This morning I had a discussion about how to change fundamental society behavior. Things like, environmental behavior, hate speech, radicalization, populism…
Looking at the print media, social media, TV, radio, podcast or any online media, you are bombarded by negative messaging. The vast majority of “news” are negative. There are reason behind this: negative news is standing out from the ordinary and is potentially threatening our status quo – so we look into this. Another point is that negative news is consumed 6x more than positive news which results in more reach and more commercial impact. Going thru Instagram, it is really shocking how many negative news are there AND getting lots of views/clicks.
When it comes to changing patterns/behaviors, I have to learn a lot to understand what is going on and then to conclude how to change things. Example:
Andrew Tate is a British-American media personality. He promotes hate and violence against women and a violent, hateful and aggressive living style for young men. Videos with his hashtag had been clicked more than 13 billion times on TikTok. The opinions of this person are mainly complete nonsense. You don’t need to be over intelligent to understand that you should not beat anybody or specifically women. Nevertheless, millions follow him and support him. So, what could be done to change this and get this hate and nonsense out of the media and in best case out of this world?
Well, there could be a prosecutor- an official political and legal body – who could go after this behavior and make sure that everything that is above and beyond legal, is followed and regulated by law (This guy, Andrew Tate, was part of Big Brother in 2016. He was removed from the show when a video got online in which he was beating a women with his belt like an animal…there was no prosecution for that…). In essence a standard execution of law and order. As a matter of fact, this is not happening.
This is just an example. But the question is, if the democratic systems of today, are still able to deal with all the wrong behavior we have in the world at the moment. Or is it really 5 min after 12, and the world is ready for more radical things, like a revolution.
I do believe that every change in society has to go thru the political system. The system might have ancient processes that need to be changed and adapted – but I still believe that the democratic system is working. I know, looking at the parties and the politicians these days, many will highly question my statement. Who is out there? Macron? Sanchez? Scholz? Orban? Meloni? Von der Leyen? Michel? I wouldn’t vote for any of these so called “leaders”. But I still do believe that elections are a powerful instrument for the people to chose their party and their leaders they want to be represented from. What we are missing are strong leaders, that can articulate a future perspective for the people and then follow them thru. I understand the frustration that there are no such leaders at the moment. Look at what happened in Bremen on Sunday…a party called “Bürger in Wut – BIW” achieved 10%+. They barely have a program and 10% are voting for them as the alternatives are just not worth it.
Breaking down the system and start a revolution is another way. This will happen if we have a majority of people who can’t survive anymore. It’s an instrument that is pulled whenever this critical phase is achieved. I don’t believe we are at this point (yet). Frustration is growing fast and initiatives like “Letzte Generation” and their radical protests are signs, that we are getting to this phase where people will no longer believe in the democratic system and therefore start to act revolutionary.
The foundation for everything is engagement. When I engage, I can change whatever I want. And if many more engage, we can start a movement. I am not there to articulate my thoughts of what the movement should lead to exactly – but I hope I will get there. And I will write it down for sure.
