Abstract: I write this essay in the tradition of the longitudinal perspective, which has been exemplified in modern literature by authors like Jared Diamond or Steven Johnson. It looks at the metaphysics of a plague which troubles our economies and many peoples’ mind, while Gaia rejoices. I claim that its causes are not to be found in the phenomenal but in the noumenal world and these I aim to describe in the role of a generalist philosopher and a pragmatic father who does understand little about science and epidemiology, but thinks about the world as a deeply connected superorganism, which we are a part of.

 
Culture critic Neil Postman gave on October 11, 1990 a well-known speech at the meeting of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (German Society for Computer Science) in Stuttgart. He argued that our society relies too heavily on information to fix our problems, especially the fundamental problems of human philosophy and survival, that information, ever since the printing press, has become a burden and garbage instead of a rare blessing.
 
He also compared contemporary society to the Middle Ages, where instead of individuals believing everything told to them by religious leaders, now individuals believe everything told to them by science, making people naiver than in Middle Ages. Individuals in a contemporary society, one that is mediated by technology, could possibly believe in anything and everything, whereas in the Middle Ages the populace believed in the benevolent design they were all part of and there was order to their beliefs.
 
What Neil Postman discussed in the 1990s has in my opinion ever since aggravated: we live in a phase of darkest Middle Ages. The scary part about this: only few people realize it, because we are distracted by all the modern technology which surrounds us from the hour, we fall asleep to the moment, we wake up. How is it possible that we experience Middle Ages with all these modern gadgets, computers, software, robots and algorithms?
 
Middle Ages were not defined by horse carriages and poor sanitation. Middle Ages were defined by a dominant power structure which did not allow for much or any individual and collective growth. It was a period in human history when a few lived well at the expense of many. Today many more live well than in 10th century Europe, but we do it at the expense of our planet; and an increasing number of fellow human beings as growing social inequality confirms.

The day that national Chinese media starts to report on a highly contagious virus, I remember it was January 17, 2020, we leave Shanghai to Kyoto. I am surprised to find at Nagoya airport large boards warning at the passport control of people coming from Wuhan city in Hubei province next to another information board warning of people traveling from African Congo who can potentially transmit the Ebola virus. Is this virus anywhere close to Ebola? I ask myself. Warnings of African swine fever and a compulsory shoe sole disinfection let me think that all these precautions are related to the Japanese national psyche which is burdened with hygiene paranoia.
 
When we reach Nagano prefecture two days later the epidemic is in full throttle back home. Our Danish skiing instructor suffers from paralyzing anxiety after she hears that we hail from China. Without differentiating between Wuhan and Shanghai, she puts on a facial mask the next morning and spreads her anxiety to most hotel guests including the owner who forces me to take our coldish daughter to the local hospital for checkup. After I tell him that it is almost impossible that anyone of our party has contracted the now called Corona virus, because we left Shanghai before the start of Chinese New Year and have not been in touch with anybody from the viral epicenter, he relents.
 
Both, the Danish skiing instructor and our landlord reveal what Neil Postman wrote about modern Dark Ages. We consume information without knowing what to do with it and believe in whatever media tells us. Our minds start to ruminate and without critical thinking we drive ourselves into places of fear, worry and hate. I admit that the first few days after people started to talk about the virus, I was myself worried about its nature and effect and felt relieved after I saw a single post about the deadliness of seasonal influenza. It takes some time to sort information available and make up one’s own mind. In particular for people like me who have stopped to consume news and try to stay away from social media. Critical thinking and a spiritual anchor. Nothing is more important in times like these.
 
The 2020 Plague
 
Seasonal influenza causes according to WHO three to five million severe annual cases and ends for 290k to 650k people globally with death. In industrialized countries most deaths associated with influenza occur among people age 65 or older. Epidemics can result in high levels of worker/school absenteeism and productivity losses. Clinics and hospitals can be overwhelmed during peak illness periods. I caught my first influenza last fall and was literally down for three days. This has never happened to me before, but I understand now that such a virus can kill an older human organism which is already affected by poor health or a chronic disease.

As I check wechat health services almost half a year later, the numbers have changed significantly. While the above mentioned 78631 infected and hospitalized corona patients were Chinese only and while the Western world was looking then on China without realizing the soon to happen impact on itself, the numbers as of Oct 3, 2020 indicate that corona was after all more serious than a simple flue. China still holds at 91105 infected and only 4746 diseased, but ROW hits almost 35 million infected and more than 1 million diseased. A journalist on CBS news describes the situation spot on: While nowhere near the most fatal pandemic in history, which is reserved for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that claimed 50 million lives, the coronavirus' survival rate and death toll makes it utterly unique and deadly among modern pandemics.

As of Dec 18, 2021 there is no need to discuss the serious impact of Covid-19 on our societies, but there still is a need to understand why it has hit us. Scientists are incapable of explaining a phenomenon like this. They look for answers in small areas of the phenomenal world only. They fail to understand interconnected systems and how our culture impacts nature, i.e. how culture is the manifestation of human nature.  It takes generalists and philosophers who connect phenomena with the noumenal world. Read here a summary which was originally published in February 2020 and still holds true.

• Covid-19 is not an isolated pandemic, but one connected to the climate crisis. It is part of the 6th mass extinction which has started to affect our own species.

• As psychologist Daniel Goleman wrote: In a system there are no side effects – just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as “side effects” simply reflects our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realize.
• A 2017 study confirmed that Germany has lost ¾ of its aerial insects since 1989. The ecological havoc industrial agriculture has wrecked on insects now turns into a boomerang.
• If a vaccination against covid-19 is found, it will not solve the climate crisis and as such stop this ongoing, man-made mass extinction.
• What we need is a system transformation. The pandemic is pushing us into this transformation.
• The forced isolation and shutdown of the production system during the first European lock down has resulted in a 5% reduction in annual CO2 emissions. Ecologist Jean-Marc Jancovici estimated on May 17, 2020 that it would take a similar drop each year for thirty years to comply with the Paris climate agreement.
• Yet, even the UN preaches economic growth in its SDG #8. Given the existing ratio between GDP growth and the income growth of the poorest, it will take 207 years to eliminate poverty with this strategy, and to get there, we will have to grow the global economy by 175 times its present size.
• There is no planet B; and we need to give up the idea that we can rebuild the economy to what it was before covid-19.
• How could a different economy look like? Circular instead of linear? Do we need to transcend the materialistic perspective of economics? Or has the time come that the rich – individuals, organizations and nations - simply must share?
• Thomas Piketty’s research shows that modern inequality is reaching again pre-WWI levels. Capital’s natural accumulation with the elites, which follows the simple formular (r)evenue on capital > economic (g)rowth, was only diverted by the two world wars, the great depression and the post WWII socialist redistribution from 1930 to 1975. Piketty predicted in 2013 a world of low economic growth and extreme inequality for the years to come.
• A basic universal income is inevitable. One which allows us to rest during cold winter periods. One which trusts in the human potential. One which gives human resources and natural resources an annual period to rest and recover.
• NASA photographs taken during the first lockdown in China at the beginning of this year confirm that reduced mobility, local subsistence farming and remote work are a viable solution to the climate crisis.
  

• China consumes more than a quarter of the world’s meat and farms e.g. half of the world’s pig life stock. This extra proportionally high meat consumption contributes to one of the main drivers of climate change: Eating more meat generates more heat.
• Moreover, there are reasonable arguments that covid-19 and intense life stock farming are connected. A swine fever pandemic forced the Chinese government to cull in 2019 up to 60% of its 200 million pig life stock – which is half of the world’s. This animal genocide went largely unnoticed by the general public, because media reporting was mostly limited to the life stock industry.
  

How is China’s pork industry connected with covid-19?

• A pathogen strikes when it finds a suitable host in an environment that favors infection, as shown where the circles intersect in the above venn diagram. For instance, diarrheal disease spreads quickly among sick people in unsanitary conditions.
  
• Intense life stock farming creates despite veterinarian precautions a favorable environment for pathogens and the genetic similarity between pig and human makes it probable that a virus mutates and then spreads to a new susceptible host. 
• We are facing a future when antibiotics will be ineffective. This is partly because antibiotics have been misused in factory farms to compensate for overcrowded, unhealthy conditions which has led to the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant diseases that pass from animals to humans.
• We think of ourselves as being on top of the food chain, but parasites and pathogens control populations, including the human population, like predators.
• What Daniel Goleman wrote about system awareness is therefore also true in this regard: In a system there are no side effects – just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as “side effects” simply reflects our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realize.

There is one thing which puzzles me in all this: why do we subject our children to similar conditions like pigs? We keep them 99% indoors. We make them sit in small cubes. We make them wear masks and disinfect their hands several times a day only to avoid the spread of an infectious disease. I only know of a single case where this similar treatment of children and pigs can be reasonably explained: The head of the Heilongjiang Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau, Tai Deliang, was promoted in 2014 to the top position of Heilongjiang’s Education Bureau.

Dozens of research teams around the globe, of course Chinese ones leading the pack, strive to find a vaccination to keep our kids in school and parents in offices. The world indeed is an animal farm like George Orwell once wrote.  In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realize, so Daniel Goleman writes. Our children should be close enough in time and space to realize that our societies need a structural overhaul. If free range pigs and pastured poultry are considered to be healthy sources of protein, we ought to think of children raised in forest schools and wilderness camps as healthy individuals for tomorrow’s societies.

Jiddu Krishnamurti famously once said that humanity experiences a prolonged consciousness crisis. Phases of consciousness growth did follow in recent history always pandemics. One could say that every era had a Pandora’s Box which humanity was bestowed upon if it didn’t play along the rules of the Gods. The tyranny of the Egyptians was ended by the biblical plague. The decadence of morbid Byzantine lead to the rise of Mohammed – who taught his followers to abstain from pork. The Black Death ended the narrow-minded clerical scholasticism in Europe and gave birth to the Renaissance. The 2nd bubonic plague was followed by the scientific revolution and the era of enlightenment. The 3rd historical plague led to the industrial revolution and modernity.
 

We are at the threshold to, yet another major transformation and our societies’ decision makers are bound to realize that they need to reform our education systems radically – if not in honor of Ken Robinson, then for the sake of our children.  
 
According to historian Yuval Harari, ancient foragers suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the agricultural revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic, permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics. Sounds like my children will be soon foraging. How about yours?
 
What does the rather enlightened press write about the state of education:

• Outdoor time has always been healthy for kids, but that’s especially the case now: One study found that the odds of catching the coronavirus are nearly 20 times higher indoors than outdoors. Though it isn’t free of problems, learning outside might be the only way to provide parents with a break, kids with an adequate education, and teachers with protection from the coronavirus. [The Atlantic]

 

• As countries grapple with how and when to restore students to classrooms, a growing number of schools have embraced outdoor learning — especially in the highly regarded Nordic education systems, where the model had already begun to gain momentum. […] Some countries, including Germany, have a tradition of outdoor preschools and kindergartens, which have begun to catch on in the United States as well. The pandemic may drive more countries to experiment with the model for older students. [Washington Post]

 

• Let us not forget that the modern sciences of learning, which are ignored in the design of most educational technologies, tell us that learning is optimized when it involves sustained interpersonal relationships, emotional connection, embodiment, and dynamically interactive hands-on experiences. Based on the best of what we know about the dynamics of learning, educational technologies should be bringing people together away from screens–not isolating individuals alone in front of screens. Technologies ought to help us customize learning and provide universal access to information through useful, well organized, and curated content. They should not be the primary focus of attention or main source of interaction and instruction. [What is Emerging]

Educator and journalist Karl Heinz Peterlini eloquently described in a daily newspaper on April 25 of this year, just before the resumption of full classes after the spring lockdown, how Covid-19 exposes the flaws in the education system and provides an opportunity for change. Another winter has rolled in, strengthening the virus and sickening the population, yet there is no evidence suggesting that we are capable of systemic change. On the contrary, pharmaceutical companies are gifting us with vaccines that allow adults to keep their jobs and children to attend their schools despite mutations of the virus. Stubbornly, we cling to a system that has already begun to disintegrate all around us. How else can we interpret the progressive destruction of nature and society? A systems theory perspective from a father of two pupils.

Seeing the Light at the End of the Tunnel.
 
December 9, 2021. I walk with our thirteen-year-old daughter after dinner from our St. Pölten apartment to the vaccination center while our nine-year-old son stays at home. It is pitch dark and the icy snow of the last few days crunches under our shoes. I have booked her the second and myself the third vaccination, although I am anything but convinced that this is the only way out of this situation, as the director of the state education office wrote in a letter to parents on November 24.
 
The vaccination center is spacious and seems surreal. Smooth gray concrete on the floor. Bright yellow walls and ceilings. There is a quiet, almost solemn mood that reminds me of a funeral. We are directed to the tables where we fill out the medical history questionnaire and walk quite a distance without encountering another person until our next assigned stop. What vaccination did you get last time? one of the two young doctors asks. My gaze wanders to the booths, where it says BionTech/Pfizer on the left and Moderna printed on a piece of paper on the right.
 
Red pill or blue pill? It makes no difference. We are pragmatic and want the stamp on the vaccination card, which, like a driver's license, currently entitles us to navigate society and prevents divisive discussions. The comparison is apt. Just as a driver's license says nothing about the owner's actual driving competence, vaccination says nothing about protection from disease or for fellow human beings. In our daughter's case, this is evidenced by the fact that she continues to be tested at school three times a week despite being vaccinated twice.  
 
After receiving this stamp on our vaccination cards, we join the few other vaccinated people in the waiting area. Wait 10 minutes, Zoe whispers to me. We sit down and I start flipping through her immunization record, which is kept together with the mother-child passport. When I find the pregnancy tests, memories come flooding back and I abruptly start telling Zoe about the first 18 months of her life, especially about her birth at the Semmelweiß hospital in Vienna. About the pregnancy gymnastics that drove me crazy. Of her mother's calmness before and bravery during her birth. Of the screaming of the other women. Of breakfast in the morning and the short drive to the clinic afterwards. Of the birth itself, just a little later, at 11:59 on May 25, 2008.
 
Zoe listens to me spellbound. I feel connected to her as I rarely do and wonder why it takes moments like this to really connect with your own children. The routine of everyday life is mostly just a side-by-side but not a togetherness. We are too busy to be able to come to rest. I look into her eyes and close my story: "Your birth has changed my life like nothing else. You and your brother are at the center of everything I do. We stand up and stroll out of the great hall towards the exit in jolly spirits. One last look back and I think to myself: in every experience you can find something positive if you let it happen. I am grateful for the conversation with Zoe, and this rare feeling that people of a western society can have a common denominator. I have a hunch that it will be the relationship between parents and children that will determine the outcome of this multi-layered crisis.

Learning what matters. Now.
 
Zoe has not been attending classes since November 20th and will be learning at home until January 13th despite her two vaccination. The Austria-wide regulation that children are allowed to stay at home without a doctor's release was a welcome opportunity for us - loosely based on designer Friedrich von Borries - to further exploit the cracks in the system and design an alternative. Every day I asked Zoe what she was learning at school and if she was interested. Every day I got the same answer. Except for visual education and handicraft classes, every school day is characterized by yawning boredom.
 
Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel recently wrote on his twitter account: What's the point of an economic system that does not produce wellbeing and destroys the planet? We can ask the same question for our education systems: What is the point of an education system that produces unhappy adults who don't know how to secure our species' survival? The interaction of economics and education is a chicken-and-egg problem: Which comes first? Which system is causal to the development of the other?
 
The government's unwillingness to sustainably transform the education system is driven by the economic system in which education is embedded. The nation that first shifts from competition to well-being could be overtaken and out-performed by the others in the rat race in force. And yet, being innovative in competition is just as critical to thinking beyond prevailing paradigms as designing a new way of living and doing business requires. We need to change both hen and egg at the same time.

After three years at a Hong Kong school and three at a Chinese school in Shanghai, our daughter brought home her first report card from an Austrian school this January. It was probably the memory of my own school days that made this unspectacular moment so formative. I immediately looked for my document folder and flipped through to find my report card from the same grade. The two documents lying side by side confirmed my first impression: despite exponential technological change, the school system has not changed between 1989 and 2021.
 
Our children are deprived of health and happiness in the same short lessons with too much and irrelevant content. 98 percent of instruction takes place indoors, is delivered by often frustrated and bureaucratically overburdened educators, and kills the child's natural learning instinct by regurgitating outdated content, such as presenting economic growth as a core economic policy goal.

A visual explanation of economic policy goals in a 7th grade geography text book.

Zoe currently attends the eighth grade in a local secondary school and is listed as an extraordinary student until summer, so she is officially not assessed in all subjects in which she has not yet reached native language level. However, the school system, which is characterized by economic competition, has already broken through this non-assessment, which is in itself stipulated in the school law, and has eroded a good part of Zoe's natural self-confidence. She grew up with Chinese as first language and English as her second.  Just recently, she casually said she wasn't good at math or English. But how many of your classmates can sing several English songs without accent and by heart? I asked her. That has nothing to do with English, was her answer. And she is unfortunately right, because the school subject English allows secondary teachers to emphasize comma punctuation and to ignore musical skills. Ken Robinson is probably the best-known educator who has bemoaned this sick focus on robotic language skills and the extensive neglect of arts & drama.
 
Instead of seeing a student from a different culture or with talents and interests that deviate somewhat from the norm as an enrichment and slowly welcoming them into the class and school community to introduce the German language through play, stories and empathy, it hailed one failing grade after another on tests and schoolwork, in keeping with an industrial education system and contrary to its extraordinary position. Talks with the head of the class and the school administration helped only to a limited extent. There is little room within the current curriculum, the principal explained to me in her office, pointing to the school code in front of her for consideration of her daughter. A cold shiver ran down my spine. How could anyone give up so much of their calling as a teacher? Was there ever one? Are we talking about a product, an inmate to be measured, or a human being to whom, with all our belief in the goodness of our very nature, we give enough space to develop to the best of our ability?
 
Since November 20th Zoe is at home and I help her to find a new rhythm. Participate only in the most necessary hours online. Sufficient sleep, as neuroscientists have been demanding for adolescents for years and as should be the rule for all children during the dark winter months anyway. Use the time freed up for your own interests. More energy and thus also a renewed desire to sing and make music, Zoe's central talent, which has absurdly died off in the music branch of her secondary school. We don't make music, we only do music theory! she complained. Daily yoga to strengthen body and mind in a self-determined way. The transformation is not easy. It requires commitment from child and parent, and I can only accompany Zoe in this process because I am not tied to any profession.
 
As an environmental educator, I take my children on short and long nature explorations and observe their interest in a wide variety of encounters. During one of these afternoons outdoors, Zoe asked me why there is oxygen in the atmosphere and why we have it on earth in the first place. A nice conversation developed, and I was pleased to see that the embers of curiosity had not yet completely extinguished. Questions of this kind are like sparks that can ignite a fire.

I remembered the Big History Project, which I had studied a few years ago as a best practice for self-directed learning. Zoe was ready for it. Since late November, after a brief introduction, she has been learning independently and we discuss her progress each day. She keeps a journal about the course in which she notes or draws anything that seems relevant. Zoe has already reached chapter three, which explains the history of evolution, and this week she has found a detailed answer to how oxygen evolved on earth and how the atmosphere formed.
 
Now I'm delighted that this transformation of learning is happening like this with Zoe, but the start of regular classes hangs over us like a sword of Damocles - a letter from the principal earlier this week admonishes parents that while they may leave their children at home without excuse, they must be graded at the end of the semester. Even under these extraordinary circumstances, competition rules. I wonder what it would be like if many parents were on the same page with us. Steering peacefully and prudently in a new direction because we are convinced that a post-industrial education system that takes into account the individual needs and talents of our children will result in well-being and happiness for both our families and society.

The Prisoner's Dilemma
 
Francis Fukuyama's comments on the Prisoner's Dilemma brought me to an important systems theory analogy that has profound relevance in the context of transforming education systems. The Prisoner's Dilemma is used by economists and evolutionary biologists to explain cooperation through reciprocal altruism. The central question to be answered is: how do rationally acting but selfishly acting players arrive at cooperative norms of interaction that increase not only their own but also group welfare?
 
This classic problem in game theory is described thus: Sam and I are in prison, and we agree to break out together. If we cooperate, we can escape, but if Sam reveals me to the guards, then I will be severely punished. On the other hand, if I give Sam up to the guards, then he will be punished and I will be rewarded. If we both expose ourselves, then no one will receive any benefit. Therefore, we will both get off better if we cooperate and stick to our agreement, but the risk of Sam revealing me is substantial, and I get a reward if I reveal him to the guards. Therefore, we both decide, separately, that we will betray each other. Despite the mutual benefits of cooperation, the danger of going out as a betrayer thwarts the manifestation of the benefits.
 
Systemically, members of a society are inmates of a prison. The capitalist paradigm binds us into competition and obligates us to send our children to educational institutions designed for competition. Instead of learning and teaching compassion and empathy, our children are literally being trained in survival of the fittest, even in the context of a severe flu epidemic that paralyzes society for several weeks and hits many families hard, especially those from lower-income backgrounds.
 
That Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism was a dead end has actually been clearly demonstrated. That symbioses between organisms create a survival advantage in times of crisis has been proven many times in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, our society is drifting apart. We are superficially divided into vaccine deniers and vaccinated as in times of the Spanish Inquisition. As the cultural critic Neil Postman wrote in the 1990s, the deepest Middle Ages prevail, but the technology that surrounds us everywhere makes us believe that we have evolved. No. We haven't. We still suffer from a limited consciousness that does not want to see that we should strive towards each other.
 
How does this divergence manifest itself in education, the most important lever of a society that wants to achieve social permeability and equitable redistribution? The public school system is increasingly being undermined by private schools in a way I know only from China. In Shanghai, for example, which we called home in 2009 until 2020, there are over 100 international schools where parents who can afford it save their children from the highly selective state system. In Austria, private schools are popping up like mushrooms of the same breeding ground: an increasingly competitive knowledge and information society.
 
While private schools were a rare exception when I was a student, they are now an integral part of the educational landscape even in the welfare state of Austria: recently, the International School Krems was opened in the Göttweig Abbey, there is an International School in St. Pölten, the integrative Montessori Atelier has been trying to carve out a niche for itself for several years, the renowned Lernwerkstatt in Pottenbrunn near St. Pölten has been attracting a group of parents interested in reform education for 20 years, in Linz the Anton Bruckner International School has joined the Linz International School, and so small towns offer what until now could only be found in Vienna: alternatives to the state system.
 
The inconspicuous example of the Integrative Montessori Atelier in St. Pölten gave me first-hand experience of the social spectrum of families interested in private schools: an upper middle class of exclusively Austrian nationality who can afford to bring their children to school every day from country estates up to 50 km away. In contrast, the public elementary school next door enrolls up to two-thirds children with immigrant backgrounds and Islamic creeds. The salvation being sought is therefore not just one of access to the labor market, but also to a form of culture. The knights of the West are still fighting with the pagans of Asia Minor.
 
That this alternative is experiencing both supply and demand is remarkable in itself, as changes in the educational landscape point to profound changes in society. Management philosopher Peter F. Drucker, who has described and predicted with unparalleled clarity the changes in the labor market and the demands on the worker since World War II, let us know more than 20 years ago that information societies will be more competitive than any previously existing human form of organization. That this competition would increasingly affect the education system was to be expected.

China's major metropolitan areas, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, along with other Far East Asian countries such as Singapore and Korea, have been leading the PISA study for years. However, the Confucian educational ambition is intertwining, especially under Covid-19, with an economic strengthening of this region that the West has not yet known. The migration of entire value chains to Asia has made Europe structurally weak and dependent. The result - even if not openly discussed in many families - is a flight from the state education system and an attempt to save oneself in a private institution that gives one's offspring a certain starting advantage in a world that has already become uncertain. 
 
And now back to the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's perfectly understandable why parents choose private schools: you want the best for your offspring, who are closer to you than anyone else. Francis Fukuyama finds the academically correct words for this: human cooperation begins with kinship; the degree of lived altruism is in direct proportion to the degree of kinship. As the saying goes: blood is thicker than water.
 
Global Gulag vs Global Community
 
What is overlooked by parents as well as national education policy is that while labor markets were largely regional in the 1980s and 1990s, they are transnational or even global in the 2020s. From the perspective of the evolutionary biologist, the dimension of the ecosystem has shifted: Whereas it used to be sufficient for a person to survive in (educational) competition in a spatially limited ecosystem, the technological acceleration of the last 50 years has created a global labor market that attracts and retains educational elites in a few centers such as Beijing and San Francisco, while the periphery is increasingly left behind. A perhaps nesting but factual note: Austria is already part of this periphery.
 
Technological change has created a global gulag in which only a privileged few can save themselves from the evolutionary-biological surf onto safe shores. The progressive population growth to almost eight billion people has furthermore created a situation which generates a so-called behavioral sink, especially in the education and health care systems, due to Covid-19. This was described in the famous mouse utopia experiments of the ethologist John Calhoun and shows that in mammals with too little retreat space, epidemic behavioral disorders and mental illnesses occur.
 
A global market based on economic competition, in which nation states are the largest competitors, reduces their citizens to armies in a battle that is no longer fought on bloody ground but in the fields of research, innovation and education. Unconsciously, we support this system by sending our children, like mercenaries, to schools where what counts is not cooperation and empathy, but competition and a sense of achievement.
 
Those parents who send their children to private schools think they are saving them from competition or giving them a better starting advantage in that competition. But, to return to the Prisoner's Dilemma, they are actually giving away other parents who cannot afford this luxury or who have already courageously chosen post-industrial learning and no longer want to expose their children to the eternal rat race.
 
I want to elaborate on this analogy again because the dimensional leap is a significant one: whereas in classical game theory the ecosystem is a prison, i.e., a territorially restricted space, and two prisoners agree to break out, we must note that in terms of work and education in the 21st century we operate in a global ecosystem that is not territorially restricted. Those who see themselves as prisoners in this education and labor market must come to an agreement to break out together.
 
Assuming that such an agreement has been reached by implication, all parents who continue to send their children to school - geared to competition - and expose other parents (and thus their children) to the system guards, i.e., figuratively, the education authorities, directors and teachers, must be recognized as traitors and agreement breakers.   
 
The question that now arises, as in game theory, is the following: How can betrayal be made so unattractive that the parties stick to their agreement? How can the social surplus value of having all the children of our society participate in a post-industrial education system be made so interesting that parties are bound to their agreement (the social contract already described by Jacques Rousseau)? Francis Fukuyama explains the framework and why recognizing a "socially suboptimal outcome" is central to the solution:
 
Prisoner's dilemmas are problematic for their players because the solution in which both players cheat is called a Nash equilibrium by game theorists. Cheating is the best strategy available: it minimizes the likelihood that you'll get into what's called a "sucker payoff," where the other player gets away with a reward for blowing the whistle because you stuck to your agreement. At the same time, you have the opportunity to do the same to him. But while cheating is a better strategy for you as an individual than cooperating, it leads to a worse outcome when the actions of both players are taken into account-what economists call a "socially suboptimal outcome." The question, then, is how the individual players can arrive at a cooperative outcome.

What game theory somehow overlooks (at least in Fukuyama's explanations) is the not insignificant role of prison guards. These guards are not only external agents in the interaction between the two prisoners who have reached an agreement, but also potential inmates. For if the conditions in the ecosystem concerned become so unbearable that even the guards begin to doubt that they are earning their bread doing the right work, they become potential accomplices of the prisoners in breaking out or changing the system.
 
Applied on our societies, we have to ask ourselves who these guards are and who benefits from the ruling power structure. That this power structure does not achieve economic justice, community empowerment, true education, and successful preservation of our environment should no longer need to be argued. Wealth concentration as it was before World War I (Thomas Piketty), corrosion of community and family (Francis Fukuyama), propaganda and production of unhappy children (Ken Robinson), and ecological collapse (Fritz Schumacher) have been logically stringently laid out by renowned authors.
 
Viewed soberly, it is the bureaucratic apparatuses of Western democracies that, as watchdogs of the wealthy, keep a sick system alive. It is these thousands of civil servants and contract employees in municipalities, cities, states and the federal government who, in the sense of game theory, have only the slightest interest in changing the status quo. They earn above-average wages, generally work below-average hours (I was at home in both worlds for several years, and know what I'm talking about), and change professionally only when they strive for meaning and self-fulfillment.
 
Vast parts of national budgets are spent on education and health in our hydrocephalous state entities, it is therefore necessary to explicitly highlight all employees of public educational institutions and health care facilities as extended arms of the bureaucracy and thus guards of the prison. It is the teachers who may have started their careers enthusiastically, but after years rendered numb by the system, do their work only as a bread job. They are the doctors who work their way up the hospital hierarchy to the position of senior physician or primary physician and, on the side, become or remain rich in their private practices with the illness of a sick society.
 
Exactly this circumstance explains why in the recent demonstrations in Vienna, where thousands took to the streets, aggression was shown against hospitals and in the fall 7500 children were taken from public schools: the citizen feels more than ever as a subject of a dominant power structure, which is more interested in self-preservation than in the common good. The problem, in other words, is only secondarily the agreement between prisoners. It is primarily the lack of moral responsibility on the part of the apathetic guards who don’t stop to support a system that is obviously causing harm.
 
Here is a second criticism of game theory, which is even more fundamental than the first: Why does game theory assume that the system observed is a prison and that the two who come to an agreement are prisoners? Who sentenced the prisoners to their term in jail and for what reason? A study of the primary literature on the prisoner's dilemma and Robert Axelrod's reflections on the question of how cooperation among humans arose is definitely required at this point but goes beyond the scope of this essay.
 
We can however summarize that the Prisoner's Dilemma assumes a prison situation and thus automatically forces every citizen in society whose will to cooperate is being examined into a prisoner position. Thus, it is not a free individual in an enlightened and fair society, but a subjugated and cornered being, which cannot bring about a change in the system by strategy, but only tries to get the best possible advantage for itself within the given system conditions by tactics.
 
Aldous Huxley already indirectly exposed this assumption error in 1962 with his essay The Politics of Ecology, in which he revealed the human striving for power as the essential cause for the destruction of nature. He describes that the central problem of human nature is not the cooperation between two prisoners, but the temptation of power, which permanently tempts any person in power to abuse it. The situation to be thought through in game theory, therefore, is a guardian's dilemma: under what conditions does the guardian decide to cooperate with the prisoner and, instead of an escape (and therefore the continued existence of the prison), initiate a breakup of the prison?
 
It is exactly this situation that must interest us in a society, because what we need is a transformation from power-abusing structures, both within democratic and dictatorial systems, to a global structure of responsible freedom. In more economic terms, this means reducing government intervention to a minimum, because it is within the public sector where the greatest potential for system optimization resides, and where decisions are made on a wide scale that are neither economically nor ecologically sustainable. The mere fact that thousands of contract employees are funded by the imprisoned citizens through tax levies to in turn raise their children to be prisoners should be enough to make one realize that we need a fundamental system transformation that must start with a lean state.
 

The Sixth Mass Extinction
 
Realistically, neither enough bureaucrats nor enough parents will realize that maintaining the current competitive educational institutions, whether public or private, will lead to a socially suboptimal outcome. We are still closer to the shirt than the skirt, and we think that investment in the industrial education apparatus will at least enhance national competitiveness. Likewise, we think that ringing names like Mary Ward or Sir Karl Popper Grammar School will protect our children from the lurid surf of automation and displacement by striving Asian students in the global labor market.
 
Anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of China's dimensions knows that economic entities like Austria, which at best can be compared to a second-tier city like Hangzhou, and even the European Union as an economic bloc, are being washed over, undermined and booted out by China in a global economic structure shaped by capitalist principles. There is no escape from the economic and social consequences of a strengthening of Asia as a whole, or of entering into competition with a totalitarian organized superstate like China. Suddenly having 500 million to a billion people above us in the global pecking order can either be fought with more competition, especially among our children, or ideally accepted in a relaxed manner with an alternative strategy. 
 
Whether we will succeed in this rethinking depends very much on how quickly our environment changes, i.e. how quickly the climate crisis leaves us with no other way out than to switch to cooperation and keep the agreement to break out of prison. For lack of perception of the large systemic changes, the change of the immediate living space must teach the necessary lesson. As the saying goes, he who will not hear, must feel. A renewed look into evolutionary biology illuminates what we can no longer recognize as observers but as participants: The five identified mass destructions in the history of the earth are described as consequences of excessive competition in an ecological niche. In the Anthropocene, humans have allowed the planet to become a single global ecosystem, which can also be seen as an ecological niche: it is the only place in the known universe where we are able to survive. 
 
The sixth mass extinction, which is undoubtedly underway, will in evolutionary terms end the competition within our own species to stop the  the carrying capacity of the planet. So unless we can learn to act cooperatively and devise, write, and keep a new social contract, the ecosystems around us will collapse first, suffering and death will enter the land until the biological niche previously occupied by homo sapiens has been taken over by another life form.
 
Whether this new life form will be a better version of man, homo illumens as I like to call him, or a virus remains to be seen. But we definitely have the possibility to influence this outcome. In any case, evolutionary biologists refer to the process of adaptation to new living conditions as "adaptive radiation": those anatomical or, in the case of humans, cultural traits that are unsustainable are extinguished, while those that ensure survival spread rapidly.
 
In times of planetary crisis, Earth's history has repeatedly shown that the symbiosis of two species establishes an essential advantage in the struggle for survival - a biological view of the prisoner's dilemma. Those who can overcome the fear of overreaching by others and resist the lure of short-term gains will increase their chances of survival, especially in the coming times of crisis. For this reason, community-based co-living projects that can think about housing, economics, and sometimes education in a decentralized way and live transgenerationally are lights at the end of the tunnel. 

A Solution to the Education Crisis is a Solution to the Climate Crisis
 
In Austria, over 100 co-living projects have been established in the past 10+ years. These initiatives have often more or less succeeded in escaping one aspect of the capitalist system: for example, the rising real estate prices or the compulsion for the nuclear family or the single household to have to purchase every necessity from the screwdriver to the washing machine itself. However, the projects I have encountered fail on one central issue: education.
 
Here, at least two problems need to be discussed: On the one hand, there are certain educational contents within a society, regardless of whether they are regionally limited or extend globally, which are better provided centrally than having them prepared inefficiently by decentralized institutions, probably in inferior quality, from an overall economic point of view. The central question is how to make ivy-league educational content available to all children and young people, regardless of their location and economic possibilities. On the other hand, there is educational content such as empathy for oneself, one's fellow man and the planet, which is not to be worked on globally but locally, and ideally a vehicle to create and strengthen deep personal relationships.
 
Software entrepreneur Martin Ford sums up the central role of education: the greatest risk is that we could face a "perfect storm" - a situation in which technological unemployment and environmental impacts develop roughly in parallel, reinforcing and perhaps even exacerbating each other. But if we can fully embrace advancing technology as a solution while recognizing and addressing its impact on employment and income distribution, the outcome should be far more optimistic. Finding a way through these intertwined forces and shaping a future that provides broad-based security and prosperity may prove to be the greatest challenge of our time.  Understanding education as a public good that must not be influenced by competitive profit or power maximization is key to finding that path. A conditional universal basic income the basis to enable educational access.

Understanding education as a public good that must not be influenced by competitive profit or power maximization is the key to finding this path. A conditional universal basic income the basis to enable this access to education. For as psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote back in 1964, the long-term goal of education - as well as psychotherapy, family life, work, society, life itself - is to help people grow to their fullest humanity, to the greatest fulfillment and realization of their highest potentials, to their greatest possible stature. A discussion of what social values we pursue through education is therefore more necessary now than ever before, but no longer sufficient. Parents - whether prisoners or guards - who are willing to offer an alternative to the state-industrial education machine must act.

PS: due to lack of time I used deepL for the translation of an essay originally written in German. Apologies for the unusual low reading quality.

Further reading:

• Karl Heinz Peterlini, Das gewonnene verlorene Schuljahr

• Johann Heuras, Brief der Bildungsdirektion an Eltern niederösterreichischer Kinder
• Friedrich von Borries, Weltentwerfen: Eine politische Designtheorie
• Jason Hickel, Urgent Need For Post-Growth Climate Mitigation Scenarios
• David Christian, Big History Project
• Gertrude Aumayr, Brief an Eltern des BORG St. Pölten, 10. Dezember 2021
• Knut K. Wimberger, Unlocking Human Potential Through Play
• Ken Robinson, The Element: How finding Your Passion Changes Everything
• Big History Project: Crash Course on the Epic Story of Evolution
• Peter F. Drucker: The Essential Drucker
• Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order
• John Calhoun, The Mouse Utopia Experiments
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century
• Fritz Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered
• Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation
• Aldous Huxley, The Politics of Ecology
• Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots
• Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences
  

Psychologist Daniel Goleman has radically changed how we think about intelligence, asking us to broaden our definition beyond analytic ability to include emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and now ecological intelligence. He suggests that the key to stopping environmental destruction and climate change is to be mindful at the moment we’re deciding whether or not to buy something.
 
This is a glossed 2017 review of his essay originally published in The Mindfulness Revolution and edited by Barry Boyce with my comments added in brackets. Reading this text in 2021, I feel that the burden on the shoulders of consumers it to heavy. Goleman forgets that consumption is to a large extent driven by compulsive compensation. As long as our culture pushes individual members into isolation and competition, we need to expect such behavior.

Mindful shopping is a potentially important practice, a socially engaged act that could collectively help us save the world from its greatest threat: us.
 
It seems likely that if we practice mindfulness, we will become more in tune with our world ecologically. We will get more in touch with our actual needs and will be driven less by our desires. As a result, we will consume less and decrease our overall impact on the environment. But I think there is a level of mindfulness, or ecological intelligence, that goes beyond just decreasing our acquisitiveness. It relates to what happens when we do buy something. So the question is, when we consume, how can we consume more mindfully?
 
The key step in socially engaged shopping is to be mindful in the moment we’re about to make a decision about whether to buy something rather than going through the store in our usual trance. At the very point of buying, we need to pay attention rather than act on impulse. Our mindfulness can then allow us to take in the bigger picture.
 
[One could of course argue that we should avoid consumption themed spaces altogether. Let’s be straight forward here: if I do not want to get bitten by a snake, I don’t step deliberately into a snake pit. A friend of mine from Vienna law school times has moved several years ago to the small village like town of Salzburg, where his wife practices medicine. He himself has changed his law job for a career as sheep shepherd reminding me of Daniel Sharma’s little book The Lawyer Who Sold His Ferrari. When we last met, he told me that he couldn’t imagine to live again in larger cities, because cities are just about consumption. What he likes most about his new profession is the productive aspect and being able to perceive the entire value chain of raising lambs and eventually delivering meat. Whether one is vegetarian or not, one has to agree there is something healthy about being productive rather then consumptive. Rearing sheeps and producing animal protein without antibiotics and growth hormones which is purchased by grateful clients is surely a sound productive act, which serves to me as just one example of how rural lifestyle choices can enable humanity to engage again in purposeful action. I would personally prefer such a lifestyle over being a frustrated urban vegan fashion designer; but that’s just my personal preference.]
 
To become mindful shoppers, we need to start by reviewing some of our common, unexamined perceptions and paradigms, beginning with our way of thinking about “stuff” – the material things we buy, use, and throw away every day. Turning our minds to stuff and how we use it opens a vast opportunity for practice that, to my knowledge, few of us have taken advantage of.
 
One of my favorite Buddhist teachings is the metaphor of the chariot. It asks, where is the chariot? Is it in its wheels and axle? Is it in the spokes? Is it in the poles that connect it to the horse and the frame? In the carriage? The answer is that the chariot is an illusion. It’s not a thing; it's a process. The chariot is just a frozen moment in time when those parts come together. It’s one moment in a long history of each of those parts, and each of them will continue in some way after the chariot is no longer used.
 
This ancient metaphor shows us the very kind of shift we need to make in thinking about the things we buy and use. We’re not buying products. We’re participating in a process that often started long before the moment of purchase. The modern version of the metaphor of the chariot can be found in a very technical, but nonetheless extremely relevant field called industrial ecology. It is a discipline carried out by chemists, engineers, physicists, and other scientific researchers who look in a very fine-grained way at the life history of a consumable and break it down into the discrete steps that result in the product that you and I buy at our neighborhood store, mall, car dealership, or restaurant.
 
Take the example of a drinking glass. If you did what industrial ecologists call a life-cycle assessment, you would find that there are 1,959 discrete steps in the life of an average drinking glass. It begins with all the processes involved in the extraction of raw materials and continues through various manufacturing, transportation, and retail processes, culminating in our use and disposal. Each step of the way can be examined to determine the myriad impacts of the glass on the environment in the form of emissions to the air, water, and soul; the contribution to greenhouse gases; the energy tied up in it; its embodied toxicity; its embodied water, and so on. Industrial ecologists look at every angle and determine the ecological impact of each step in the life of the glass. The sum total gives you a kind of karmic score for the glass, the debt to nature that you take on when you buy it.
 
When we begin to understand things in this more global way, it challenges what we tend to think of and call “green.” It’s often a mirage. An organic cotton T-shirt may be called green because the growers didn’t use pesticides or chemical fertilizers when growing the cotton. That’s on the good side of the ledger, to be sure, but if we look into the life cycle of the T-shirt, we discover that organic cotton fibers are shorter than other fibers, so you need to grow a lot more cotton per T-shirt. Cotton is typically raised in arid parts of the world, and it's a very thirsty crop, so a lot of water is implicated in the production of the T-shirt.
Also, if it’s a colored T-shirt, we have to take into account that textile dyes tend to be carcinogenic. When we consider all these angles, we may come to see that if you change on thing about a product and leave 999 unchanged, it’s not green. It’s perhaps a little bit greener.
 
Understanding the life cycle of products in this way is a means of directing our contemplative mind to the true impact involved in our buying decisions. It lets us know the karmic weight of any given object. Therefore, its’ a way of helping us buy in a more socially engaged way, in a way that takes more responsibility for our impacts.
 
[It is in particular complex industries like textiles, which are globalized and made up of several sub-industries that are far from transparent for the end consumer making it almost impossible to purchase mindfully in regard to products offered in traditional B2C sales channels. The social responsibility of manufacturers therefore seems to outweigh in some industries the possibilities of consumer empowerment. With about 2/3 of our global annual fiber consumption being supplied by crude oil turned into synthetic fiber, but only marginal volumes left for traditional fiber crops like hemp, jute or flax, we need to reassess the entire textile industry system and are as consumers forced to pretty radical decision which are not easy to take in a world of psychological peer pressure reinforced by the advertisement industry.]
 
Another ancient metaphor from the Buddhist tradition can also help shed light on what’s involved in becoming a mindful shopper. It’s known as Indra’s net. At each connection point in this infinite web is a jewel, and each jewel reflects every other jewel in the web. Everything is interconnected, and everything is reflected in every other thing. Nothing is totally independent.
 
That view of interconnectedness can help us understand the supply chain: a company gets its stuff from such and such place, which employs immigrants form yet other places. The history of any given item likely extends throughout the world. It can also make us rethink what “local” really means. Some researchers, for example, did a life-cycle analysis on locally grown tomatoes in Montreal. It showed that the seeds were developed in France, grown in China, then flown to Ontario, where the seeds were sprouted. The sprouts were trucked to Montreal, sold in a nursery, planted, and sold as local. Apart from asking, “How green is green?” then, we also nee to ask, “How local is local?”
 
[The so-called practice of greenwashing has been established by many enterprises and government entities in order to sell inconvenient truths, as Al Gore would say. Whether Chinese eco-cities or IBM’s smarter planet campaign, most large scale organizations do engage in fraud campaigns of massive scale and are supported by two main allies: the financial and the advertising industries, which cash in the short term profits, but make the global ecosystem at large pay the debt, which continues to build up. I recommend to watch two documentaries hereon to understand the scope and scale of how this triangle of governments and large coorporations as contractors and financial service institutions like banks and global accounting firms and the advertising industries must be identified as the main crooks in a sick profit driven system.]
 
Considering the scope of the life cycle for any given item and the vast interconnectedness of the supply chain may make the shopping decision seem overwhelming and daunting, but we are not alone in our efforts to become mindful, socially engaged consumers. We can get help. There is now a way to know the relative ecological merits and demerits of many competing products through a website and an iPhone app called Good Guide, started by an independent group at the University of California – Berkeley. It aggregates 200 databases and compares 60,000 plus consumer items – toys, foods, personal care products, and so on. They’re adding new categories continuously. This kind of tool helps us to pay attention to the karmic virtues of one competitive choice versus another.
 
Even Walmart has announced that it wants to develop a sustainability index for all its products. It may take four or five years for this concept to reach the shelves of Walmart and other retailers, but if it becomes an industry standard, it will make it easier to be a mindful shopper.
 
[Such an approach despite it good intention seems to be completely unrealistic; if large trading and wholesale companies like Walmart have corporate social responsibility at the center of their business strategy, they would have started long ago to implement such a sustainability index, and if they do only now so, they would not only indicate the results on their shelves, but remove critical suppliers altogether.]
 
Another wonderful resource that’s available now is Skin Deep, a Web database that reports on toxic chemicals in personal care products. Skin deep looks at the fifty different ingredients in a given shampoo through the lens of a medical database and sees if there are any negative findings. It then ranks the products in terms of safety. One of the lowest shampoos on the list is one of the most expensive. Even though it has a greenish-looking label and a botanical name, its ingredients are really bad.
 
[What we truly have to ask here though, is why cosmetics are used in the first place. I remember once plowing through a 15 story cosmetics mall in Hong Kong searching for a product my sister in law had asked me to buy; I felt like a famine struck fugitive in a warehouse full of candies and could not stop thinking that a society which can spend space, time, money and effort on purchasing such products must be sick to the bones. It is vanity only that motivates such social behavior, yes, sometimes it might be nicely packaged into health, hygiene, etc. but in the end its only vanity that drives in particular women to such temples of narcissism.]
 
The moment when we are about to be drawn in by the label and the name – the buying moment – is critical. As a psychologist, I would call mindfulness at the moment “looking into the backstory.” It means looking into the ecological truths about the things we’re considering buying. One hair dye may have lead in it, while another doesn’t – that means something. One sunblock might have a chemical that becomes a carcinogen if it is exposed to the sun. An “organic” dairy product might come from an industrial-sized dairy farm that employs some of the worst feed-lot practices. The moment you realize the bigger picture surrounding your purchase, the moment you find your preference for a brand turning to disgust, you are led to a more mindful buying decision.
 
[Shouldn’t the buying decision not be triggered by our needs, not by brands? I feel that Goleman speaks here too much out of the perspective of consumption conditioned Americans. It is not about which brand propagates which information, false or true, its about reflecting on our needs first and foremost. Do I really need yet another XYZ? Or do I actually need something quite different, social interaction, being cared for, being appreciated, being hugged, etc? Aren’t we in many of our modern consumer decisions compensating an emotional vacuum with materialism? Our societies resemble more and more a shiny set of teeth, shiny because of gold fillings hiding the rotten caveats beneath.]
 
Dive deeper:

• Good guide: a guide to sound consumer choices
• Excellent article by Wolfgang Uchatius in the German weekly Die Zeit about the how the Western political system has deprived the citizen of its voting power and why consumer decisions are the only voting powers left in any societies: Soll ich wählen oder shoppen?
• Brilliant article on Greenwashing by August Rick in Forbes: The Eco-Friendly Scam Winning over China’s 1.3B Consumer Marketplace
• Collapse of insect populations: The equation is very simple: no more insects = no more humans.  
• Momo by Michael Ende: A book and namesake film about how more stuff deprives us from relationships
• Matthieu Ricard on chocolate cake
• The Story of Stuff: 20min online documentary and nonprofit which started in 2007 to promote “better” rather than more. Meanwhile there are a number of animated videos available which tell different stories.
• Delicatessen: a classic movie about gluttony