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Germany

The Real Scoop: Our World Is Far Better Off Than We Think

Heading up, toward the light.
Heading up, toward the light.
Sebastian Herrmann

MUNICH — What a crappy year you were 2016. With your terrorist attacks, the British going mad with Brexit and the Americans electing a Twitter troll as commander-in-chief. In Syria and other war zones, people were drowning all year in blood. On top of all of that, many of our most beloved artists and performers left the stage, forever, last year. And yet ...

Yes, folks it is high time to interrupt all of this turn-the-calendar mourning and shout out loud and clear: People around the world have never been better, healthier and happier. It's the mind's natural predisposition to record only bad news, and no doubt there has been plenty. But that's also one reason why all the good news goes unnoticed – Another reason is that positive developments often happen more subtly, they build up over decades and therefore never really make big blips on the human emotional radar.

People have forever been convinced that things have just changed for the worse. In a 2015 survey, only 6% of Americans claimed the opposite. In 2010, 2005 and 2000 the number of optimists was similarly low. But such a sentiment deceives, says Max Roser, an economics professor from the Oxford University.

According to Roser's statistics, the number of people living in poverty has been steadily dropping, relative to the world population. 1981, 44% of the inhabitants of the earth lived in life-threatening precarious conditions; in 2015 the number has dropped below 10% — Even as the total world population has continued to climb. Over the same time period, ever fewer people have to go through life illiterate, infant mortality is sinking across all social classes, life expectancy is on the rise worldwide and despite current conflicts like the one in Syria, historically compared, the number of people dying by violence is dropping.

Still, the optimists continue to be far outnumbered. Surveys show that people are convinced that extreme poverty is on the rise, that there is more crime and less and less hope for the future. Perception is calibrated by the force of negative events, which, on top of that, usually occur with a bang: an earthquake, a humanitarian catastrophe, they all trigger great emotions. Long-term trends for the better, on the other hand, hardly ever produce dramatic images, nor are adept at providing a convincing narrative. Good news happens in silence and passes right past the attention of the masses.

This in a tragedy in its own right. Being submerged by an image of the world that is both unrealistic and negative creates nothing but fear. And fear, we know, usually leads to bad decisions. Some at least we are stuck with for awhile.

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Ideas

The Unifying Power Of Art In A World Divided By Religion And Morality

Political battle lines are becoming increasingly entrenched, and opposing views are being pushed towards ever greater extremes. Language has become a battlefield. If morality pushes us apart, and religion does not help in the process, we may find a solution in our sense of humanity, writes German psychiatrist Manfred Lütz in Die Welt.

The Unifying Power Of Art In A World Divided By Religion And Morality

Eugène Delacroix - La liberté guidant le peuple (1830). Commemorates the French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution.

Manfred Lütz

-Essay-

BERLIN — In the Middle Ages, people didn’t read texts about the meaning of life. Most of them couldn’t read at all, and they saw the meaning of life in the images in their churches. Academics have recently started speaking about the “iconic turn”, the return of images, and it is true that the Instagram generation prefers to communicate visually. Could pictures offer a way for our deeply divided society to come together once again?

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Both in terms of foreign and domestic policy, political views are becoming increasingly entrenched, and on both sides of the debate, opposing views are being pushed towards ever greater extremes. In the world of today, many people are cut off from any contact with those who think differently, living in echo chambers, surrounded by people who confirm their worldview. When those who disagree with their position condemn them from a moral perspective, this only serves to vitalize the group under attack.

The public pillorying that dominates social media can be a cause of great anxiety for individuals. But for those who feel they are part of a community, their fear often transforms into an aggressive form of self-defense. The topic itself isn’t as important as the sense of being attacked.

That is a possible psychological explanation for a strange phenomenon, whereby attacks on groups such as the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and some of their individual members have strengthened the sense of community within these groups and brought together a surprising mix of people, from radical free marketeers to nationalists, conspiracy theorists, pro-lifers, COVID deniers, right-wing extremists, conservative Christians and racists.

They are united by a single experience, that of being excluded. Conversations within these groups are reminiscent of chats around a pub table: the more harshly someone criticizes “those in power”, “the lefties”, “right-wingers” or even, “the others”, the more likes they get.

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