Category: ENGLISH

What is the most important thing in the world, I am asked, and I don’t have to think long. The most important thing in the world is obviously nonsense.

I love sense, I’m always looking for sense and whenever I get hold of something that could be sense, I look at it closely. Whatever thought I grabbed, I hold it up in front of my eyes and study it in depth. In the vast majority of cases, however, I have to realise, “damn, that’s nonsense again!” And then I throw the thought away, somewhere, with all the other nonsense. The nonsense that apparently makes up the whole world.

Every now and then I find sense and of course I don’t throw the sense away. I put each sense in a jam jar, with a pretty label with a name I’ve thought up for the sense, and I put the jam jars neatly in my jam jar cupboard. Every now and then I unscrew one of the jars and enjoy the enchanting smell, which triggers a strong feeling of well-being in me. Sometimes, however, I notice that an old sense has gone bad and I throw it away.

And so I spend my days looking for some sense to put in jam jars. I already have many jam jars, maybe a few hundred. They are all in the cupboard, I wouldn’t even know if I could list them all.

But as I said, sense is rare, most of it is nonsense. The world is made of nonsense and only now and then does a little sense grow on it. But nonsense is obviously more important. Nonsense is the stuff the world is made of. Sense is only the exception. It’s nice somehow, but it might not be useful for anything.

When I say, “I don’t have an opinion on anything,” people usually laugh and say, “But you have an opinion on everything.” Most regular readers of my blog seem to share this view, at least that’s what I infer from what those who do comment say.

It would be more correct to say: “More and more often I succeed in not having an opinion”. Because I can only have no opinion about something if I focus. It is impossible to be concentrated on everything. So it’s only selected things that I don’t have an opinion on, for example the things I write about in this blog. I don’t write (at least not anymore) about things I mean. Instead, I try to describe the things I see. Even if I myself disagree, even if they don’t fit my own thinking. Because I no longer give a damn about my opinion.

I have no opinion on everything that is important to me and on which I have concentrated since I learned not to have an opinion.

On everything else I still have an opinion and it is on most things.

Having an opinion seems to be the default mode of the human being, and that to the extent that the human being develops language. Language is opinion. This would also explain why opinion can be expressed so well in language, while no opinion is so difficult to express in words, and why no opinion expressed in words leads so reliably to misunderstandings.

Since I started to look at things increasingly without opinion, I see more and more. Because I not only see what I mean, but I also see what I don’t mean. And I see what I don’t mean as real as what I do mean. So I can no longer deny what I don’t want to see, nor do I want to. Because the world is much bigger and truer when I perceive not only what I mean, but also what I don’t mean, don’t think, don’t want to perceive.

And every time I succeed in seeing what I don’t mean just as well as what I do mean, opinion becomes more and more irrelevant, uninteresting, undesirable. Because opinion collapses the world to the section of one’s own opinion.

No opinion allows to see much more.

Climate change is a wonderful problem, because climate change is pushing humanity with great force further in a direction it has always been going.

Humankind will have a manifold more energy at its disposal than ever before. Humans are the only animals that have systematically learned to tap energy beyond their own muscle power. This has enabled the human being to do things, to think things, to attain consciousness, like no other living being on this planet.

Most of the energy available on earth comes from the sun. Without the sun, the earth would be an ice-cold planet. Fossil energy is nothing more than coagulated solar energy, created over millions of years. It is relatively easy to collect this coagulated energy and release it again. Humans have managed this trick by harnessing fire. It is much more difficult to collect energy directly from the sun and make it usable, because you have to redirect the solar energy from day to night, from one place to another. This requires technology that could only be discovered and developed with tools that required enormous amounts of energy to produce and operate. To be able to harvest and store the energy of the sun, you not only need the energy it takes to build solar, wind or hydroelectric plants, distribution and storage systems, you need a million times more energy to be able to conceive these technologies in the first place. In this sense, one could say that in every single wind turbine there is embodied energy that has been released at all times in human history.

We have not wasted fossil resources, we have used them to get to a new level. We are now able to become independent of the energy that is lying around clotted on the earth.

Non-coagulated energy from the sun and energy from the splitting of the atom has opened doors for humanity to much more energy.

And what is the point of all this?
I have an opinion on that: it is the energy that humanity needs to get closer to understanding.

It is only the last sentence that I would like to discuss.

It may be due to being catholic, or to the fact that one believes in God in general, in the paradise of heaven, where one wants to go at all costs and where a camel has to fit through the eye of a needle. Where I come from, people have made it a habit of making themselves small. But only to those who are bigger. We are modest and, when in doubt, we hide our light under a bushel. That’s how I learned it from my father.

In balance, you show what you are to those who are smaller – or at the very most, the same size. To your neighbors, for example, or to your employees. You mow the lawn, show up in a suit on Sunday, put up a freshly washed car in front of your door. “What should the neighbors think otherwise?” was the question. “What do you want the neighbors to think?” would have been the right question. And one wanted: just don’t show any weakness!

That is a foolish strategy. Only much, much later and only long after I had given up my faith in God and also no longer even secretly wanted to enter the heavenly kingdom, then I realized: one should keep it exactly the other way around. Make yourself tall in the face of those who are tall. Towards the doctors, the professors, all those who are smarter than you. One should make oneself big towards those from whom one wants to learn. Not that one should puff oneself up, because those who exaggerate look ridiculous and are not taken seriously. One should show oneself as one is. Emphasize your strengths and be strong enough not to want to conceal your weaknesses but instead make them widely visible.

Showing one’s strengths opens the first door: to those who have to decide to whom they want to direct their attention. One must make oneself visible. You have to show that it’s worth paying attention to you.

Showing your weaknesses, on the other hand, opens the second door: you make it possible for those from whom you want to learn to see where they can help most effectively.
Towards those who are smaller, on the other hand, one should be modest. In a way that they are not intimidated and can speak honestly without hesitation.

In this way, one can learn from all of them, from the big animals and from the small ones.