Three days ago, it arrived again on schedule: the current brand eins edition. Today, since this is the end of the week, I have a little time and take a closer look at it.
The focal issue of the October edition is: Normal. On the title page, they printed in huge letters:
Everybody is Normal.
Except You.
(smaller and in red).
Before opening the magazine, I let this make its own impression on my mind. After all, I learned from the brand eins September edition that you have to be careful with title pages.
I remember my own childhood. In fact, that was a time when I envied some other people for being “normal” while considering myself not normal at all …
That reminds me of my friend and teacher Rupert Lay. A short while ago he gave a beautiful presentation – despite being already quite elderly – about the different worlds of other persons. One of his statements was:
Every human being has his or her own world. It is and has to be totally different from yours.
He also said that you have to be able to deal with the fact that people around you are different from you. And he formulated the sentence:
“Tolerance means accepting that someone else is different from you, love means wanting your partner to be different from you.”
For me, this is a monumental sentence. However, it will be hard to accept that others are different if you cannot accept that you yourself are different. Which will probably not be possible if you consider yourself “abnormal”.
I believe “considering ourselves abnormal” stems from us well-meaning people admiring the worlds of many other persons. At the same time, we sometimes consider our own world shabby, because, after all, we are very familiar with it. And I think this is probably a huge mistake. Because our own world, too, is something wonderful.
But enough of a preamble. I take a closer look at the inside of the magazine. And I find quite a few things that make me depressed. For instance the total marketization of our worlds. Look at the enterprises, your work, your health and medicine, your retirement provision, it is the same almost everywhere. In our individual sphere, decisions are also more and more dominated by economic considerations, for instance when it comes to planning families and children, as well as your private concept of life in general.
Apparently, the reason for this marketization is that all social systems try to optimize to their advantage. Every process is designed to be useful above all or even exclusively for the system. Customers, employees, participants, users, parties concerned and all sorts of victims are ignored. Mind you, this is regardless of the fact that optimization for the system to the exclusion of all else is basically also detrimental to the system itself.
And I found the occasional confirmation for these two theses – that this marketization actually happens in our society, but also for the fact that, in the end, it is more detrimental than beneficial for all of us (including the systems for which it was designed) – in the “brand eins” October edition. While reading this brand eins, I also re-discovered that this development is the consequence of a reduced concept of humanity – not just in terms of entrepreneurial thinking –, thus leading directly to this success (failure).
But why don’t you read and discover it yourself?
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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