I was invited to speak for the “Kollegstufe” Ethics course at Ottobrunn Grammar School late last Thursday morning. Our idea was: “Business Meets School”. The initiative had come from Frau Plank, who is an extremely dedicated teacher at Ottobrunn Grammar school and constantly tries to do the best for her students. For instance, she also helps when it comes to organizing events and external presentations on career and university choice.
So I had the pleasure to speak in front of the “Kollegstufe” students of the Ethics course at Ottobrunn Grammar School about
Community – Humans – Society.
For me, it was a special occasion, because this was the first time I adhered rigorously to my presentation method “OpenSpeech”. Following the title, I divided my presentation into three parts
Part 1: From communities to social systems
Goal: Making the audience understand social systems by using the example of the socio-economical system “enterprise”. We had no problem coming up with terms like family, groups, teams, enterprises, communes, clubs, federations, churches, countries and the world as potential social systems.
Looking for characteristics of a society, we found the following attributes to attach to them: social, economical, cultural, goal-oriented, and historical. It did not take us long to realize that communication plays a central role. But we also agreed that social systems develop their own set of values and culture.
Part 2: What exactly are humans? What exactly defines the relationship between a human being and the community?
Goal: Discover the role of the complex human being in all kinds of social systems.
Here, too, we came up with valuable insights in no time: the human as a product of evolution, a social creature determined by values, full of expectations, with multi-dimensional interests and various needs. (VEIN). It is all very diverse and complex. And emotions, along with our sexual drive are not much of a help, either.
We also discussed socialization and cultivation of humans at great length, finding out about the importance of morals and virtues in the process.
We found out that there are primary virtues (civil courage, constructive disobedience) and secondary virtues (obedience, honesty, reliability, punctuality). And that the so-called secondary virtues – no matter how important – may well also have a detrimental effect when not combined with living the primary virtues actively.
And we saw that all humans have certain needs in social systems:
Security, freedom, trust, openness, reliability, safety and many more. And that we humans are social creatures who like living in a community and need a personal “other”. Yet we also agreed that it is difficult to balance individual and collective demands.
Our discussion was about common values as a requirement for our own, ethically responsible value system.
Part 3: Society
Goal: I had planned to shed some light on the social interactions of humans and social communities together with the students.
Unfortunately, there was not enough time for this part of my program. I had prepared to talk about:
- Our shift in mobility (from the mobile society to the i-mobile society).
- The permanent change in society.
- Consumer society, knowledge society, join-in society…
- The role of the internet, Web 2.0, blogs, twitter, social media,…
- New WEB 2.0 topics, such as “crowd sourcing”.
- “Mass Intelligence” and wisdom of crowds in social systems.
- The social basis of a new (improved) democracy
I truly regretted that we could not finish what I had planned. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it immensely. Unless I am mistaken, the audience also enjoyed it. I would therefore like to thank you, dear students very much, indeed! You were an excellent group to work with and stayed with me all the way. And, of course, I would like to thank Frau Plank very much for her invitation
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
The pictures were also taken by Frau Plank. Many thanks!
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