Balloons

We first grow in a bag of water.

Our only connection with the world is the umbilical cord.

Today, everybody is running around holding a smartphone in front of their eyes.

Again, a balloon by itself.

The radio signal is the new umbilical cord.

The new bag of water is the search engine by mother google.

Mother google will nourish us with what she thinks is good for us and keep us away from what she thinks is not good for us.

If someone outside the balloon comes into our bag of water and asks for a street two blocks away, we will forward the question to mother google, because – unlike us today – she will know the answer.

Incidentally, there is no need for us to know anything anymore. Don’t think, link.

google is not an enterprise, google is a big mother.

We are the small children.

My friend Harvey says:

Objection, Dowd, life inside the balloon is not something the internet invented,
google only copied real life.

If, for example, someone turns an indebted shack club into a world-club, a butcher’s shop into a meat plant, even worries about integration of immigrants, then there is the distinct danger that he considers himself strong enough to become a one-man-nation who writes his own rules.

But L’etat c’est moi will only function of you systematically have the right false friends: the spit-lickers who always say yes and never say no.

Hoeneß has these kinds of friends.They hermetically lock him into a balloon and there is no world with other rules outside this balloon.

Unfortunately, there are far too many who, living in the ghetto of their own rules – keep violating all our rules without ever being aware that they act unlawfully.

Harvey, balloons are interesting.

However, they do not come with drums and trumpets, as you might imagine.

Initially, they are solid units, with thick and flexible walls. As soon as they fill up, they grow unexpectedly large and their walls get thinner and thinner. Finally, they will explode and their content is gone.

At the end of the last century, we had the internet balloon, then the real-estate balloon. “Sic transit gloria mundi” and whatever small and medium-sized savers and gamblers invested is lost along with it.

The “Hoeneß-Balloon” belongs in the family of solidarity balloons. After all, solidarity is nothing other than stepping in for other people’s sloppiness, ignorance, failures and incompetence. Solidarity balloons will mostly be built up in enterprises and governments. Normally, their growth is misery without end and their bursting endless misery. Because they fill up with solidarity, at the cost of competence.

Here is what you will find: a top manager or head of government will only choose those for his closest associates who declare their solidarity with his project, concept or vision. This makes competence a minor criterion – on all levels of the organization. Sooner or later, there will be the Troy effect, which means the words spoken by Kassandra will just not be heard. Well, not much is left of Troy, is there?

I wish we had more Kassandra-s in our governments and enterprises. They need character, because they are probably mostly frowned upon and called brakemen and slow doubt-carriers.
Even solidarity is a question of the dose
(Elwood P. Dowd)
(Translated by EG)