problem, then we are left behind completely puzzled. What should we do against a housing shortage? We do not decide who is allowed to build where. What should we do agains high energy prices? We do not decide what recourses are cleared for extraction or import. What should we do against the declining purchasing power of our salary? We have our hands and our mind, and often it seems that both cannot help us to solve the problems that we are facing. Or to overcome the worries that plague us. The power of the established structures seems overwhelming. How should we escape them? So, we expect that other people solve our problems. Those few of whom we elect a winner from a small group of candidates in regular intervals. We want to entrust us to those winners, want to give them the responsibility, so that they advocate for us. Is tat correct?
What tasks arise when we live together as humans? Everybody needs something to drink, something to eat, and a sheltered space to live and sleep. But we must not simply take those things from Nature. The times of self-catering are long over. No land is given to us that could provide for our needs. We would have to buy it, and for most that is impossible. Anyway, the interest in self-catering is very low. Today, we have established an economy that covers all needs, and it thrives with the contribution of many people. We are all a part of it, as soon as we give or take any goods. Mostly we trade with money, but gifts and exploitation are also a part of economic life.
However, our interactions are not limited to the economy. We do not only want to be fed and sheltered from wind and rain, but we also want to understand. People are curious, and if something is incomprehensible, then we take a closer look. We explore the world, look for the laws of matter and energy, and we also want to understand what life is. What a human is. Why we are here. Surely ideas can also be sold and thus enter the economic life. But our interest in ideas, our strive to understand the world and also the quest for an individual vocation, that is cultural life. What we discover, that gets passed on to our children, and this way we enrich our culture with the ideas that we bring into this world.
A third sphere is important for a a functional society. This one covers the rules. Those are the result of an agreement, how interactions are to be structured. The results of our activity in the legal life are our laws. Those can be obligatory, strictly enforced with tough consequences. But also politeness, table manners and individual agreements between two or more people are part of this. We grow into an environment that already has many rules and laws. At first we simply learn them, and at some point we might challenge them. There is no perfect rule book, the rules must be constantly adapted to follow the development of mankind and society.
How we shape those three spheres, how we behave when we live in them, and how the spheres interact with each other, those are the core points of the social question. The goal is for every human to live in dignity on planet earth. That is an ambitious ideal, which has been somewhat forgotten. Dignity is more than welfare or comfort or safety. What the idea of dignity really is, what it means to us, that should be given some more thought by each of us. Only this way we can figure out how the three spheres of social life need to be laid out. Only this way can we see how to take back the responsibility that we need to have.