Much has been written about Covid-19 and little I read was of value. The nearsightedness of politicians and the tunnel vision of scientists is deprived of interdisciplinary systems awareness and what Buddhists call the connection between phenomena and noumena: the reflection of moral problems in the material world.

There is however one outstanding quote by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, which hits the bull's eye: "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew." The 2nd bubonic plague triggered the end of the dark ages and the emergence of Renaissance. Recurrences of the 2nd bubonic plague gave way to the enlightenment movement and the 3rd bubonic plague to the 19th century revolutions which led to the decline of Empires and Aristocracy.

Some day soon a book will be written like the one above right which will not be titled "The Black Death and the End of the Dark Ages" but "Covid-19 and the End of Modernity". Humanity is at the brink of another major transformation which might rejuvenate a decaying democracy through technological decision making and extend spheres of justice from a few wealthy nations to a united mankind. It might also produce an enlightened absolutism in which Xi Jinping continues the tradition of enlightenment kings like the Prussian Frederick the Great (1740-1772). Who can say for sure? The only thing that is certain about the future is that it will be different.

The wide spread admiration for authoritarian and thus industrial solutions to Covid-19 in the outbreak country China reflects however that large parts of the population support an industrial solution to a multi-layered problem which connects nature with culture. The crisis we experience is at the root one in consciousness of everything being interconnected, one which shows us that the exploitation of people and planet is not any longer sustainable.

Regulations on compulsory vaccinations like the one introduced in Austria on Feb 1 are the product of societies which are not ready to embrace diversity and tolerance. They are fascist in nature and repeat a cultural phenomenon which has materialized in our cultures over the course of history in various forms: the inquisition of the catholic church, the final solution in regard to European Jews, the genocides committed by Tutsis and Hutus, the recurring wars between Israelis and Lebanese, etc.

Courageous Chinese netizens shared at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak a clip from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on wechat and pointed at the  nontransparent top-down approach of the government. Courageous Austrian citizens demonstrate these days in many cities against a regulation which ignores human integrity for the sake of keeping industrial working and schooling conditions in place.

Covid-19 has laid bare an essential characteristic of our contemporary societies and has shown that democratic nations converge under the pressure of systemic challenges like this pandemic episode with authoritarian regimes which have not yet gone through enlightenment movements and bourgeois revolutions. They reveal power structures and power interests which are in contraction with what Fritz Schumacher postulated in Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

The future might not be known, but in the words of Peter F. Drucker, the only thing that we know about the future is that it will be different. The best way to predict the future is however to create it.

Occasionally I would just wish I could forget the frame conditions under which we live, engross myself in Chinese New Year celebrations or be amused by US blockbuster movies. But we can’t truly change how our minds operate. It is as if they have been built as special purpose machines with a mission to accomplish. Darwin wrote about himself in a similar manner in his autobiography. Like him I would love to be able to enjoy music, but my mind is on a mission to unravel a problem which we sooner or later all need to face.
 
Saturday night, I finish in a second attempt director Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look up. I felt compelled to turn off in a first attempt after only 30 minutes. Don’t Look up is Netflix’ second highest grossing production. It’s a cash cow. One which is described as dark comedy, a satire of government, political, and media indifference to the climate crisis. I couldn’t find the comedy aspects in it. The way it has been made reflects how sick our hedonistic societies are. And it made me literally sick.

The day after we consume this piece of cinematic art, the sun shines and I decide to take the family on a little trip into the outskirts of town. Temperatures are up 8˚C from -1 a day earlier to +7. A storm brushes the landscape and makes driving our van challenging to my wife. Our first stop is an approximately 200 year old tilia cordata, the only nature monument of this species in town. I exchange a few words with the owner,  and we measure the tree’s grith at an impressive 450 cm.
 
Our next stop is a same size tilia platyphyllus a few kilometers south from where we start a three hour hike. The wind makes it occasionally difficult to walk. The kids think its fun, I think it’s a manifestation of climate change since I can’t remember such frequent storms from my childhood. How the trees must suffer under such a storm. We cross under the A1, the country’s main highway, in a tunnel and encounter loads of trash on both sides. The signs of a closeby service area with restaurant and gas station where drivers discharge their waste on the parking lot.
 
A rolling landscape opens the view to the snow-covered northern Alps and after another half an hour we enter a forest which I identified on the satellite map as the main attraction on this route. I am however first disappointed then even horrified as we get deeper into the forest. The storm is ear deafening, making it hardly possible to talk to each other and the spruce monoculture has created an acidic soil which is poison to most understory plants.
 
Austria is considered to be a green country, one in which nature protection is a priority, but where once mixed broad leaf forests covered the surface, capitalist forestry has supplanted oaks, wild cherries and limes, with this ugly spruce monoculture with no tree older than thirty years. We follow a little creek and after another half an hour I notice a hidden fault line in the forest landscape which turns away from the forest trail which has been recently used by heavy machinery.
 
We walk north and discover a probably 150-year-old beech which nestles in a line with an approximately 200-year-old oak along this old path. East and west the spruce monoculture extends as far as the eye can see and looks not much different from the Malaysian palm oil plantations which I still have in my long time Asian memory. Why did film maker Werner Boote back in 2017 shoot The Green Lie in Malaysia, if there is so much more to discover back home?
 
Not far from the beech the forest has been partially cleared and about two dozen twenty-meter-high spruces have given way to the force of the storm. Like a game of Mikado they are scattered on the ground and lean against adjacent trees. A picture of disaster which reminds me of our 2020 visit to Japan were we saw a three dozen century old trees having been destroyed by a storm only a few days earlier. Can there be something like a graveyard for trees? Did the ditches in Srebrenica look any different?

Don't look up.

Isaac Asimov's bathroom metaphor is famous and as Aldous Huxley once said: A fact doesn't disappear by ignoring it. Western nation states however pretend that population growth does not impact the democratic model while it slowly declines right before our eyes.

Donald Trump's presidency and the attack on democratic institutions like the one on the US Capitol last year, a dictator-like regime in Austria from 2017-2021 under the youngest ever chancellor Sebastian Kurz and two successors since then seem like manifestations of what Ken Wilber once called aperspectival madness. In fact these events follow the laws of nature and show that we need a new form of governance.

The grand master of the exponential function, Al Bartlett, wrote a short and readable article about the connection between the democratic decline, techological advancement and population growth which quotes Asimov in lucid manner.

Bill Moyers: "What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species
if this population growth continues at its present rate?"

Isaac Asimov: "It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, Then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, Stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in Freedom of the Bathroom; It should be right there in the Constitution.

But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, Then no matter how much every person Believes in Freedom of the Bathroom, there's no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, You have to bang on the door, 'Aren't you through yet?' And so on."

Asimov continues with what could be one of the most profound observations of the 20th Century: "In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation; Human dignity cannot survive [overpopulation]; Convenience and decency cannot survive [overpopulation]; As you put more and more people into the world, The value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies,
The more people there are, the less one individual matters."

Read this and you will understand why the threat to democracy does not originate in authoritarian China, but in our elites' unwillingness to reform democratic decision making. China's own overpopulation problem can teach the democratic West that another form of governance - if not a totalitarian - is inevitable - no matter whether we praise China's absolutism or work on more humane alternatives.

Writing a blog on the future of work on education, I should mention that this condition extends to labor markets and education systems: the more people there are the more unequal and unfair the frame conditions will be.

We have two routes which we can take from here:

One leads to the decimation of population through war and disease and is in the interest of the small number of people who own the majority of wealth and assets on this planet.

The second route leads to a new form of sharing and education in which finite resources and the need to allocate them fairly are precondition for genuine growth and the true unfolding of human potential.

Peter Drucker forsaw already many years ago that "if the 21st century will show one thing, then it is the futility of politics." We have chosen route one already a few times. How about taking a different turn this time?

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