Ideas

Introduction

Throughout history, the manifesto has illuminated the path in the darkness, leading us to the peak. In the handbook, you have encountered the manifesto firsthand and perhaps noticed some initial changes. Our grand vision is our summit, that is, the collective experience of the manifesto. We have pointed out one or two examples along the way to make the manifesto more tangible. However, our goal was to avoid inappropriate concretizations as much as possible. How could we possibly advise the world's best expert on you specifically? A map cannot replace the experience of a walk nor fulfill its function. A map is merely a model of reality.

Life and our impact can be described as a process of continuous change and repetition. Our manifesto has an effect and it can generate new ideas. You will scrutinize these ideas, weigh them, and you will try out the good ones. Ideas that you find valuable and share with others become even more valuable. Others can then try out your ideas, build on them, and enhance your ideas. So, we have created a structure where changes can develop and flourish. Now we could sit back and watch as your ideas grow on this framework in the future. However, we believe that ideas are fertile. Therefore, we want to take a big run-up as good role models and make a big leap across the river. We now want to share ideas with you. Ideas that have been born in our alliance, that we have found good, and we believe that these ideas want to grow.

Before we make this leap, we want to prepare something necessary. Let's direct our attention to the evaluation of ideas, i.e., to the "… finding ideas good". An evaluation is always determined by an underlying value. The value weight determines the judgment of whether something is heavy. Suppose we follow the same route everyday, passing the same alleys and houses. Just like the raindrops taking the same paths on a windowpane. But one morning, we stop at an intersection and take a different route than usual, only to find ourselves back on our familiar path after a short while. Once we have reached the old path again, we can recognize that the new path was good. The old path was good, too, but at that moment, the new path was better. Let's now unfold our wings and look at this scenery from an even greater distance. We can now describe all actions in our life as a game in progress. Surprise surprise, since humans created games. In our life game, one move follows the other with the aim of collecting as much reward as possible in total. This is something we are familiar with from many board games. Moves can be the same, like the same route, or they can be different, like the new route. When a move is the same, we are moving within the existing culture. We follow the established, the experienced, the known. However, if a move now differs from the others, we move beyond culture. This beyond culture can also be described as the idea. Ideas can be small and personal in nature. A new route, a new lunch dish, a new ritual. Ideas can be good or not. Good ideas are the reward. Ideas can be big: an insight that connects a handful of areas of knowledge, like a bridge, and that serves as a foundation for further discoveries. We are aware that we have created new values. These new values now mean that future actions and ideas must be evaluated anew. Our ideas are not just permeated and interwoven with these new values; they also all have a certain new flavor, a certain new style. Of course, you can now think in analogies and start sorting: this idea seems conservative, this idea is rather progressive. This idea is shaped by techno-optimism, this idea originates from a libertarian school of thought, and so on. Consider the American lifestyle, which has spread over the past hundred years. Today - in retrospect - we can all too well summarize this lifestyle succinctly in the motto - from dishwasher to millionaire. But when it was still emerging a few decades ago, this was not possible. Only the practice of many has made this style and this phenomenon describable. Only the long practice of many - be it through movies, texts or direct experience - has made it possible to condense the style into its essence in a few words. So it is also with the Ultanio way of life. When we speak of adventure beyond culture, it is a description. Any analogy would be wrong. Adventure beyond culture is our current and therefore our best possible description to condense our lifestyle into its essence. Our ideas should now - and this is the real risk of this idea book - reverse this process. Our ideas should hand you the fragrant flowers so that your delicate nose can discern their essence.

Before we hand you our colorful bouquet for you to throw it with great joy like a proud bride, let's summarize.

Behind every idea lies life, that is, your life. So behind every idea lies an invitation to try it out, to look at yourself in the mirror with it, and to let this new impression affect you. We want to encourage you not to see our ideas as truths, but rather to question, test, understand and above all improve our ideas.

We have summarized our ideas in fields. The order of the ideas fields starts with you, then goes into your immediate sphere of influence, i.e., your family and your organizations, in order to finally go beyond that and focus globally and intergalactically. Some ideas have a political dimension and can inspire work in existing parties, impel the founding of one's own party, or inspire other social engagements for change and mobilization.

We wish you much joy with our ideas.

For your family

Our parents raised us and were thus the first instance that gave us values. We also pass on values in this role. This process repeats itself from generation to generation.

But the family is not a picture and therefore, the family is also not an ideal. The family is a system and the family is a process in which everyone learns, all on an equal footing.

A family is an interplay and the better the individual players complement each other, the more families can grow.

For your friendships

If we raise our gaze, we find people outside our family whom we learn to call our friends. We learn to categorize these people. Recategorizations of existing friends always take place. As the intensity of the friendship increases, so does the trust in the respective friend and thus the openness to exchange information.

Our first idea for you is to do an inventory. Just as the careful merchant goes to his warehouse at the end of the business year and weighs, measures, and counts all the goods he finds there, you can conduct an inventory of your circle of friends. You can ask questions at your discretion and put on different glasses: From 'How much was I able to help friend A recently?' to 'How much has friend B brought to me recently?'

Perhaps there is already an existing motive for you, like in a good opera, after which you have evaluated your entire circle of friends to date. So your view of the whole circle might be that you see it as too large, too small, too strenuous, or too distracting. This motive also offers many possibilities to question.

Once you have warmed up here, you can delve deeper: What exactly does 'good' mean to you? Why? Well, the question of the model behind a rating can also lead to interesting results. Or the question of differences: What distinguishes your family from friends?

Once you have completed your research, it is time to look at the results, to understand them, and to finally review and improve. Your ideas then come into play. One of the ideas can be to first record in writing your research results and what you want to improve. This way, you can check yourself at a later date and see what has changed.

Another idea could be that you not only evaluate individual meetings with your friends, but above all record their content. What insights did this meeting lead to? What ideas did it lead to? Afterwards, the genealogy of ideas can be helpful in reflecting on your own development.

By paying more attention to your friends, your friendships can bloom anew and change fundamentally.

You can do this!

For your suppliers

We are all customers. At our baker's or at our search engine. In these relationships, we can discover a lot of potential for improvement through open questioning. We also experience that ideas on how service could be improved do not always immediately find a receptive ear.

So share your ideas, not only directly with the supplier, but also with other customers and with your friends. A small note in a suitable place can make a lot of difference.

Transform your suppliers into the best in the world.

You can do this!

For your technology

As with your circle of friends, a basic inventory can be a first step to create clarity. An inventory can help to recognise which technologies you use, what benefits they bring you, and which topics concern you in this context.

We believe that in recent generations, the activity of understanding technology has become increasingly important. It goes without saying that a farmer who tended his land a few thousand years ago attached far less importance to understanding what he was doing than a contemporary knowledge worker who uses a variety of technologies.

At this point, we would like to remind you again that, in our view, technology encompasses far more than is generally subsumed under technology.

Understanding technology is thus initially a major investment, which wants to be paid with time. But if you look far ahead at this point, you can recognise that this investment pays a profitable interest and thus - in the long run - through the compound interest effect, can create a large treasure.

The first result of the inventory may be to recognise technologies as such anew.

Now our actual work can begin, i.e., to question technology - as a whole - and ourselves. You already know the procedure from the previous idea fields, so it could also be interesting here to put on different glasses, i.e., to use different filters.

What dangers arise from your current behaviour? What benefit has this or that technology brought you? Which technology could easily bring more benefit to you if you understood it better? What business models are inherent to the companies whose technology you use? What opportunities present to you when you use a new technology for a certain goal?

Our understanding of technology also includes psychology, language, nutrition, sleep and social. Technology as an interplay of various aspects of us.

At this point, we would like to briefly illustrate with an example how a better understanding of technology makes change possible. Let's take the well-known Alice and let's take Bob. Alice now wants to send Bob a message. Alice can thus first, become aware that what she describes as "I want to send Bob a message," is nothing more than a thought. It may have been a voice she heard telling her in an emphatic tone, "Bob should buy milk, the old lazybones!" This gives Alice a variety of new possibilities. So, she can not only follow the thought, but she can also ignore it or she can change it. The same, of course, applies to the communication channel and to the message as such. To recognise that there are many channels, to understand how these channels work, and to have options to formulate the message, provides Alice with a lot of room for change. So, while it might have looked at first as if there was only one single possibility, she can now choose from a huge universe of options. This allows new possibilities that she has not seen before to be tried out.

Let's now look at two specific technologies that are on everyone's lips and illuminate them with new ideas. Both governments and companies see artificial intelligence as either a tool or a resource. Yet, artificial intelligence in its essence is neither a tool nor a resource. Both tool and resource would be means to an end. But artificial intelligence is an end, not a means. Intelligence is the ability to achieve one's goals in various environments. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics not only of our species, but of life.

Politicians pride themselves on investing billions in artificial intelligence. The money is flowing into new university research centres, thus into big bottomless barrels. But even today, we have algorithms and data to convert simple control loops like traffic light systems into cybernetic systems. This would bring real progress and not create more senseless and useless papers.

As in all areas, politics lives at least a decade in the past in relation to the technological status quo and maintains a dilettantish understanding of it. After having followed the Gandhi roadmap exactly in politics and first completely ignoring social media, then mocking it as "Who cares about what I had for breakfast today," 2016 came as a wake-up call. One morning, politics woke up and realized that someone seems to be sawing on the branch they are sitting on, and after rubbing their eyes in disbelief, they saw that it was social media. Our idea is simple: Politics is not supposed to regulate social media now, but politics needs to create better social media. That must be the benchmark.

Pars pro toto. Artificial intelligence and social media are just two technologies that we have pointed out as part of the problem. Our goal is to support ambitious and bold projects that create something genuinely new. We understand technology in its original meaning, as the connection of engineering and art. We also understand technology as an increasingly significant essence of our species.

We, therefore, want to become technology.

We will also achieve this!

For Fashion and Taste

Let's start our ideas for fashion and taste with a brief thought experiment. Look around in the room you're currently in. Consider the clothing you're wearing. Imagine the house you're in. Take another look back at the pictures hanging on the walls of your home, and re-listen to the music you last heard. Recall the last book you read before that and the last dialogue you had. One final view, please, from a bird's eye perspective of the city where you currently are.

We want to initially describe all these impressions as culture. Of course, these impressions will vary for every reader, but this experiment provides a great foundation for discussing the following categories that apply to all of us:

Interior design. Furniture. Design. Architecture. Fashion. Music. Literature. Painting. Art. Communication. Narrative. Urban design.

So it's time to turn on our stage lighting and ask the first questions:

What do the images that you just saw look like? In other words, do you like these images? What do you like particularly?

Now let us propose a new thought experiment: Imagine putting on a magical dreamer's hat. As soon as you wear this hat, the critic in you becomes completely silent and the doer, the one who wants to put everything into action right away, also remains in the background for now.

Now, in your new role as a dreamer, imagine how these pictures you've seen earlier could look in order to appeal to you even more.

Perhaps more color on the white door? A more colorful jacket? Maybe a new music direction with imaginative sounds? Perhaps more imposing Baroque?

After these two thought experiments, we deserve a small break.

Culture is like the air that surrounds us. We can now focus our attention on the breath, but usually, we are not aware of our breath. Not just momentarily perceiving the culture, but questioning it involves tremendous effort.

Psychology has discovered over a hundred cognitive biases that provide a further explanation for this phenomenon. Basically, it's an atavism that occasionally becomes more visible and which was the best behavior for us a few hundred thousand years ago in order not to be eaten and to have enough to eat.

However, since we are now capable of performing such effort and since we are capable of questioning our culture, a whole new door opens for us.

What could a culture look like that goes beyond our present culture? How could such a superior culture, which we call post-culture, look like?

Let's examine two of the categories we first shed light on, while still wearing our magical dreamer hat.

We know from experience that learning works best when we perceive a stark contrast. We want to take advantage of this knowledge in our next thought experiment.

Let's shine our bright attention on fashion right away. Let's juxtapose today's fashion with the fashion of another culture and another time.

We believe that taste has not evolved for the better and the finer. This realization might surprise twice and hence it's quadruply valuable! Taste should actually improve over the centuries. Fashion should also improve due to the generally increasing prosperity. Let's take a short break and note: This realization alone is of immense value.

So, what could new fashion look like, which mirrors good taste on the mirror? Again, some effort is needed, so let's end this little break.

Looking at today's fashion worn in Western countries and comparing it to the fashion of other cultures and times, we find that the former fashion can be described with the two adjectives simpler and more functional in contrast to the latter fashion. A glance at the category of architecture confirms this. Yes, even furniture, design, and music have become simpler and more functional. What principle underlies this development? Why are no more works created today, which gloriously worship good taste?

The answer is right in front of us, and it's no small disgust that makes us look at it: works are created to please many and to be especially lucrative for the creator. The disgust lies in the fact that we - although we wanted to turn to ideas for a new culture - are now occupied with identifying our prevalent economic system as the culprit and are struggling to give a speech in defense.

But here we remember with pleasure our magical hat of dreams and postpone reflection, as well as a possible apology of the free markets, for later.

But now we see the next challenges coming up. We've created wonderful fashion that shines anew and is a top tribute to our good taste. We have created fashion that brings tears to everyone's eyes and that again deserves the name culture. Except for us, who else would have the courage to wear it?

Enough. So where are we now? Initially, we conducted an experiment to have this experience and to identify categories that are supposed to shed light on the term culture.

We have thus hung all sorts of different panels on our wall and written on them illustrious concepts like architecture, fashion, art, and communication. We then turned to fashion first and after initial insights, checked it in architecture and music.

We identified taste as the culprit and the market as its accomplice - more than that - as its patron. So before we put the prime offender on trial, we want to take a close look at taste.

Our society is essentially prescripted a culture that neither represents current societal conditions nor is a culture that would be forward-looking. Therefore, the state-imposed culture is largely a dictate, which by law forces us to live in the past.

The objection that the people vote and the representatives carry out the will, we do not accept. This is the insidious thing about what we understand by democracy today. It undermines everything new and all processes that could lead to something new. What we understand by democracy today first puts blinkers on everything, castrates everything that isn't common and ignores all that could provide feedback. But the new is never common at first. The new is always at first the property of the few. What we understand by democracy in Western countries today resembles an intellectual museum, even more, an intellectual crematorium - and can, by definition, consider nothing new as possible.

We understand that the subsequent descriptions may seem unfamiliar to all who have not paid any attention to these observations so far. Nothing is more difficult to recognize than what surrounds us every day. Just like we never notice our breathing, although we are constantly breathing.

Let's start with time. Every 7 days is Sunday, and all shops in Europe close. God, too, took a break from creating the world, so we should do the same. But is that good for us today? Is that good for our future?

Holidays. Please tell us now, what does Ascension Day, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi entail? Please also explain why Mother's Day, Women's Day, and Children's Day are not holidays. To sharpen our question: Why are nebulous fairy tales that never happened a few thousand years ago and have no social significance today, more important than our mothers and our children?

Church tower clocks. We have another question: How often is the phone battery dead today, no one else there, and so we need the unmelodic hourly clang from the towers of the churches?

Libraries. Why do our public libraries have opening hours that are even a cut above the opening hours of the Savings Bank in Smallcowsville? Then, please compare the range of your public library with that of a well-known online platform. Think not only of libraries, but also museums.

The aforementioned examples should convey an impression, in which dimension we question, have no claim to completeness and are not important in detail. We have mentioned that our goal is to create a culture that goes beyond our culture - a culture of the future, that deserves the name high culture again.

We believe that state artist, music, literature funding is first and foremost occupational therapy for art dilettantes while simultaneously employing an army of useless bureaucrats.

We create an open post-culture that promotes and celebrates the future. We will set up laboratories in all communities and cities where young and old can gather and tinker and hack together with 3D printers, VR glasses and laser cutters.

This is just one idea how you can achieve a lot with minimal means.

We can do it!

For our markets

The market has become the sacred cow of our time. Reason enough to question the market and thereby create ideas for change.

The market touches everything and from the market's perspective, it shapes everything. Markets touch you, your family, your friends, your technology, your culture and your environment. There is a persistent urge to ask: "Why not?"

Only when the market fails, when it doesn't function well, do we allow intervention from the outside. Let's savour this word - outside. If this is not the case, then - according to popular opinion - there is no need to do anything, because the market takes care of everything perfectly.

Those who have read closely here will naturally have noticed the words "well" and "perfectly" in the last sentence. We now want to devote our full attention to these words.

When we discover monopolies, we know all too well that this leads to the market no longer steering well. In other words: The market likes competition and where it is lacking, it does not flow. But when it flows, it performs real miracles, the augurs of the market constantly tell us. Prosperity increases for everyone and we are always doing better.

We can now ask these augurs the following question: Is there a price to pay in any form for this miracle of the market? Of course, we only hear deafening silence and are therefore happy to provide the answers ourselves.

Our marketplace is not a place where the butcher hands over his meat to the farmer for a few eggs. We all know what supply and demand creates. They create the price. And contrary to our question to the augurs, asking for any form, the market price always has a specific form. The market price is measured in money.

We very much believe that we pay a price for the market. This price can't be measured in money, moreover, this price is not measurable at all.

Before we now look more closely at what this ominous price is that needs to be paid but is not measurable, let's pause for a moment and hold that thought. The market has a price not because it is a market, but because it denominates everything in a currency. The market has a price - to carefully choose sharper words - because it makes comparable what is not comparable.

Back then to the purchase price of the market: What does the market cost us?

We believe, the magic market costs us like a Magic Theatre our sanity, taste, courage, strength and also our outlook.

Of course, even when we have warned emphatically that this work is illogical, although a lot can be deduced from this book - when it comes to slaughtering such a sacred cow, a few words are needed to explain this action.

Before we begin with our apology, a foreword: We don't want to hold competition, or even the struggle, as the real villains behind the market responsible for the costs. Nothing could be further from us.

Our apology is virtuously brief, even the foreword was longer: Only what has no price has value!

If we make the mechanic the helmsman, who labels everything with price tags, then nothing has value anymore.

The question that arises now is: Who should steer instead of the market?

We have two ideas for this and we certainly invite you to carefully consider both.

Answer one - the answer for today: Each for themselves.

Answer two - the answer for tomorrow: Algorithms.

We understand that it's customary to outline plans in more than four words on how a future societal system could work and therefore find ourselves in your debt to play a few more bars of this melody, so that you understand us better.

Our pragmatic idea for you and our pragmatic idea for the markets, which can be implemented by everyone today, is simply to start not being a servant of the markets, but to promote yourself to the king of the markets. The market offers you everything and you can offer everything on the market. As soon as you decide for yourself what is important to you and as soon as you have the courage to do this, you become the king. You overcome the market perspective and to be more precise, you overcome the perspective of the market price. This makes you the helmsman and the commander of your resources. The market no longer dictates which occupation you should choose or which activity you should engage in. You can recognise yourself and your good taste and you can question what is really good for you.

Answer two to the question of who should steer instead of the market, i.e. the answer for tomorrow, is a big part of our grand vision and therefore also our big task. Today algorithms are general algorithms. Every platform has its algorithm, which is common for everyone except the platform: it deceives, seduces, misleads and does not advise in your favour. Furthermore, today's algorithms are still in their infancy in that they have capabilities that are just beginning. But the development and direction are clear to us and others. Just like the Jazz musician who was asked what the future of Jazz might sound like - we are allowed to answer briefly in this context: if we already knew exactly, we would have already programmed it. At this point, let's refer to later, especially to the protocol book.

Markets were an idea. But we can do better.

We will make it!

For Your Business

This book is for all the brave, strong, and free spirits. To truly be free, it is important to have control over yourself and also your time. For this, having your own business is of great value. You may now either be in the position to look at your own business with great pride, or you may be aspiring to achieve this goal.

Perhaps you have entirely different plans. But even then, it may be of value to you to at least consider the idea of starting a business from time to time - to mull it over and see how it suits you. We will elaborate on this in the following.

You can start a business with no employees. Like if you are an artist or craftsman. You can start a business as soon as you can read. So even a child can start a business. It's not necessary to establish a corporation, i.e., a legal entity, and even this would be possible.

All you need is an idea and a name. You can make airplanes out of waste paper and sell them. The common saying is: if there's a will, there's a way.

For those pursuing a career and are satisfied in their current company, we would like to ask the following questions:

Have you got all possibilities to create something? Does the company where you work always act and support you in your best interest?

We are aware that we are asking questions that you might at first see as critical and leading in one direction. Just let these questions stand and keep them in mind when you are on your way to work or on your way home.

We will make it!

For Entrepreneurs

First of all, we would like to express our respect for you at this point. Even though we consider it advisable to found and run a company, it demands a lot from those who do it. Being an entrepreneur shapes you.

Like every family, every business is different. From startup to corporation. From technology to finance.

Our ideas are the essences that we believe are universally valuable for every business. Our ideas are again based on our manifesto, and our ideas are mostly timeless thought models. Nevertheless, it is, of course, necessary to question, check, understand, and improve these models.

We will make it!

For Our Businesses

The core problem of the New Great Stagnation is a culture of fear that merely repeats what already exists. We need big ideas that lead to key innovations and thus create change.

We will make it!

For Your Finances

Although one of the first words that we learned after mom, dad, and car is money. Even though money accompanies us every day from the earliest days of our childhood, neither our educational institutions nor any other organizations offer a chance to learn about handling money.

We would like to introduce you three simple ideas on this matter.

The first idea is to ask the question: What is money? Ask yourself, and ask others, then observe. It can also be enlightening to further question their answers.

The second idea is, before you spend money, quickly calculate what what you are about to spend will be worth in 30 years. For this, you can simply multiply the amount by 10 as a rule of thumb.

The third idea is to consider how long you have to work for something you want to buy or have already spent.

Just these three questions can change your approach to money fundamentally and thus significantly improve your finances.

You can do it!

For Our Finances

A central driver of the New Great Stagnation is the unpleasant virtue of creating money out of nothing. Since U.S. President Richard Nixon lifted the so-called gold standard in 1971, all central banks are merrily creating money out of thin air.

Of course, it will be an ardous task to tidy up the resulting mess made by this financial hocus-pocus over the past 50 years. When money becomes more and more, it becomes less and less valuable. So it is important to buy something with it quickly.

The idea is to create a new hard money system and thus get rid of the wrong conceptions of value. While consumption has mattered over the past 50 years, saving will matter in our new system.

Self-confessed experts naturally have many arguments why this will not work. It may be advisable to read a few works from the Austrian School.

Of course, there are also the colleagues from central banks who meet every four weeks to agree on a number. But here too, we have an idea: An algorithm that makes real-time decisions based on a good database.

We also have a simple idea for the financial management of nation-states: Only spend as much as you take in.

We have another idea for tax systems: Shift from the principle of fairness to the principle of simplicity. In practice, this means more consumption taxes, which are charged when purchasing. This will save much effort involved in tax collection.

Finally, an idea for our state finances. Every citizen tries to invest their hard-earned money so that it works as hard as possible. The state, however, invests its money at 0% interest rates; it puts its money, to stick with the analogy, on the couch to laze around. We propose that state finances are invested using exactly the same principles as the world's professional capital allocators, such as in undervalued shares.

Our simple ideas for the finances of our nation-states can simplify taxes and restore the budgets to health.

We will make it!

For Your Organizations

We all get involved far beyond our families, circles of friends, and companies. Through our commitment, we become part of these entities, and through this commitment, we can have an impact on them. However, we tend to take institutions such as schools, universities, clubs, associations, political parties, and even churches for granted in our everyday life, like we do with street signs.

One initial idea is to question these seemingly silent compatriots in which we engage. What do they bring to you? What do they bring to us as a society? What costs do these organizations impose on you in terms of time, money, and other resources?

Beyond the mundane benefits, it can also be interesting to question the operating rules of these organizations. This perspective can bring to light new aspects that may have previously remained hidden for you. What principles guide them? How would you lead? These questions may inspire ideas you could propose to your organizations.

We are often indirectly part of organizations. Consider, for example, so-called intergovernmental organizations. These entities are hidden behind another mask. Take, for instance, the OECD. This is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Its famous PISA studies are conducted annually to evaluate the quality of educational systems and compare them with others. The desire is to improve school systems. Therefore, each one can be evaluated individually, and more importantly, how well it educates each individual.

Our ideas for your organizations can bring new clarity and fresh ideas.

You can do it!

For Democracies

Our set of ideas for democracies is based on the mechanism by which democracies function. Former U.S. President Barack Obama summed up an aspect of this mechanism in the demand that the state should serve its citizens, not vice versa. Another element of this machinery is the assumption that the participants of a democracy are mature and engaged.

Assuming we accept this mechanism as a given, a phrase we often hear from politicians, such as "Everyone can get involved in a democracy," is clearly an understatement. Instead, it is a prerequisite for a democracy that the citizens get involved.

One of the ways to engage is to vote. However, in all Western states, the electoral process today is still as it was 100 years ago. Voting takes place on election day, either in person at the polling station or by mail, with elections only taking place every few years.

This process is not only very lengthy for the citizens, but it is also inefficient. Citizens vote for a politician, who then makes many decisions. It is clear that the politician doesn't always make the decision that the citizen would have made. The citizen also doesn't have the option to abstain from some decisions or to connect their vote with a petition.

Remembering the contemporary internet platforms we know - where one can click to place an order and have the product delivered straight to their doorstep within an hour, or quickly send a message targeted to one's closest circle of friends and receive feedback to a personal question within minutes - it quickly becomes clear that our voting system - to choose the most polite form of expression - has a significant potential for improvement.

Our idea is to create a New Democratic Evolution. The core of this New Democratic Evolution is to build upon the so-called Liquid Democracy, which provides a solution for our outdated and inflexible electoral system.

Elections can be replaced by votes, where everyone in our society has many more options. Anyone can propose ideas, and anyone can vote on ideas. Anyone can, if they wish, appoint and dismiss representatives of their choice. Anyone can delegate their vote to any other person and grant additional rights.

This allows for entirely new possibilities to reward engaged citizens and hold politicians accountable for their actions. The success of ideas can be measured, influencing remuneration. In addition, voting rights can be adjusted in a much more granular manner.

In addition to the voters, the essence of a democracy is also changing. In the past 50 years, our society has fundamentally changed. Due to the demographic transition, the population has gotten older. Democracies have gradually turned into gerontocracies because politicians are incentivized to be elected. Politicians tailor their strategies to the average age of the voters: investment in the future and youth issues are given less weight compared to the concerns of older generations. However, the youth is our engine of ideas as they view our world with fresh and brave eyes. One of our ideas is to significantly lower the voting age to 14 and introduce an age limit for all political offices at 75.

We can do it!

For our Countries

Each of us was born into a country, and each of us is a citizen of at least one country. We would now like to invite you to engage in a little thought experiment.

Suppose, the current Secretary-General of the United Nations were to make an announcement today with great fanfare, completely unexpectedly declaring the dissolution of the United Nations and all nation-states by the end of the year. The successor organization, called 2.UNO, will commence its operations on January 1st of the coming year under entirely new regulations and new technology. He finally calls all people to submit papers to collect ideas for this new organization. What would you wish for from 2.UNO?

This experiment might seem bizarre and reminds some of us of our grand vision. The experiment can only succeed and lead to new insights if you commit to the assumptions. Granted, that is a challenge at first. You now have to imagine something that does not mirror our experiences. This is beyond culture.

The country into which we were born influences us. It has shaped our language and customs and has thus shaped our reality. However, countries are imaginary constructs. The existence of nation-states presupposes that people believe in them. You can touch your passport, but you can’t touch your nation-state. When you realize how similar we humans are to each other, in comparison, for example, to a brimstone butterfly, it becomes apparent that the efforts we put into these imaginary lines, the country borders, is bizarre. Nation-states have always provoked conflicts rather than resolving them. Identifying with a nation-state- nationalism- artificially delineates one group from another. At this point, one could also consider why brimstone butterflies do not recognize borders between nation-states. As soon as you participate in this thought experiment, a host of questions arises: How would current outstanding obligations be settled? How would voting rights be regulated?

To the idea of the thought experiment, we would like to add another idea. This idea builds on the experiment: the New Local Globalism.

The idea is to shift the attention within the laws of a nation-state from thinking within borders, artificial limited thinking, to a global mindset, a borderless thinking that is at the same time natural and local. Decisions that can be made locally should also be made locally as much as possible. This aspect of our Local Globalism is the principle of subsidiarity, once prevalent in politics but progressively forgotten.

New Local Globalism is a free pass for all secessionist aspirations, where communities want to break away and become their own organ.

The latter also leads us, in biological language and perspective, to perceive interstate conflicts as unhealthy conflicts between the organs of an organism.

Another idea is to deliberately establish free trade zones where different private cities can emerge, or existing cities can gain greater autonomy.

In short: Nation-states can be improved. We are one humanity, and we still live on one planet. Instead of 195 different countries, we want one that includes everyone.

We can do it!

For Migration

As soon as we think without borders, migration also appears as a natural movement and not a problem, or would we speak of migration if a red blood cell happily moves from the heart towards the kidney?

Migration is thought of from the country's perspective. Migration polarizes and binds. The media often repeats phrases like: “The proportion of foreign population has increased over the last 50 years.”

Conservatives perceive this increase as high, seeing it as a source of conflict within society and a reason for less prosperity. Progressives view this as a natural evolution and a sign of an open society.

Now let's put on our glasses and read the sentence out loud once more: “The proportion of foreign population has increased over the last 50 years.”

It becomes clear: This sentence contains no information!

It is as if one were comparing the average temperature in Vladivostok with the energy consumption of an energy-saving lamp. The only information this sentence provides is that our population is changing. So how can this naivety lead to such significant polarization that divides our society?

To resolve this, let's examine the interpretations of the political poles in more detail.

To the "migration is bad" camp, it can be opposed that if no migration in the form of arrival had taken place in the last 50 years, the respective population would have declined. One of the subsequent models establishes that population growth and prosperity correlate.

But also the "migration is good" camp has an incomplete description. It is not good or natural that a tribe that settled a valley 10,000 years ago, would immediately welcome a new tribe that has just joined with welcoming dances.

To untie this Gordian knot of thought, it is first necessary to remove the blinkers. The polarization's solution is so simple that it is frightening that this triviality causes such a significant uproar.

If the new tribe - to stay with the historical example - brings a great gift, or if the new tribe, since they have no gift, serves the old tribe's cause, things start looking different. There won't be any welcoming dances, but also no fighting.

That is the New Global Localism: thinking globally and acting locally.

Just like there are global price discrepancies, we can also globally find a price for what we call re-establishment or moving. Just like the price for goods is determined by supply and demand, a new local index can be determined from a range of factors concerning movement: the reason for relocation, the price index of the new country, and the value the newcomer brings to the old society.

Example: If a young man is fleeing from a war-torn area, he undoubtedly cannot bring a gift. Therefore, the gift does not have to be as substantial as if he were coming from a country where there is no war. If he serves the cause and compensates this small deficit by doing something for society, then all is well.

The thought model 'migration' is based on a country. We want to overcome exactly this reality. Every human is a global citizen. The question now is, what does this global citizen have, what does he want, and why - i.e., what social, economic, and symbolic capital has he accumulated, where does he come from, where does he want to go and why. On the other hand, there is the local community, which also has something and wants something.

Our idea is to understand migration as a process and steer migration as we steer all other processes.

Undoubtedly, this is much more complex than a binary good and bad. We live in a complex world with complex questions, and we are capable of answering these questions. But to do so, as initially mentioned, we need more variety instead of more polarization by increasingly louder ideas.

We can do it!

For our education

In 1970, only a fraction of Western youth attended university; today, it's more than half. Still, we dare to postulate here that graduates today are no wiser due to their academic routine. Let's consider the following definition of intelligence: the ability to achieve one's goals in various environments. Now, let's conduct a social experiment and ask two dozen college graduates:

Why did you study and what do you want to achieve?

If we then exclude answers like "Because my parents wanted it" or "Because I didn't know what I want to become", we remind ourselves of an insight we previously shared:

Schools and universities have become an end in themselves. Education is not the goal of these institutions, nor is creation. Instead, their goal is breeding internal offspring.

We allow ourselves to state this thesis polemically and claim:

In the past, it was bread and games. Today, it's bread and school. After years of memorizing facts to pass multiple choice tests and then forgetting them again because they have no relevance to the students, they have forgotten how to question, check, and thus think.

In doubt, if it ever arises, they just do what everyone else does. The system is happy because then there is peace on our streets, and the growing daily number of retirees can complain about the bad weather instead of having to dodge rebellious youths. In the only relevant examination, the daily test of life, everyone fails. Parents follow the unquestioned belief that an academic education leads to greater wealth. Even if the child had a craftsman's talent, it would not become a craftsman.

Both in school and in university, we have a well-known problem, which we also encounter in politics. The problem is the incentive system. Salaries are always paid regardless of performance. Performance is not even measured. It is only logical that this person tends to avoid all risks and effort and serves his time with as little energy expenditure as possible. This person does stand in front of a class in the morning; let's call him a teacher, although a more apt term would be an 'emptier'. The teacher's brain is programmed for permanent sleep. The sleep is only interrupted when the first pension payment arrives; then he no longer stands in front of the class but instead spends his mornings in his garden, snipping at his hedge. If we let this kind of person talk to our children and young people for many hours every day, then it is not surprising to us what comes of it. One only has to look at clowns like David Precht as a symptom of intellectual degeneration caused by the state's dumbing-down system.

Those not deterred by this polemic are now welcome to hear our ideas for education.

The first and most important change is to abolish compulsory schooling. Only then can parents freely decide how and what their children learn. The fewer children go to school, the more they learn.

For all those who still want to send their children to school, the school system will be reformed. Accordingly, we want to develop a new curriculum with new subjects for the types of school in the future. Of course with a new type of teacher. Now for primary school: its future purpose is single: children learn to read, write and calculate there. End of story. They learn nothing that could be subsumed under ideology. All schools – from primary school to university – will in future take up essential elements of Maria Montessori's educational concept. The main principle is "Help me to do it myself". We call the new curriculum an educational plan. It is not about teaching something, but about helping the newcomers to our society to educate themselves. Children and young people are to become what they are. Everyone who now has Pink Floyd in mind, should turn up their inner auditory system to full volume. Our educational plan focusses on a much broader, deeper and more future-oriented general education.

It was, it is and it will not be relevant in the future to be able to enumerate all kinds of songbirds, to know exactly when the Peloponnesian War started, nor is it relevant to be able to recite a Rilke poem by heart. It is far more important to stimulate. The objective is to inspire students to learn programming, to think globally, to read Thucydides to get an impression of the Peloponnesian War and to listen to how beautiful songbirds twitter.

Furthermore, the educational plan provides for a focus on strengths and thus the promotion of creativity from the very first day. Thus, from the first day of school, children have the opportunity and support to implement their ideas and projects instead of mindlessly coloring letters for weeks and forgetting how to think.

Some are craftsmen and some are philosophers. Some obey and some command. The error in the current system is treating everyone the same. But, of course, this is more complex than sticking everyone in a class and confronting them with a humanoid autoprompter for 8 hours a day.

Our new educational plan is not static, but based on feedback according to cybernetics. This allows not only the strengths of the children to be determined, but also the symbiosis between teachers, pupils and classes to be organized.

We will manage this!

For our youth

Many of the impulses that have shaped our society since time immemorial have come from the youth. Young people have a fresh, daring outlook on the world and still don't know many arguments why something doesn't work. This makes them a valuable source of ideas. However, young people in our society have no way of getting involved. Only at the age of 18 are they allowed to express their opinion at democratic elections. In school, political education takes a relatively small part compared to other content and does not encourage expressing political ideas loudly. What's more, we believe that our society underestimates the youth and does not take them seriously. This creates a systemic cycle. Our society doesn't appreciate the youth adequately. As a result, the youth act hesitant. In return, they can't mature to the extent that would be possible.

Our idea for this issue is simple.

Let's just have more conversations with young people and give them attention. Talk to them and appreciate them as adults. Depending on how the dialogue proceeds, you can question their positions. Take their answers as full answers. This means you have to look closely at these answers. It's easy to dismiss these answers because they are new. But that's the core of the idea. The experiences we have, we often call treasures. Now, the core of the idea is to take the ideas of the young people and consider them as a treasure, however odd they may seem at first glance. We believe that this will not only create a systemic cycle that makes young people stronger and more mature, but that we can also take a lot of inspiration from these conversations.

Our youth need new impulses and we need the pulses of the youth.

We will manage this!

For your pets and plants

One of these common opinions is that animals and plants have no consciousness and are therefore different from humans. Common parlance likes to call humans the crown of creation.

Another aspect of the problem is that literature questioning this common opinion is almost universally of very poor quality. It seems as if only authors who ignore any fear and respect of intellectual challenges, which is good, also tend to lack the ability to mentally grow beyond merely hugging trees.

Our colleague Sigmund Freud, whom we've already met masked in an interlude of history, has recognized the three great humiliations of our species. Perhaps it was the strong feelings that arose when Copernicus realized that we are neither the center of the universe, nor did Darwin snitch that we actually descend from animals, and thirdly, we are not the master of our own mental house, as psychoanalysis teaches us, a considerable part of our conscious will comes from the black box labeled the unconscious.

But even these humiliations are just models. In the latest research, however, the insight is increasingly gaining weight that animals, plants, and even matter are much more than we have hitherto assumed.

And even this is still to be relativized, because just because famous American researchers say something, it does not carry more weight than a thousand-year-old Zen Koan that points to the unity of everything.

Our idea, again, is an experiment for you:

What if your cat could talk? If your plant could talk to you?

We believe that we will be reevaluating the value of life and also the value of matter in the near future. More and more cases will come into our daily lives where we reevaluate life and matter. It's not about hugging trees to better appreciate the tree as such, but it will soon be about understanding ourselves better to set off against this background for new adventures.

Just as Copernicus was only a few decades ahead of Columbus, so a new holism will open doors that will make the three humiliations Freud identified look like small mosquito bites.

We will manage that!

For our strengths

In the contemporary world of work, strength is mentioned everywhere. The strength of an employee wants to be recognized, as well as the strength of the entire organization. Once this is recognized, it's crucial to focus on the strength. The model of strength that today's economy and its players like to describe themselves with, comes from the military. This has been the case for more than 2,500 years as can be read in colleague Sun Tzu.

It is thus all the more interesting to observe that the imperative to concentrate on the strength has not found its way into politics and our society as a whole. Politics, since its origin in ancient Athens, inherently possesses the quality to steer. Interesting then, that the cybernetic discipline of politics deals so ignorantly with strength.

The reason for this riddle lies extremely deep, but we can quickly clarify this without going into detail.

Strength is the comparison of traits. The fastest person in the world runs 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. A frail elder lays this distance in an hour.

For politics as the ringmaster of equalization and even worse as the representative and leader of our society, strength is like a minefield that one prefers to avoid as much as possible.

Our ideas are hidden in and especially behind the following questions:

How do we measure the strength of individuals? How do we measure strength in politics and society? How do politics and society allow focus on strengths? How does politics and society promotes the strengths of individuals?

One of our ideas is to rethink the promotion of highly gifted individuals. Our society defines such giftedness with successes that far exceed the average in social institutions like the university. But in doing so, we lose a hitherto unquantifiable amount of highly gifted individuals who don't even make it to this special institution. Think of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan who, despite adverse circumstances, made it from the simplest conditions in India to Cambridge and who has gifted our society with nearly 4,000 innovations in mathematics like no other mathematician. Thus, our idea is to shed light on this under-investigated area, not by demanding education worldwide for everyone, but by making everyone and each individual develop a greater sensitivity for the extraordinary instead of an appreciation for the ordinary.

Another idea is to promote general physical and mental enhancement. This political idea is based on three topics that are generally known, but which we want to completely redesign.

Sport for physical endurance. Strategy games for mental fitness, like chess and Go. Nutrition - that is, balanced nutrition.

We are interested in the meaningful combination. Hence, we promote outdoor sports and joint walks instead of indoor meetings. City centers without noisy cars and with cycle paths, to promote meaningful movement, which offers a multitude of benefits simultaneously.

How can it be that in industrialized countries millions liters of sugar water are sold and several billions are spent each year on junk food, while consumption of local fruits has been declining for years?

10,000 years ago, our humanity put the idea into practice to be able to affect certain plants and animals by pairing them. This made humanity capable of suffering less hunger and eating more proteins. Today, we have developed research fields such as synthetic biology from this idea, but also created new possibilities for our species in other fields such as robotics and brain-computer interfaces. Developments like the exact prediction of protein folding by artificial intelligence suggest at first glance that these research fields are developing rapidly and therefore everything is fine. Here again, necessary care is required. We want to illustrate this with an example: In 2018, a Chinese scientist managed to deactivate the CCR5 receptor in several human embryos through genome editing to make the then born children immune to HIV. However, this contradicts international ethical guidelines. Worldwide, over half a million people die of HIV. A political and economic idea is to create the conditions so that technology can more quickly and purposefully lift the limitations of our species. We are concerned about healing diseases as well as using technology to build our strengths. Already in cattle breeding, a greater heat resistance of Holstein cows has been achieved through genome editing.

Recognizing strengths anew and building strengths afresh.

We will make it!

For our weaknesses.

Although our primary task is to recognise and build upon our strengths at all levels, this dualistic model also contains weakness. The insidious thing about strength is that we are hardly aware of it because when we utilise our strengths, things run smoothly and we achieve more than we ever assumed possible. But when a weakness appears, everything becomes difficult and we become aware of the deficit.

Let us now look at three cases of how we as a society deal with our weaknesses.

For all those who have landed roughly at the bottom of our society, we have planned social security systems. But anyone who now already perceives government interventions, even without being in these systems, as patronising like an annoying kindergarten teacher, should take a closer look at these social security systems. Instead of teaching the basic principles of money, wealth and investment, the state takes care of all the needs of its recipients, as long as they are properly articulated, from TV sets to gaming consoles. Just not money. This also deprives people of the very last competence in dealing with money.

For all those who abuse criminal law beyond measure, our society has built large prisons, locks up offenders and then collectively looks away. We do not measure the success of the prison idea, nor do we have ideas on how to improve this whole system.

Every year, nearly 8 million people die from tobacco worldwide and 3 million from alcohol. Thus, every year a city the size of New York dies. The damage from alcohol to our economy amounts to an incredible 60 billion euros per year just in Germany - 1000 euros for each citizen per year, or to draw another comparison, 3% of all state expenditures.

In our eyes, however, the damage is far greater: the economic damage only takes into account sick days and accidents at work caused by alcohol. But as we know, alcohol is a poison, and as such, it reduces the ability to learn in the long term after consumption. If this damage were also taken into account, the damage would amount to several trillion euros per year.

These three cases once again show a surprising degree of political incompetence. It doesn't seem like politics has the ability to deal with the weaknesses of our society. So what path should our species take to better handle our weaknesses than politics does?

We believe that a strong society neither needs paternalism, punishment, nor drugs. Therefore, our idea is to rely on education and consistent action.

Since we obviously do not have a strong society, but one that is diluted in its values, the idea that leads to a fundamental change is a cultural shift. Only when we pursue a large and common goal, and understand ourselves as one species, can we successively, i.e., with each strengthening of society, adjust the criminal law accordingly. This could also introduce a Universal Basic Income, which you can live on and, as the name suggests, no conditions are attached.

This cultural shift is the process leading to a post-culture, as we have described in our vision.

We will succeed!

For our economy.

The best idea for politics to boost the economy is to stay out of the way as much as possible. The less the state interferes in the workings of the economy through bureaucracy, regulation, and subsidies, the less resistance there is and the more the economy can flow.

Good companies will grow and create solutions for problems, just like they have been doing for the last 200 years, and thus solve important problems of our species, such as the food crisis at the beginning of the 20th century through the invention of fertilisers.

We will succeed!

For our environment.

In the last 50 years, environmental protection has become increasingly important. Other terms such as sustainability, ecology and climate have grown behind this term and are now omnipresent.

Our first idea is - what else could it be - to question the term 'environmental protection'.

Many of the political demands and many of the measures imply a restriction on freedoms. But this disproportionate attention and the one-dimensional view of the restriction is ultimately not successful.

Loud cars still disturb in recreational areas, major cities still have no plan for dealing with extreme heat, and people's initiative against species extinction still lead nowhere despite electoral success.

The idea following this analysis is, on the one hand, a new configuration of what we call the 'environment' and, on the other hand, new objectives for the value and protection of this environment.

Environment, in the political discourse on environmental protection, refers to the surroundings as they present themselves without human intervention. Examples of this are National Parks, where nature evolves without human intervention.

This concept of the environment and today's environmental protection artificially excludes humans and implicitly assumes that the goal must be nature without humans. The result of this careless consideration is that attention to climate change is focused exclusively on reducing carbon dioxide, but not on adapting to a new climate.

Another result is that attention focuses on species protection, not animal protection. While one tries with immense effort - among other things the halting of construction of life-essential projects - to protect an extremely rare species of bat, an animal abuser who shot a cat with an air gun is acquitted.

Our idea is a new environmental doctrine, focusing attention away from environmental protection - which is a pointless protection - towards environmental value, i.e., increasing the value of our environment.

Environmental value is actually what we want to achieve with environmental protection. Just as a shareholder strives to increase the value of their portfolio, it is also our actual goal to increase the value of our environment. The question is not how can we protect the environment. The environment is not a museum. The environment is our living room. So the question is, how can we increase the value of the environment?

In considering the value, it becomes obvious that there is an effort, which results in a result. The difference between effort and result is important.

If we improve the quality of our air, the quality of day and night, and the quality of our water, then we can achieve great results with little effort.

We think in terms of generations and want to increase the value of our environment so that many hundreds of generations will find a more valuable environment than it is today.

We will also achieve this!

For our planet

We have now arrived at our blue planet, the habitat of our species. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, namely the model of so-called overpopulation, our planet could accommodate a multitude of people. However, women worldwide are having fewer and fewer children. Since 1990, the birth rate has dropped from an average of 3.2 children per woman to 2.3 children today. In all Western countries, the birth rate is below 2 and thus the population is shrinking there. Only in the countries of Central and East Africa are the birth rates above 2. Prosperity goes hand in hand with the number of people who contribute to this planet. Therefore, we should aim for higher birth rates again, especially in the western world.

As soon as we begin to think on a planetary level and understand us as one species, we can focus our attention on real threats that have so far received no attention.

As already noted elsewhere, vast amounts of financial resources are spent on defending nation states. It's like two people wanting to have a conversation with their eyes closed, but they can't hear each other because they're wearing earplugs and they also can't see. This is not productive. This makes military defense of nations counterproductive. Let's assume that aliens land on our planet tomorrow. The threat scenario has changed completely. But only an efficient international organization could respond to such a threat.

We understand that the threat of aliens goes beyond the horizon of many readers. But they should now be told that in recent years there has been a new dimension of UFO sightings and secondly - not least due to the Fermi Paradox - such an event can occur at any time.

We are one humanity and should focus on the real threats instead of throwing sand at others over imaginary lines.

We will manage this too!

For our space

The most important point, which is not receiving attention in the current discourse, is not our environment, our society or our planet, but our space.

In a few hundred million years, the sun will have grown so strong that life on Earth will no longer be possible. This period seems so large to many people that they find it plausible to not pay further attention to this problem.

66 million years ago, a comet struck the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, leaving behind a 150-kilometer-wide crater. This comet is most likely responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. A similar comet could strike the earth again at any time and also wipe out our species.

To date, we have no publicly known plans for the event of aliens contacting or visiting our planet!

Apart from the sparse and privately funded SETI@home project, there are no worldwide efforts to search for signals to analyze them.

Finally, the most serious point: We were last on the moon over 50 years ago. The moon could serve as a final repository for nuclear waste, a place to store solar energy and then beam it back to earth, or a location for nuclear reactors. A moon base would promote research and could offer advantages due to low gravity to produce goods and services there.

Space is not only important for our species due to its direct use. We have repeatedly pushed boundaries in our history, from the African steppe to the ocean. What started with the moon landing is a new boundary that we can push and that brings us together and advances us as a whole.

Despite all these obvious points, space only plays a role in Hollywood movies and recently, sporadically, with a small handful of entrepreneurs.

Our idea is to declare the colonization of outer space as a global and political main goal.

We will manage this!

Appeal

Question. Verify. Understand. Improve. With these ideas, we do not want to convince you. We want to use these ideas to show how our vision takes shape in various areas of life and what we want to achieve.