Opinion leader

Whoever indulges in the decadent pleasure of attending a theatre performance or - only slightly less decadently - listens to a public speech may know that tenth of a second of intent silence preceding the applause. It must be remarked rather maliciosuly that this tiny span of time is the climax to some of these performances. Looking at it naively, that spontaneous emergence of order within a heterogeneous mass might be a source of permanent amazement. Persons who do not know each other are sitting in a dark room and suddenly clap as if by command. A trimph of the only partly Invisible Hand, for basically everybody is waiting subconsciously for somebody to make a start and then joins in a reflex action. All that happens beneath the threshold of perception, and that is why the first applauder is not authorized to issue directions. Only because his reaction time is abbreviated, he is like a primus inter pares, thus a random product. Who makes that start, reveals the observers' self-observation who do not merely watch the stage or rostrum event but also the event's effects on their peers. Needless to say, bright theatre managers comprehended that mechanism early enough and placed paid first applauders in the front row to make the unsuspecting audience well disposed. Whoever is irresolute about what to think about the performance will fare well at observing one's environment. Discoveries such as laughter is infectious are due to that strategy of behaviour.
As for that, second-order cyberneticists talk about the absorption of uncertainty and of the reduction of complexity, psychologists prefer the term pithiness in a diffuse situation. It boils down to ignorance what things are like and waiting for clarification. In cases like this, it is a good thing that - as is the case with an audience - there are sufficient clues to observe. This is much more comfortable than examining the coffee grounds, telling fortune by the cards or adding birthday numbers..
Personified human absorption of uncertainty is called opinion leader. These leaders are at the era of PR and Marketing the crucial factor which is constantly persecuted. The advantage they promise are too attractive, for instead of addressing each member of a target group individually, one counts on the domino-effect and tries to convince that group member crucial for the forming of an opinion. Besides increased efficiency there is maximized effectivity, since, as any customer advisor's creed says a content customer will be the best salesman. All one has to do is find the right inclined ear and then leave the field to next-door propaganda.
But of course the snag is right at the interface between person and function. It is one thing to praise the opinion leader's role in abstract terms, it is another to find the appropriate person in the single case. At first, in the 1940s empirical communication researchers concentrated on as it were natural influentials in a social group - after they had accidentally found there are opinion leaders; persons held in high regards in towns or professions. It was them to pass their formed opinions on. However, then it turned out these communicative activists' opinions had not emerged from out of the blue, had not been a case of transcendent inspiration. Step by step the insiduousness of the whole concept revealed itself. Those persons who have just been identified as opinion leaders form their opinions when communicating with other people. In short: Opinion leaders follow opinion leaders. And the thought cannot easily dismissed that these opinion leaders again follow further opinion leaders and so on.
Gradually discovering that there is a multi-step flow of communication rather than a two-step one involves two things: firstly that society as a conglomeration of social groups is organized as a heterarchic network, not a hierarchic order. Different groups can interact differently concerning different issues, but need not do so. Secondly, two characteristics of opinion leaders determining their influence must be distinguished, namely their factual competence and their social competence. Both types can, but need not either be embodied by one single person. Only duly to that groups will not cut themselvesoff forever, but now and then open up to other ones. And here lies the problem: looking for opinion leaders is like opening Russian dolls - a reflexive procedure, for within each doll there is another one. The only difference is that in the case of the dolls we will some time come to an end. The opinion leaders' trace disappears in the network nirvana. So merely perceiving them guarnatees their attractivity.
Now what is the opinion leader's function, mark you, not his or her person? As has been mentioned, the opinion leader reduces complexity by ridding the followers of the molesting duty to form their own opinions.

Factual component
At best the opinion leader is endowed with a presentable knowledge of facts which distinguishes him from the others. This again involves two things; for one thing he must have a feasible strategy to gather useful information - maybe because he is an expert in the issue at stake, maybe because he is the only one to know such an expert. For another he must be capable of conveying that kind of expert's knowledge to the laymen, the other group members. In this case he serves as a kind of link between two groups, the experts and the laymen.
Social component
The opinion leader is highly acknowledged by his group; his opinions count for something and not for an eccentric's muddleheaded fantasies who should be disregarded. For that reason, no opinion leader is a nerd. But he might know one. That is, the opinion leader has access to two different groups; he will be appreciated in at least one. since he is the only one to cultivate contact to the other, as it were importing suggestions, alternatives, differences serving, because irritating the group spirit. By that he releases the group members of the duty of dealing immediately with the others. For instance, we do not drink coffee because the Turks liked it but because the elites from this country vouched for its enjoyable consumption, thus generating imitators. In this particular case opinion leaders fall together with preemptive tasters..
Tempral component
Usually the opinion leader relies on a common history of communicating with the other group members. He maintains a reputation he has acquired over the years. In his function past and present cross, for because he has contributed useful information and advice for the formation of opinion before, the members invest confidence he will do so the next time. In other words, he disposes of a prognostic advance he is paid. His opinion will be taken into account, because it worked so well in former times.

A typical example of the concept's complexity is the continuing differentiation in the expert language. It was a long time ago when it sufficed to talk about opinion leaders in general. Instead recently terms such as opinion fomer, VIP, testimonial and multiplicator inhabit the discourse.
By common definition, an opinion former is a prominent opinion leader possessing a high factual competence and credibility. In contrast to the common opinion leader unknown to the broad public the opinion former exerts a visible mass influence. And this is just the way it is meant to be. He intends to influence the formation of public opinion. Therefore especially political and economical elites can be potential opinion formers - if their status is not thwarted by lacking credibility.
They share the aspect of prominence with the VIPs; but the latter do not intentionally propagate their opinions are exemplary. VIPs do not influence; they are perceived. Against this background it is obvious there might be transitions, whcih means a VIP might gradually acquire enough respect to be actually an opinion former. Last but not least there are the testimonials who have recently become the focus of public attention - especially during those times when advertising was booming that complacently. We are mainly talking about paid celebrities displaying their faces for adverts or spots to sell a product or an idea. They differ from the opinion leaders in so far as their recommendations even dispense with a minimum of subtlety.
The fact that journalists on the one hand disseminate opinions, on the other insist on objectivity as a professional creed shows they are different opinion leaders. In case of doubt they merely report other people's opinions (or think so). That is why media research prefers to call them multiplicators who secure the quantitative rather than the qualitative aspects of influence.
Nonetheless we should not lose sight of one thing; in the end everybody wants to believe his opinion is his property. Influence will be especially high when unnoticed. Only then the most crucial, because unanswerable question arises whether there actually is influence. Advertising experts contradict themselves by answering in the affirmative; opinion leaders by answering in the negative. Meinungsführer dadurch, dass sie sie verneinen. Still, any successful campaing depends on both of them.

NLP

The author feels obliged to declare the issue of NLP (for all those who have not been blessed by Wisdom yet: Neuo Linguistic Programming) leaves him a little undetermined. He thinks it is very hard to make up one's mind, for as a matter of perspective NLP can be regarded either as ingenious or as blunt. Luckily modern complexity does not oblige us to take the wrong side.
But let us proceed by turns: NLP appeals to various disciplines to substantiate (or sell) its concepts (or chimeras). 'Neuro' refers to the comparatively new cognitive sciences which conceive mind activities to be neuronally based, thus redefining the old Ghost in the Machine problem. 'Linguistic' appeals to traditional Linguistics, especially Linguistic Semantics dealing with word meanings. 'Programming' of course borrows from Artifial Intelligence and computer science. Depending on our inclination and tolerance we might consider it to be an interesting case of interdisciplinary thinking or a hollow-sounding jumble of superfially understood terms from highly specialized disciplines. Anyway, the reference is quite manifold (or vague).
NLP claims (with a similarly vague reference to second order cybernetics or constructivist approaches) human beings actively create their environmet. This means it can be altered. Accordingly, human beings can change their perspectives of things, too – provided they make their brains perceive reality differently. They are recommended to re-programme their way of thinking. To make sure they will, experts in NLP enter the scene. The aim is to create new associations, thus clearing anxieties, negative thinking, aversions of second language acquisition or other persons, nicotine addictions etc. To manage it, the coach first has to observe his client very diligently, adapt to his patterns of speaking (Linguistics!), generate confidence. Then it is said to be possible to redefine negative experiences as something positive, for instance risks as chances, shortcomings as strong points.
In order to secure (or simulate) the necessary expertise, NLP doctrine has invented an interesting arsenal of innovative terms; here we hear of rapport, there it is spoken about reframing. Objective observing is meant to be guaranteed by dividing the client's visual focus into different sections (left, middle, right; up, middle, down). They are meant to tell the coach what the client is thinking, even if he is not aware of it.
Like any intervention in a person's psychic state NLP is not undisputed. It is not only about the notorically problematic responsibility the coach has taken over in therapeutic contexts, but also about passing on that knowledge to amateurs; amateurs who either wish to programme themselves in order to succeed or to use their skill to smoothly direct other persons – in, say, the professional realm. The fact that dazzling (to say the least) coaches have advanced the method from the side-entrance to fill the city halls contributes to the dubious image of NLP. The coaches seem to be too powerful manipulating associations with the force of his skills. Critics insist on telling difficulties in distinguishing NLP from brain-washing. That is why an ethics code serving as a voluntary self-obligation to all those apprentices in magics seems indispensable to segregate the black sheeps.
As mentioned in the beginning, the author is uncertain what to think of NLP. However, it is not due to its ethical ambiguity. Quite the contrary, cultivating dubiety is an aspect in favour of it. We have to acknowledge it has been an ingenious move to claim one's product is somewhat dangerous; for implicitly it has been presupposed the product does create effects. To put it differently: by discussing if the effects of NLP are good or evil we assume there are any effects at all. And it is just this assumption, this presupposition, the authors takes the liberty to doubt. Somehow he feels reminded of the film distributors' knack to guilelessly warn the audience in the 1950s the latest thriller could harm people having heart trouble.
Whoever is interested questions whether it is right to manipulate people. Nobody wonders whether it is possible to manipulate them; whether the announced effects my not rather be due to group dynamics which induces people who struggle for self-knowledge and job promotion to gather in seminar rooms, in city halls where they repete everything the man on the stage screams. The author is not quite sure about it, but he cannot help but suspect that circus or amusement park attractions are more honest. So this is what makes the negative part of NLP. And what creates uncertainty about the ingenious bag of tricks.

Motivation

The notion of the Ghost in the Machine is the source of eternal molestation for present society. The ideal state is that everything works flawlessly, so that personnel managers can restrict themselves to watching the Human Factor entirely be absorbed in fulfilling his function inside the operation. So the human element only will become an issue when it indicates an organisational crisis.
For a few years economics has been facing the problem that success cannot be identically reproduced. Globalcompetition imperiously shows us that the environment surrounding an organisational system is highly capricious and is lessand less calculable. As a consequence, the organization on the inside depends on each member of the staff being totally devoted to the job, using his creativity, making his own suggestions. In short: the organization is compelled to reply to exterior uncertainty with the interior development of colleagues. However, this means dancing on the blade, for we never can tell if we will be able to lure the Ghost back into the bottle, as soon as we have encouraged him to be independent. So it is extraordinary difficult to call in the employees' intelligence on the one hand, to make sure they will not come to thinking they might be more competent than ourselves on the other.
Fortunately, we can take the wind out of that problem's sails by becoming pro-active and publically reflecting on the motivation of the staff. This leaves in our post-industrial information society lacking the traditional heroic founder types a remarkable impression. All the same, one is walking into the reliable communication trap of making a problem aware by announcing to solve it. Consulting firms specialized in motivation have been booming for over 15 years, since there has been no more denying that increasing motivation cannot be put on a financial scale, devotion cannot be bought. The present employment situation might have facilitated the employers' task of motivating, for nowadays the perspective of staying employed is motivation enough; still, reflection on that topic is free.
Motivation results from a complex, hardly perdictable and nearly impossibly feasible synergy of a component of knowledge as well as will. Contrary to common opinion will alone is not sufficient for motivating a person. That is, motivation might express itself in an act of Will, but cannot be reduced to it. It is just impossible to make the beneficial effects of jogging palatable to a wheelchair user (and should not, not only because of that, even be tried). A person needs to know, too, he or she can perform the action. Only then he or she might want to do it. Maybe.
Assuming somebody could perform an action; then how to induce his Free Will to put it actually into practice? Here lies the well-known paradox of motivation. It says: You will be free to make a choice if you make mine. It is obvious an action must be made attractive. Its positive value has to be pointed out. This value can be claimed to lie in the action itself - for example because it is great fun or qualifies the executor as a morally good human being. Or the action is conceived as a means to an attractive end which even might lie within the executor's reach.
It could be an interesting experiment to take a new strategical approach in the pedagogic realm. Usually teachers appeal to the pupils' good will to acquire certain kinds of knowledge. They hope they will draw the conclusion their self-obligation to be diligent printing potatoes presents the outlook to get a good job and become a respectable member of the society. Of course this way will offend the pupils' intelligence who most probably have noticed the academically-trained unemployed. Alternatively, they have resort to threatening and announce sanctions. In that case they speculate the pupils' aversion to school will induce them to avoid spending more time there than necessary. In contrast to these strategie the author advocates the Tom Sawyer inclusion-by-exclusion principle. It means the following: Tom Sawyer has to paint a fence. He enviously watches his comrades roam lazily about. Suddenly an idea strikes him. He evokes the impression his labour is a lot of fun. At once his comrades' interest has been aroused. They stop smirking and bribe Tom by giving him their treasures into allowing them to swing the brush.
Tom's strategy was not simply to bring home to his friends that painting fences was enjoyable. It seems that his initial (pretended) refusal to let the others participate created the lure. This is because subconsciously human beings follow the herd. At best they want to decide which group they do not want to belong to, but they do not like to be excluded from the first
All one has to do is to remember that in other parts of the world education is still a very rare good, not a throw-away article. Elsewhere children go miles to finally learn the things they have been denied before. Do these girls from Afghanistan or former African child soldiers lack motivation, because they are allowed to learn how to read and write?
So why hammer into Western pupils' heads chemistry or languages is fun? Why not concede those pupils their right to be ignorant? You do not want to learn? Fine. You need not. Or, more correctly, you must not. From now on you will be excluded from the shrinking club of adepts in chemistry or languages. Forever. You have forfeited your right to be educated, for you have confused it with coercion. Nobody is exerting pressure on you. After all, there so many highly-qualified unemployed. For a change it is time for low-price workers necessarily lacking relevant qualifications. Enjoy yourselves. By the way - please return those shockingly expensive school books right here.
Of course there is a hook - the idea is too good to be realized.

Man

Maybe the impression is deceptive, but recently man has been more and more talked about. As a man, mark you. The term is strolling through public discourse as if there was no tomorrow. Well, maybe there is no. Thanks to man.
After all, there have always been men since there have been men. Only that they have not been interested in that for a long time - Nature, the Gods, the Pope, the Emperor, the Prince were of greater importance. It is no accident the era when man became aware of him- or herself the first time was called humanism. Since then the problems have not ceased to exist, for an observing subject making himself the observing object triggers off cognitive paradoxies. And at the latest since the invention of psycho-analysis man has been failing to break open the doors of objectivity with his throbbing head.
This has been merely extempore, for originally the author had not intended to succumb to high-flown writing. After all he addresses men. However, he is one of then. And the core question is: What is man? What to make of him, as he is the talk of man's town?
It is interesting, to begin with, he actually is a topic - 20 years ago, for example, public discourse was much more focused upon acid rain and dying of forests, 10 years ago more globally upon climate. Men then only played a part as the singular scoundrel (Man destroys the ecological system ...). Or as handy groups (the foreigners, the asylants, the skinheads, the politcians ...). And today? Today the politicians deliver speech after speech about the men outside the Reichstag, radio listeners bawl to the 'man' song, the debate storms in a teacup whether the protagonist of the 'decline' may be shown in such a human way, professors teach us he may, since he was human after all. Once again - what is man?
Following a good old procedure language analysis practices we answer by posing the another question: what is the meaning of the word man? As it seems to be one of those keywords we have to assume different contexts, namely a factual and an evaluative one. The first can be dealt with quite easily: all organisms which are mammals and capable of speaking are eligible. We should not narrow down that definition, since the author is not in the least inclined to dispute about one-legged, blind, fair or coloured human beings. The notion of subhuman creatures ought to be reserved to those who believe in it. Needless to say, capability of speaking applies to sign language, too. The only thing which might remain to be interesting is from when on a cell formation can count as a human being. But as a male man the author is not entitled to an opinion of his own.
Man's evaluation is much more complicated; depending on context both pathetic positive and pejorative meaning hues can play a part. Case 1 refers to efforts (especially in institutional connections) to free functionaries from their fixation as just another brick in the wall. After all it is human beings compelled to make ten thousands of their peers redundant (or to set them free, if you prefer). The old topos of the fate behind the numbers, so to speak. Our representatives follow that example - maybe to remind themselves of the fact the ballot cattle has human traits during the legislative period. People claiming to be good judges of character seem never to be wrong. On the other hand we must state liars, criminals, child murderers are human beings, too. This paves the way for the pejorative trait of word use - e.g. when it is said 'atrocious' is too euphemistic an evaluation of atrocities. Suddenly even animals whose brutal struggle for survival in the savannah gives the Middle-European couch potato a pleasant thrill are a lot more human than man. As we can see, man is sometimes better, sometimes worse than anything else populating the world.
Just because and even though mankind believes to have emancipated itself and compels retarded ethnic groups to follow the example, it has no clear self-conception. This is due to the fact the point of being human is based on de-trivialization. Man is free and unpredictable, unprogrammable. For exactly that reason he has no idea what he is. Modern theory of social systems consequently avoids talking about man in general and in particular. For it, 'Man' represents - if the author is not mistaken - a kind of semantics developed by cognitive systems tightly coupled with organic systems; it serves as personal address stations so that the social systems emerging from communicative coupling of cognitive systems can work out a handy self-description to remain reflectively functional. This might not be as easy to associate as the good old term man, but avoids deciding on a unequivocal good/bad judgement.
Perhaps this is a completely wrong reading. Maybe man is neither good nor bad and the approach of the theory of systems wholly incorrectly reported. But at the latest then the uncertain author might be sure of being a human being. Errare humanum est.

Liberality

Since the Age of Enlightenment Western civilization has been accustomed to appeal to the notion of freedom when it comes to describing its cultural roots. Fortunately, this procedure allows us to explain how we differ from other traditions - autocratic monarchies, communist collectives, military dictatorships or Islamistic countries. So liberality is a high value that appears to be too important to be ceded to a single political party.
As a rule, liberality is defined as the ideology of freedom in contrast to the notion of force. Force leaves no option, but degrades human beings to mere objects. However, it is often overlooked that absence of force does not necessarily mean freedom of the object. Only if human beings are in the position of making a choice between alternative options, their reason will prevail, turning objects into subjects.
So liberality is based on free choice, but not on the absence of necessity to select. That would lead to short-term chaos and anarchy, until a bold stroke reduces the abundance of disorder to a tolerable degree and, in the process of this, merley temporarily, of course, entireley abolishes disorder. You see, the Invisible Hand seems to signalize, with its middle finger erected, we cannot let you do whatever comes to your mind; being subjects, you are not up to the demands. We are sure you will agree it is much more comfortable for you to let us decide what to say, work or think, will you not?
Therefore it is safe to state liberality is a relational term which in fact does not denote a value in itself. That means, liberality will require an opposite term to become visible in the first place. A person is not free, but free from something. But how to make sure the subject can in accordance with Kant paradoxically turn out to be free by exerting discipline on himself and thus displaying reason? Or, in other words, how to make sure an object will be a subject by making itself an object? As has been pointed out above, force is out of the question, for reason is autonomous, not heteronomous. Free Will will refuse to obey the mood of the moment, too, without respecting consequences.
It appears a single opposite term to freedom aka force is not sufficient. We need a unit which restricts freedom without exerting force. That is, it is a double definition which makes the concept practicable. A definition which distinguishes on the one hand freedom from force, on the other from something else. What is it? Well, let us have a look at everyday life which offers useful hints.
All we have to do is watch children's and teenagers' social behaviour. One cannot help but notice it is not meant to break rigid rules and to create a modest air of anarchy in the first place; for breaking a rule requires knowing it. Enter the parents. Delegating responsibility resembles less and less a relay race, more and more a game of dominoes. From the indifferent parents to the notoriously understanding kindergarten teachers to the disillusioned school teachers responsibility is off and running. They form altogether a chain of transformation which simply confuses liberality as the wish to raise free children with indifference. And it is exactly that lack of difference which thwarts any selection. Perhaps it is quite far-fetched a speculation, but is it possible that permanent pedagogic strike and violence against children go together? After all, devaluating social rules that are meant to enforce principles of justice and humanity as bold oppression of individuality only raises the question when exactly chaos calls for the Super Leader who in the worst case is more intelligent than common demagogues.
This goes for the social lode-star we call economy, too. When we justifiedly criticize bureaucratic over-regelementation, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Free Market the self-attested Neo-Liberals like to conjure up will only force us under the knout of global market constraints. In the end a very small ratio of participants will not act freely, but only arbitrarily, not to mention the vast majority.
So it is not till all the rational liberal advocators understand liberality has to be distinguished from both force and indifference, they will refute the objection that human reason cannot simply be postulated, because some never get the opportunity to use their reason - for material or cultural reasons. Not till then either they will escape the suspicion they euphemistically represent the interests of those people who actually can afford to consult reason now and then.

Leisure Time

Once again the author has nothing to do and occupies himself as well as he can. So - he has something to do, has he not? But nothing regular, for he cannot earn money from it. But after all, he must insist he is not simply hanging around.
Of course this tiny semantical dilemma is of no importance, as any freelancer can confirm. Over hundred years ago so eloquently praised by writers to be a mixture of art and life, this concept has finally made its arrival into modern world of employment. There it is called - in a similarly impressionist way to the era when dealing with time was put into the focus of self-representation - time management. And this kind of management is - as we as conditioned time spirit participants officiously are secreting saliva of ideas - above all: flexible.
Flexibility means de-differentiation of high-grade differentiation. Before somebody gets the idea to take away the psychiatic nursing staff's leisure time to draw their attention towards the author, it might be high time for an explanation. The more scopes of work are differentiated, the more experts mushroom up, the more complicated it becomes to coordinate these freewheeling scopes. Since the notion of project management has been spreading, all those professions maintaining a classical concept of time organization (which is going bowling after work) have come under enormous pressure of legitimation. It is the client whose outsourcing decides who will work for how long - which means, having outsourced the client has been entitled to define his demands as undisciplinedly as possible, since the project consultant will save him that. The client has missed the deadline to inform of internal information the consultant needs to know? No problem - the project workers will have to be called back on the motorways, if necessary. What are mobile phones for, anyway?
So this means for one thing working time is shifting to former leisure time. However, it is not necessarily expanding, for as the number of intranet downloads of silly cartoons indicates, leisure time in turn consists of more or less extensive phases of doing nothing, or to be more precise: waiting. For the client, see above. And exactly this means temporal de-differentiation of division of labour: within working time there is leisure time, within leisure time there is working time. Modern form of homework which prefers to be called telework takes this recombination of dissolved units even locally into account. More and more it mixes workplace and housing . to the worker's (and in a way the inland revenue's) regret who is compelled to move sofas evrey morning and evening.
So differentiation of time results in time again; when continuously formed, time turns into a medium. Leisure time falls into working time and leisure time. That goes for working time, too. Nonetheless, there is a difference between the traditional and the modern leisure time. Just because modern leisure time at the workplace can only appear as the legitimate form of waiting, boredom spreads pretty quickly. This is because that kind of leisure time is actually not free for, but only from something - namely a specific task. This can sometimes be quite annoying. From that point of view the would-be humorist downloads are still harmless, as long as they do not contain pornography. As the admittedly rather extreme incidents at the American prisons in Baghdad display, employees who have nothing to do but have to work in particularly rigidly organized social systems make up very strange ideas when boredom increases. The as charming as intelligent female soldier whose surname alone might cause radicalized fundamentalists to launch a terrorist attack on Great Britain is a case in point. Any way we look at it - boredom is dangerous, regardless if an employed or an unemployed person feels it.

Lamenting

It will be always difficult to give an attribute to an entire nation - last but not least because it has to be clarified what is meant by a nation in the first place. Do we associate a political and/or an ethnic and/or a cultural unit with it? Then there is the attribut as such; its regularity virtually cries for the exceptions to the rule, too. No doubt there are diligent Spaniards, honest Poles, abstinent Russians, humourless Englishmen, lavish Scots, dull Frenchmen or enlightened Italians. In the end a German will be ashamed to have not borne that in mind and thinks this is typically German.
Here we are at the core of the issue. It goes without saying the image a nation has of itself is especially hard to conceive, for it gives other nations the opportunity to simply adopt its critical implications or to scold it for its arrogance. In other words, the national self-image suffers from the same problems as is the case with organizations: As soon as the reflection upon corporate identity starts, one gets into a hell of a mess.
Since the gradual EU East-expansion it has become more and more obvious the classical German attributes like punctuality, diligence, discipline cannot serve as the defining characteristics anymore which are solely reserved to Germany. In more globalized terms: Germany has lost its cultural USP. Other characteristics such as obedience, planning, militarism have been inopportune for quite a while, too. So - what is the German self-conception like?
Of course it does not make much sense to arm oneself with notepad and pencil and comb house for house, street for street, to ask each German for his or her opinion - this could be handled neither logistically nor intellectually. Fortunately modern societies are independent of that, for - after all: what is the public for? So we are allowed to pose the question more precisely with a sigh of relief: What image does the German public have of itself?
Till the inclined amateur will have been set right, it seems to him the present characteristic of German society is its lamenting. Unemployment, the reforms of Public Health and of the national pension scheme insitution, the decreasing birth-rate, the Euro - apparently any issue is appropriate to make the public sullen. And whoever dislikes that is not lamenting about these issues, but about the others' lamenting. Above all, there is common consent the general mood is appalling. But how can lamenting be characterized?
In contrast to other verbal actions such as complaining or mourning lamenting can especially easily dispense with a precise object. Usually we complain about physial or mental pain, maybe to somebody, but lamenting seems to be much more self-satisfactory. Furthermore its durative implications are more obvious, that is it knows neither a definite starting- nor an ending-point, but can easily become permanent. So the object of lamenting remains indefinite, which makes lamenting highly flexible. Virtually any fact can trigger it off. The main thing is keeping it going. Lamenting is, to borrrow an Aristotelian thought, an action of praxis, not of poiesis; it pursues no aim beyond it, it is done, pardon, for the joy of it.
This modest analysis already displays why lamenting is that unprofitable: it paralyzes, since it has no ending after which things could get better. Lamenting will only result in a truly deplorable situation if it kept long enough, because in that case improvement will have been fatally delayed, so that only negative things can turn out. And then lamenting will justify itself. Withoudt a doubt every kind of society has its own problems - some of them are more difficult, some less, some latent, some exaggerated. But their global weight differs. Even th emost reactonary progressive will not be able to help accepting the pile-up of reforms seems to be less important in comparison with famines or genocides in other parts of the world. From that perspective we hardly have any right to lament. All the same, it is typically modern to shift future to present and so to speak make projections whose attractivity increases insofar as they make us expect negative consequences. According to that, any change is a threat. And this is the point of lamenting: It can be only justfied in future times, and, since it does not recognize that, it actually will be justified then.

Knowledge

To a great deal the so-called guiding principles like freedom or fairness are so inspiring because they resist any endeavours to define them once and for all. As they doubtlessly refer to human practice, their contents have to be adjusted to the change of time. For example, what was regarded under the circumstances of Enlightened Absolutism as liberal, might justify by present standards revolting. For that reason the variable word content requires an analogously dynamic opposition term which is to be permanently negated to make sure the guiding principle remains update. Counterterms and negations are actually updates worked into the guiding principles. E.g., something is fair until something unfair is found in it, that is, until the once fair state is changed to become fair again. Dialectically speaking, there is no development without opposite notions.
The same thing applies to the core term the modern image modern societies have of themselves: knowledge, to be precise. If we examine the evolution of human abilities, we must acknowledge that in the last 300 years mankind has produced and gathered more knowledge than ever before on the one hand, but has been made aware of its own ignorance more than ever before on the other. So here the principle prevails, too, the process of knowledge results from the tension of knowing and not knowing. The more proudly human beings responded to a gain of knowledge, the more humbly they had to realize unexpected negative consequences soon after. In order to avoid the melancholy of ignorance people saved rationalism by characterizing it as critical. Knowledge concerns not only what is the case but also, more than that: exclusively,what is not. True is what can be proved false. That is why the positive aspect of knowledge is negative. We can only know for sure what is not the case, not what is, for what is the case only expects refutation.
This principle of fallibility is about to overtake itself, for the half-life of the raw material knowledge is steadily shrinking. That is because knowledge is in the true sense of the word a factor of production, not a product. And by now it points to the rucksack it is carrying on its back, ignorance. When once pupils explained their aversion from learning with their lack of knowledge what to use the things they were taught for, their teachers guaranteed their use. Nowadays this is no more possible. But hardly a teacher finally brings himself to characterize learning as exercise in being willing to forget any time what was taught. Still that is why the term knowldge society is ambiguous, for it means both what a society has already acquired and what remains to be acuired - just knowledge.
However, it is very important not to confuse old knowledge necessarily with obsolete knowledge. After all, Socrates' age-old insight into his knowing that he does not know anything is much more update than some complacent research on Artificial Intelligence or Neuro Science. Socrates has identified the opposite terms and has shown that the modern manner of sequencing knowldge and ignorance is wrong in believing it is possible to secure a linear increase of knowledge.
But how to put that application into practice? Well, it might be an intersting discorvery if we relate knowledge and ignorance to each other. In other words, we could follow Socrates' example and distinguish between four cases, namely (a) knowledge of knowing; (b) knowledge of not knowing; (c) not knowing of knowing; (d) not knowing of not knowing.
Ad (a): Consciousness that something is (not) the case is the classical example of human reason. Being rational is based on this principle. In its highest degree it tries to rely exclusively on strictly axiomatic conclusions, to deduce from what has been known for sure.Wissen, dass man etwas weiß. This complies with the intellectual wishes for security, but solves no problems in the long run. This attitude runs the risk of intellectual inbreeding when perpetuately applied.
Ad (b): This kind of consciousness is not rational - if we make the modern presupposition being rational means control. Instead, it would be more appropriate to talk about wisdom as the Socratic manner of modesty. However, we should picture what Socrates had to swallow, because any decision-maker will be most irritated by someone who steadfastly refuses to be right. Just because of that our social elites strive to be wise, but remain rational.
Ad (c): With the evolution of modern cybernetics this notion has gained importance. It is based on the idea that systems are not only internally organized in a rational way, but that they are also embedded in a feedback relation with their environent. Since a system can only control itself, but not its environment (for that would mean the environment ceases to be environmental and becomes a systemic element), the internal rationality will not be sufficient for the system to exist within its environment. So this is intelligence. A system cannot know or plan beforehand what might be occurring. Company strategies prove that every day. The inflationary use of the term intelligence only reveals its content is a rare good.
Ad (d): The way knowledge and lack of knowledge have been related to each other here, it is no surprise that the fourt case is very similar to being rational (but, of course, it is not identical). This is because being rational creates a logical niche, for it is exclusively focused on what is known; as a consequence, the fact that the niche differs from the environment comes as a big surprise. In short, what is not known is considered irrelevant, which means it slips beyond notice. A strategy like that establishes ignorance. Well, knowledge-based societies face the challenge of dealing with these four forms. We improvise, are lucky and after that realize rationally we have obviously acted intelligently. But if we then succumb to the megalomania of Enlightenment that we can rule everything we shall be merely ignorant. This can be mostly seen from people calling themselves intelligent in the first place; for self-attested intelligence is ignorance. And wisdom is recognizing being rational and ignorant can be only distinguished by the means of intelligence - which means the distinction is absolutely uncertain.

Kairos

Mankind as a whole seems to fall into two large groups - the progressive and the retarded. The progressive ones are those who have deprived Nature in particular of any mythology and instrumentalized it as a means to their grand aims. We are replete with food, fridges buzz day and night, cars are waiting in traffic jams. The fact that the psychiatric profession (clearly indicating the raging senselessness) is thriving seems to be a minor evil when compared to a march to the next source lasting for days.
The Occident, rational as it is, plans. Nothing is left to accident. It pursues a strategy. A strategy is the projection of a future state onto the present decision making. In doing so the projection generates a feedback element: the decision will effect the imagined future. So it depends on the quality the decision has how the future will turn out.
This might not be too impressive yet; after all it is possible to act from the guts and to declare the action a masterly performance in strategy, a conscious choice between alternative decisions later upon inquiries keeping at it. How that works can be watched at any press conference after a First Division match. High-grade strategy can only characterize an action which is based on complex, ramifying decision making. In that case strategy is the path leading to a decision as an output by gathering as much information as possible.

For the sake of illustration all we have to do is imagine two different kinds of giving reason for action. In case 1 the person asked what made him decide to perform an action: No idea. Somehow I was in the mood for it. My astrologer agreed. In case 2 the person answers: Take a look at my information input. (nonchalantly pointing to a very long filing cabinet). Case 1 leaves us the choice to classifiy (dependent on temper) the actor either as an intelligent genius (on condition it has worked) or as a muddlehead, case 2 compels us to regard him a rational strategist.
The military origins of the term strategy play moreover appeals to the latently martial cravings all those (project) managers have whose authority to issue directions as it were builds the small general's hillock upon which the coolly calculating thinker's head has an elevated look into future. And it is typical we keep wanting to optimize things for rationalization's sake; a strategy can always be improved.
And here lies the problem; if a strategy is meant to be improved, if the decision making is intended to be as ramified as posiible, it must become its own topic, an end in itself. By that it will like it or not become the focus of attention, when its original intention is to establish an outlook for a difference between unsatisfactory present and promising future. That is why the need for information becomes insatiable. Today's strategists are information junkies. The more they have, the less they will have to deal with the unsettling paradoxy any strategy implies: forming the unformable material future. For strategically comparing present to future will fix it. But that act of fixing is an unconscious, uncontrolled intervention in the present. By fixing the present strategy changes it. This change may be minimal, even without strategically defined consequence, but this will have no impact on the fact a small amount of uncertainty will remain - and the more elaborate the strategy, the more tightly it couples the imagined elements, the more destructive it might turn out. After all, the vernacular saying knows it is the details that are vicious. The most elaborate strategies can solve every problem - except that one of their own existence.
Of course strategies are related to their einvironment. By optimizing them, we will sever them from that, since the environment is in a constant flow and will not do the strategy the favour of waiting till it is conceived. Children photographers know what the author is talking about. And a detached, closed strategy is basically crossing your fingers, file cabinets or endless internet research or no.
Business strategists have paid lip service to flexibility long since. Strategies must be loosened up if we want to avoid jumping to the opposite extreme and praying to the force of nature. But they have to face the insolvable dilemma which demands the most rigid system, the organization to be flexible. That system, which above all intends to bring time to heel will be bound to surrender to the favour of th emoment: opportunity.
An opportunity is an irritatingly fickle thing. It works along the medium of maybe - maybe not. But there is no serious planning that way. Ancient Greek mythology was so impressed with the moment's incalculability that it assigned its own official in charge of it, the god Kairos. Contrarily to Chronos, who guarantees the constant flow of time, Kairos, the right time, is a truly spectacular persona; his forehead is graced by a curl he can be seized at; in return, the back of his head is bald, offering no sure grip. So no matter what one intends, everything depends on grabbing his hair. In short: The most elaborate and sophisticated plan will fail if Kairos turns his head.
This -admittedly a little irrational - image can be explicated grammatically, too; strategies always express a direction coupled with a conditional: IF situation X THEN do Y. So strategies will fail if IF is not the case. And it is particularly bitter or tragicomic when IF will be denied just because the corresponding action has already been signalled. This means any strategy demands another which precedes it in terms of the future projection which defines the conditional scope of possibility which makes it strategically relevant in the first place. And so on. In other words: We plan what we will plan as soon as we have grabbed Kairos's curl. Which presupposes we plan how to grab his curl. Which presupposes we get to see him in the first place. And at the latest here we cannot plan anymore. This is a matter of inspiration - something completely unknown to organizations. That is why it has to conceive inspiration (as a way of abandoning a strategy) as a strategy itself. And the more elaborate, the harder it is to dispense with it. Apparently the only way to do so without a bad conscience will be to shut down the organization - because its cozy routine did not realize the sign of the time.
Constant strategy optimization is more useful than successful, though; anyway it absorbs time, and at least for a while it is worse to be bored than to fail.

Innovation

Communication psychology has informed us paradoxical messages can lead to schizophrenia; the scientific term for this is double bind. It denotes two controversial notions within a single utterance. The message is self-contradictory. Countless gag writers and family therapists make a living letting one party order the other to be independent, to disagree, to disobey. This goes naturally for this text, too, demanding the reader's critical reflection.
But there is also a productive aspect to paradoxes - as is usual, where it is least expected, namely in management. That kind of double bind orders: Be spontaneous. Be creative. So what causes amazed head shaking outside in the real world has become a fixed form inside an enterprise called research departments. Its staff industriously slaves to meet the requirement to be permanent innovators. Enter the key phrase.
Readiness for innovation can be regarded as the real currency of knowledge-based societies; its material equivalent is investing into time and accordingly money. Without doubt, this is a promising affair which can be alone seen by the fact nobody knows what innovation might be generating. It cannot be forecast, and just because of that one does it.. To put it more exactly, one tries. And this means: planning what cannot be planned.
Principally, innovation is an everyday phenomenon. Human beings manipulate their environment which changes its state which requires a modified manipulation which in turn changes the environmental state and so on. Modern cybernetics conceives this as aviation controlling of autopoietical, self-organized systems. It is this behaviour which enables us to control ourselves behind our own backs as we concentrate on the environment generates innovative raw material. However, just because innovation is natural, it is difficult to make it its own issue. It loses its matter of course, the natural innovator observes his action. As a consequence, the concepts enters the public issue and proliferates in speeches and commentaries. Practically anybody of self-attached importance likes to lead the flag of innovation, but the more it is conjured, the less precise its content becomes. To compensate this, innovation is even more often mentioned. Not for the first time quantity rules over quality.
In the technical and managerial realm innovation denotes the relation between an unsatisfactory state and a correcting means. The state often cocerns an obstinate environment which is to be made pliant with the aid of a mechanical or data processing apparatus. This apparatus indicates the difference between the original state S and the successfully altered state S'. So much for the technical aspect. But once the idea of making money with such an apparatus emerged, innovation became a matter of chain. Innovation follwos innovation, innovation' innovates innovation. Nowadays lack remedy is no more an excuse to lean back with relief to enjoy the improved environmental state; quite the contrary, lack remedy turns into a lack to be remedied ad infinitum. We might call that kind of innovation 'rational'; it refers to a given connection, falls back upon a given solution and improves it.
All the same - innovation is not merely about (may this be a modest advice for innovative sponsors who spill money over the developing departments) perpetuately improved tools which help us to do even whiter washing, to spare even more time, to send even more superfluent photographs by SMS. No, beside 'rational' there is also 'original' innovation. It establishes an entirely new lack remedy by either inventing a totally unknown machine (as has been the case with the wheel, for example) or by unexpectedly reinventing an apparatus that was originally conceived to solve problem X for abolishing problem Y. It remains to our rational purists and fund raisers to lament over this misuse. Often the two aspects are connected; a new apparatus is invented and later on used for something different. But it is original in any way.
As we can see, innovations will create something new by requiring something old. Originality then means the dissolution of structures, whereas rationality implies their modified recombination. Accordingly, original innovation means a definite relation of lack and remedy is redefined. This is inconceivable without a verbal basis. Therefore verbal innovation is no surprise at all. And not only machines, but also ideas, ideals, cultural habits inside and outside of organizations create and remedy lack. Since in these cases there is no immediate equivalent in the machine world, it is impossible draw a line between 'real' and 'virtual' innovation. It is a matter of indivual case to decide which is substantial and which is old wine in new pipes.
Innovation defines the rhythm of technical and intellectual development. Given the increasing acceleration it will not last a long time until what was yesterday will be up to date tomorrow and the strained short-term memory thinks anything is modern. Here lies the chance for the old iron to declare its rusty parts to be innovative.

History

One of the most fascinating issues culture has invented is how it deals with time. Although everything happens everywhere in present time, language allows us to dispose of past and future, too. This is trivial, but let us forget that. This 3-in-1 distinction is strong enough to admonish us to avert from last year's snow and not to reflect on unlaid eggs to be at the peak of time. And if that was not enough, many languages even construct the past of the past (After he had diligently dissected his wife, he drank a glass of port in the libraray), the future of the past (He assured me he was going to bridle his pyromanic inclinations two days before his death by fire.) just like the past of the future (I shall wisely turn my back to this mean old world after I shall have blown it up) and, albeit less elegantly, the future of the future (In twenty years' time we shall imagine one day we shall not wish to be cloned anymore). This proves a truly infantile joy to dissolve and recombine time units.
This always strikes us somewhat dramatically whenever past and future do not coincide temporally in the present (for this goes without saying) but mentally. That is, whenever we are not concerned with the past, but with the possible effects of a reflection on history - the possible future of the present reflection on the past. This management of time reveals itself in special jubilees and commemorative days, when we are assured there has been no oblivion and will not be. So it is this which makes history ambiguous; in the wide sense it comprises everything that happened prior to the present, the past. In the specific sense which has more impact on present and future it merely covers the remembered past. And it is this impact on the present which sometimes is controversial, for here history does not simply mean (un)known events in the past, but their implications for the present. Meanings and implications always cause dissense, because they result from communicative bargaining. So grammatically speaking history concerns both the past and the present perfect.
Since a few years some people have been reproaching others with instrumentalizing history. Something has happened, and being aware of that is meant to have consequences. This reproach aims at the exact difference between history in the narrow and in the broach sense, thus implying that the narrow aspect, its cultural meaning, is inadmissibly confused with the broader aspect, its mere facticity - for highly present purposes. This - if it only was pointed out that way - marks a crisis resulting from a paradoxical dealing with history. Anyway it is not very constructive, for it has not struggled through yet to advocate forgetting relevant historical knwoledge, that is declaring it as irrelevant. But that can be its only purpose if it is to be more than just diffuse uneasiness.
That kind of uneasiness is largley due to the fact one must talk the more about history the more distant it is - on condition one wants to secure reminder and claim to have learned from history. All the same, this results in an accumulated historical agenda setting in the present which is often considered redundant and uninformative. In the end public opinion will feel disgusted, maybe even inclined to break a taboo. This is what is behind any endeavour to close an issue: We know what happened and that it is over. Of course, this attitude is paradoxical, too. After all, an end cannot be publically decreed. Quite the contrary, it comes to an end by resigning from demanding an end. The other way round: the more avidly a debate is to be closed, the longer it will last. This is because normality is not communicable. It can only become an issue if it is viewed from an anomal perspective. This way the controversy aggravates. This way the newspaper columns are replenished.
It is absurd for historical committers to demand their victims should forget; it is even more absurd for the committers to regard themselves as victims. For in the first case one pretends past has nothing to do with present and future. In the second case it is confused with them. After all, we should remember it is the difference, sometimes the conflict between them which structures time.

Harassment

Modern media society does not teach us information (since they are so excessive they can only generate a deafening noise), but above all the increasing mingling of the public and the private. Private people imitate what they have publically seen on TV, celebrities behave to some extent privatly, that is jovially. Advice seekers are instructed to address public experts instead of their social surroundings. This way private problems are public(ized). At the same time actors, musicians and more and more politicians open their private doors for homestories' sake - so that to the public they can seem to be private. Nonsense at work that nonetheless works.
This is what makes modern images effective. They are the projection screen to keep the distant celebrities available, virtually transforming them into one's living-room. This makes the modern phenomenon we have never seen old acquaintances face to face. Therefore we just spend some thought that the candidate is leading a harmonious marriage, the pop singer performs any stupid song with some autobiographical traits, the screen star constantly bashes PC monsters, believing the camera is only accidental. Media researchers call that 'para-social interaction'; among other things it refers to the TV serial effect - for instance uninvitedly displaying one's eczemas to former stage performers or forcefully demanding they should fix their TV marriage which is going through a crisis. The point is it is increasingly difficult to separate media and everyday reality.
Media images' drawback is a correspondingly modern kind of behaviour - confused aficionados harass their favourite stars. Time and again the media (mostly those which have made a cult out of stars the most resolutely before) report spectacular judgements, especially in the USA, which prohibit the mislead admirators from approaching their objects of desire more than so and so many metres. Mr Chapman has set the role model.
The harasser's collective image refers to a fast food freak existing in his darkened room in the midst of meal remnants and newspaper clippings with each square centimetre plastered with the idol's posters - maybe equipped with one or two knives, since that idol constantly refuses to state officially he or she is married to the admirator. But by now that trend seems to have expanded to the private lives of those persons who are no public figures. It goes without saying there have always been admirators whose tenacity has transcended the time limit towards obtrusiveness, it is true; but the fact there is now a terminus technicus allows us to draw the conclusion today's media conditions have noticeably aggravated the phenomenon.
Working out the differences to traditional forms of harassment requires a short reflection upon individuality. Basically, harassment just means jeopardizing other people's autonomy (their right to live largely unmolestedly and fearlessly). Classical modern age characteristically holding individuality in high regards made that a vested right independent on religious commandments. But nowadays things are different. Individual autonomy has radicalized to such an extent that it is not the individual in general, but in particular, the Ego, which is courted - and demanded: whatever happens socially needs individual arguments. It has to pay the single person - and to motivate. Working in order to earn money - perhaps. But in any case for the joy of obligation. The individual is to embody his part, even though and just because he cannot do so, for a surplus will always remain. And because somehow this is suspected, hired psychologists are needed who are meant to pamper the individual until he meets with his limits. By closing the ranks with advertising it is suggested modern man can achieve anything he wants - but he is to want. Impossibility is impossible, as we have learnt by heart.
And if everything is possible, then it will go for selected fellow individuals’ liking, too. Simply a matter of will. Displaying presence. Living interest in how the other person spends his days. Looking for contact. After all, we are communicative, are we not? You'll be sorry if you are not. Dedication knows no limits, and that is why it will not be a surprise if people find themselves in the shrubbery in front of the diligently established impression management's addressee's house - maybe equipped with binoculars, or a stabbing device. We are special, which other people are to confirm. No matter how.
Western culture is permanent harassment, secreting obtrusiveness out of any social pores. The harassers might be that mad, because they are so resolutely typical. The victims cannot even resort to Diogenes's cask or Hölderlin's tower room.

Halo

By now, the public indignation has died down and grown accustomed to the idea a show-biz immigrant is governing the affairs in the most important federal state of the most important world power. America is just not Old Europe, things like that belong to the curiosities of the American Way of Life with its myth of the transformation of dishwashers to millionaires, we notice shrugging our shoulders, relieved to be indifferent. Besides, he was not elected President and will not be. What is all the fuss about? After all, Reagan was re-elected, too. It is true, the governor is authorized to sign death sentences, but as a matter of fact he mostly does so during election campaigns. And what about Italy? We have accepted a would-be pop-singer as the head of government whose interest in power even his harshest critics cannot deny - maybe not in the public TV, but let us leave it at that.
Conservative objectors to that clear entanglement of entertainment and politics insist on the nagging question of how qualified these political climbers from the sidelines are. What do these conquerors have to show besides their TV compatible appearance (which need not have anything to do with aesthetical pleasure – neither in California nor in Italy) and a cheerful disinterest in hard political issues? But these objectors forget former American elections were solely decided by the candidates' elegant appearance, too. For instance, Nixon's stubble could not compete with Kennedy's wife or Clinton did blow the sax convincingly. In other words: They maintain a classical notion of the public which can be found in the good old textbooks on state philosophy. It is high time we enlighten the enlightened. After all, public does not mean anymore insightful private persons debating political issues the souvereign has already decided upon in intelligent newspapers, but insightless spectators and readers guessing who is credibly representing democracy's interest. Professional politicians are dependent on the public's thumb.
The evolution of Western democracies involved the public domain expanding in relation to the increasing specialization of disciplines. The public in a way recombines the partial social elements which have emerged from the dissolution of the whole. As a consequence, it has not been a term for a long time which only complies the politically interested without a mandate. Whatever is discussed and decided within the important functional domains has the same impact on it, be it art, sports, education, religion, economy, administration, politics or the media. And since politics is no longer the only issue of public perception, we do not talk exclusively about politicians anymore.
A case in point for this development: public figures. While in the old times great statesmen or heads of government fell in that category, giving the media cause to report, nowadays it is almost the other way round – the media appetite for filling the newspaper columns and programmes with public figures is insatiable. Politicians have only a decreasing share in it. So today it does not play any part at all in what respect someone is a public figure. The main thing is to talk about it. Or to buy the newspaper. Or to tune in to it.
This means two different kinds: for one thing the media have public figures on spec ready to report about. This is called event culture and comlies chat shows, talent contests, container programmes. For another the politicians feel compelled to expand their declining share in publicity by active participation in non-political programmes for their own goals, thus doing the political system a disservice. No wonder politics and entertainment are diffusing. That is why, not only politicians can enter entertainment programmes, but also entertainers can enter politics.
Why did the public cease to separate these domains? Because it cannot, for public coverage ignores the differences. So when we try to insist there must be reasons of competence if someone is qualified for a political position, the public as a functional system of its own can only respond that might be the case - but it cannot decide that. Otherwise every voter would be a politcian.
To keep funcioning, the public can only stick to its own perception: image instead of qualification, publicity instead of argument. The public treats everybody equally, be it arguing politicians, quarrelling teenage mothers or ex wives. So it is the public indifference which explains why we expect cowboy actors or film terminators to do a good political job. That kind of drive displayed in movie roles is projected onto the actor's image maintained even when changing their function, becoming a politician. What worked so well in the films, should work elsewhere, too.
Media researchers analyzing public opinion have known this phenomenon for years, calling it the 'halo effect'. The impression a person makes on the public might shine so brightly that it can be used for other aspects, too. When it is only repeated often enough, people will only remember if a public figure is provocative, conciliatory, brisk or reticient, not if he or she is it being a politician, entertainer, business manager or athlete. As soon as such a figure changes the domain, he or she will take his or her image with him or her. That is why a rough football player is expected to have his way in lengthy commitee meetings, a political doer to make enterprises pull their socks up or an actor specialized in honest characters to be trustworthy. As the public neglects these domains, it merely distinguishes between positive and negative. Who is competent in X must be competent in Y. (Leaving aside cases in German history, for instance the President of the Empire Hindenburg - mark that: directly elected by the German people!)
An especially bright shining halo even allows neutral figures to bask in its reflection. The author therefore recommends the term seam effect (inspired by the New Testament). It implies an event no matter how boring or predictable it is (for instance guild, association or company ceremonies) can be upvalued by a much sought after halo bearer who acts as a guest of honour delivering a jovial speech.
Needless to say, this goes for regional or local publics, too. This way we can explain the accumulation of offices. An honorary post or the chair of the rabbit breeders' association here, the respect of the fellow card players there. Still, the direct communicative contact involves we sometimes take into account we have been directly and personally lied in the face. For that reason we cannot rule out the question if an expert in engineering is really able to be a marriage guidance counsellor. But we might buy it from a public figure, for why should he or she talk about things he or she has no idea of? Such a person will never get the opportunity to speak in our quality oriented media world which feels obliged to the ideal of enlightenment, will he or she not? For exactly that reason blonde fashion models reflect upon national pride, football players castigate the shortcomings of the welfare state or idols feel compelled to deny political ambitions.

Football

At a time like ours which is not exactly devoid of fascination, football takes an exceptional position. Regardless if managers or street-sweepers, politicians or prisoners, more than that, even entirely opposite social groups will gratefully resort to that topic. The author cannot avoid the question what makes football that interesting, what makes it a social phenomenon. And the fact the question cannot be answered thoroughly, does not impair its attractivity. Quite the contrary.
As for the bare facts: 22 persons hunting a ball is from a technical point of view quite boring. The more amazing are the fuss that is made about it, the tears that are shed, the noses that are broken and the children that are procreated, simply because one team has beaten the other. This technical side can be called 'denotation'. This term means a quality which we can without being too malicious characterize as dull information - an implied invitation, in other words, to have a discreet look at the wristwatch and to wonder how time sometimes seems to stand still. But over that basis another component piles up, the cultural meaning which is attached to the neutral fact. And it seems it is exactly the hardly challenging original idea of football which literally cries for being emotionally and intellectually supercharged. Being trivial is still the best precondition of being profound.
Umberto Eco has stated a similar thing with regards to verbal sign systems, texts in other words. He subdivides them into 'open' and 'closed' ones. Closed texts imply a single reading, thus preferring being informative to being creative, texts for everyday use, for instance. In contrast, open texts enjoy their own variety of readings, thus inviting the readers to speculation. They do not confer their meaning in themselves, but require an actively participating reader. The interesting point of this is the more closed a text is conceived to be, the more meanings can be constructed anyway. There is no text with one single meaning. (With a compassionate address to religious fundamentalists of any kind.) In turn a text, however open it might be, cannot carry any meaning; its scope of interpretation, albeit variable, remains end- (if not bound-)less in principle. (With a recommendation to political ways of dealing with civil rights.)
Now football is a typical example for the first case; its rules are so simple even Americans feel bored by them. After all, baseball or American Football matches are much more complicated. But it is exactly its closed primitivity, its dull denotative component which elevates this simple sport to an eternally sung phenomenon; now we are talking about its connotative compnent. So we might be more precise: The less imaginative the denotation, the more creative the connotation.
And football has been experiencing quite a breathtaking connotative development in the last 50 years. Originally considered to be a mere working-class sport whose executors might at best become a petrol station owner after they quit kicking, thus belatedly trying to climb the social ladder, it has grown into a huge cultural form by now. It is the lubricant of the media machinery, it provokes more and more profound comments and reflections, it conquered the status of a philosophical issue long ago.More than the history of political parties it serves as a blueprint for a principle analysis of the history of mentality, for it is endowed with such a universal quality delighted sports palace attendants celebrated in this country about sixty years ago the last time. It is a code of the declining and constant values, mass psychosis, individual motivation, suspense, the schematic, in short: for everything and nothing. And nobody blames it for that. By now, the common fan himself reflects hedonistically upon the emptiness of the language of football (players). This means the factual component has become so complex that it reflects upon itself.So komplex ist die sachliche Komponente mittlerweile geworden, dass sie sich selbst reflektiert.
Nobody can evade football as a way of life anymore. Particularly before big events such as international championships even the disinterested loudly display their temporal reformation, exactly posing that kind of questions every real fan enjoys answering - for instance, what are the chances for the German team like, what is an offside trap, what is meant by the competition arithmetics and so on. Intellectual circles either participate fully, albeit aware there is still time left for a wink or they resort to the observation of the second order, which means they have a look at the football madness around (and inevitably at the first order object of observation, too, namly football). What is more, it has become a veritable topos to draw conclusions from the national team's state and its way of playing to the national state in general. And maybe for that reason, too, the professionals crawl more and more depressedly over the field, with the weight of the entire Western cultural state on their shoulders. Given that, the well-(?)meant advice to simply regain the joy of playing seems to be totally useless.
Technically speaking everybody tries to dissolve the closed factual form into the open medium of conclusion by finding relations to the economy, politics, psychology, mythology, biography, science and culture. So football can be anything, but hardly pure sport. This involves a certain danger: theoretically the football fans mightturn their backs to the expanding cultural relations which do not seem to have anything in common with the simple truisms of football. But paradoxically the inklings of the growing alienation of the fan basis, the credibility crisis of highly paid professionals actually secure its existence: every irated fan will dispute the football millionaire's frighting spirit and his enthusiasm, but not the notion of football as such. Lamenting the once innocent club sport has become too commercial just do not result in the break with football; instead the football business absorbs it functionally. Pure unadulterated football remains authentic for the fans; they only blame the overestimated and spoilt players who have forgotten to be enthusiastically earthy. So the spectators complain by the ten thousand about the missing club identification the players show, their luxury problems of motivational lack - but they do so at the only place they can utter loud criticism - the stadium, having paid the entrance fee. Paradoxial? Of course. Boycotting seems impossible. The fans see themselves as the guardians of the Grail of Football and detach themselves from all those intellectual smarties, eggheads, arrogant club chairmen, snappy managers, dubious consultants and just the lazy players.
So it is exactly that diversification of meanings making the fans aware of the authentic roots. Might others break the closed text open for futher readings, medializing the form - the fans do know it is closed. That is why the primitivity of football remains a constant scandalon for the other oberservers and keeps inducing intelligent and far-fetched explanations.

Ethics

It has been astonishing news that even Federal Bank Presidents do consult advisors in ethics – apparently to avoid running the risk of losing their positions for the same reasons they initially got it: Because their pedecessors' losing their way had become public. And what is more, ethics consultancy is said to be common practice in business management. Obviously it is meant to be a deliberate self-restriction. That sounds reconciling. And interesting, too, for what, may we ask, kind of person is an ethics advisor like? Unfortunately, the author still depends on speculations without support, as he has not yet had the opportunity to observe either the consultants nor their influence.
To begin with, ethics means reflecting what makes an action (or, more basally, a decision) good or bad. It is more abstract than a moral judgment which deals with a manifest action/decision under concrete conditions. Are we to imagine the ethics consultant enters the lavishly furnished management office flight and just in time leads a Socratic dialogue about the good life shortly before the client signs a paper? Do machine wheels or computers come to a halt, because the workers or the operative section wait desperately for the management to finish reflections? This is rather improbable. So what is business ethics all about? After all, the author must confess he doubts that ethical considerations are deeply felt, since on his way up the client has not missed them before. Ancient Rome's usage to whisper that ‚Memento mori' (Remember you are mortal) in the Emperor's ear seems to be old-fashioned, for the Modern Emperor will plainly reply ‚Non ignoro' (Just for the sake of that) and plunder the buffet one more time. To put it more technically: The client in ethics is not intrinsically motivated, but he must be extrinsically persuaded. For instance by pointing out he will lose his highly paid position if he additionally piles up too many similarly lucrative benefits. This means: Business ethics is not beyond imagination – but not as an indivdual effort to do something good (at best business managers try to do something well), but as a hint to the only punishing instance accepted by non-philosphers or non-theologists. The author is talking about all those people whose opinion might become important because it is now irrelevant: Public opinion.
So it is not about relieving managers they have made the right decisions. In fact, ethics can only explain why we can never be sure about that; instead, it is about the way managers are regarded by totally anonymous people. How important that is will become obvious as soon as public opinion starts another discussion round about fair salaries - and at the latest, as soon as TV cameras makes pictures of unemployed workers outside a company building. To put it differently: Whatever calls itself business ethics is identical with PR consultants.
And since we have come to understand that PR itself is ethically dubious, too, PR is killing too birds with one stone: It improves both the client's and the consultant's images. Woe be to that PR agency which declines such a win-win-opportunity and refuses to call itself a think tank for applied ethics.
Is it right, then, to talk about a new phase of management culture? The answer is clear: maybe. The label consultant is, an exception to the rule, correct, because advice is no obligation. At worst the client is free to tell the protesting consultant to shut up. Especially when business consciousness, public opinion, starts to examine, the criticized manager still has the option to shift responsibility to his incompetent advisor. And this way the Lost Son might return: responsibility.
One question remains to be answered: who works as an ethics consultant? Well, it should be someone who keeps a safe distance from ordinary management, but does not content himself with vowing he abhors unbridled capitalism, because his post-communist conscience bugs him. Economs and psychologists are for the first reason out of the question, romantic sociologists and pedagogs for the second. It is a classical field for theologists, philosophers and philologists, as for any unemployed.
And how are ethics consultant ethically to be judged? The author is uncertain, because he is still searching for an adequate advisor who can give him some clues.

Elite

As we have inevitably noticed, the elite concept has been booming in the last few months. Before it will have exceeded its trendy half-life, the author likes to seize the opportunity to give some irrelevant thought to the semantic traps of this celebrated notion.
Since the beginning of time, May 8th 1945, to be more precise, Germany has had some difficulties in classifying citizens regarding their influence (foreigners or recent immigrants count for nothing, of course, since they cannot speak German they are autoatically inferior). And this is for two reasons: Firstly the concept somehow implies the selection procedure. We are about to imagine bored people in uniforms distinguishing two groups of newly arrived people at the loading ramp. Secondly since the 1970s it has become additionally out of fashion, for no potential member of the chosen ones wanted to qualify as a target for terrorist assassinations. From that point of view any elite will be well advised not to behave like that. The media have realized that for a long time, subdividing celebrities into A, B and C categories; while A does not have to stand for media attention, C must tackle the problem of how to make its lost self-esteem palatable to disgusted tabloid journalists. These two reasons bilaterally put the screws on the concept of elite. Which makes the problem right now all the more virulent when it comes to supporting elites appropriately. Again we are faced wit a highly paradoxical construction, for who is entitled to count whom as the elite? If we think it over, we can distinguish two constellations.
#1: The existing elite calls itself elite. Revolutionary assassinations apart, this involves great difficulties because this clientele cannot completely dispel the heretic suspicion it is only interested in its own profit. That is the way it is - lining each other up with monetary awards and lobby positions. Common good is a camouflage for selfish profit. And dog does not eat dog. So credibility is missing, because we might doubt the elitist intercessor's sincerity.
#2: Selecting an elite is an outsider's duty. Which again raises the question of competent assessment. How can I be sure who the elite is and to be treated that way if I do not belong to it, that is if I have no idea if the so-called elite actually is the elite? So credibility is missing, because we might doubt the non-elitist intercessor's factual competence.
In other words, elite is a phantom. As long as things work, no thought is squandered about it. As soon as things go wrong, it will be hectically watched out for - to hardly any avail, since the potential elite will only lament its tied hands.
Most interesting is the political elite's behaviour; probably thanks to expensive opinion research it has noticed a certain dissatisfaction with its performance and is now trying to lead the movement demanding elite support. In doing so, the politicians have turned a disadvantage into an advantage, sneaking out of focus. They ingratiate themselves as a kind of instantaneous water heater for supporting elites and save their position. After all, politics rids itself of tackling problems elites are entitled to solve by calling for elite itself.
Our hectic debate neglects what elite support really aims at. After all, elite support is an ambiguous term, as can be affirmed by the declining elite of the classical educated by use of the pair genetivus subiectivus and genetivus obiectivus; elite supports either means supporting an existent or a developing elite. In the first case the problem is to define an elite extensionally, in the second one to characterize it intensionally. Case no. 2 is more complicated, because we would have to decide what qualities are most useful for society and deserve to be supported sustainedly. Heaven forbid! It is much easier to enter the familiar battlefield for research budget and haggle about per cents instead of objectives. This is because the very principle of elite us self-contradictory; on the one hand it is meant to characterize a group of people who is a minority (thus detaching itself from the majority), on the other it is inteded to display qualities which are in keeping with the interest of the entire population. Elites are the primi inter pares. Furthermore (and her lies the biggest problem) they are meant to form a special but not an exclusive group. Otherwise social promotion prospects on the way up into would be impossible. But they must be possible if values such as achievement orientation and education are meant to be based socially. And this is the only way for elites to legitimate themselves - strictly theoretically speaking, of course. Talking about pinstripe suited washouts or the football players' or civil servants' working morale clearly hint at that crisis of legitimation only the elites' behaviour can alleviate and not their permanent crying for support. Once again, the best example is set by common language use: elitist behaviour just does not mean the elite's behaviour but simply the arrogance the incompetent people with useful contacts display.

Dialogue

It is not wrong to have good intentions, but dangerous to utter them. For one thing because the whole world will know that they have not been there before. For another because from that time on the world will judge if one manages to put them into practice. So why do we uttere them? Probably because we are excited about ourselves and want to share that exuberance with the world. And because we sometimes forget we might wear ourselves out between the two jeopardies as have been mentioned above. All that will remain for us to be done is to shrug our shoulders and confess that we have too late realized something trivial and, even worse, have failed. But since we are not philosophers, we are not silent.
Whoever thinks this is a little cryptical be assured the author's sincere intention to enter into a dialogue with him. After all, this is what is all about. There are so many misunderstandings which thwart the real goals normal communication pursues - mutual respect, understanding, perfect consensus. All we have to do is take a determined breath and let the dialogue happen. Acting that simply can sometimes be so hard.
No surprise that, assisted by their consultants, political parties and business organizations have internalized that plain recepy and present themselves to the world with communicatively spread arms. A few years ago PR quite melodramatically focussed its professional image on the term dialogue, implicitly coceding its credibility could be increased. Since the opposite notion, the monologue, still enjoys popularity, because it helps to forget one could be confronted with someone who is not only too stupid to see he is wrong but also too ignorant to see even this. And during the monological phase of corporate communications it was all about conveying one's viewpoint to the electors or customers. No contradictions.
But this belongs to the past. We have understood. Well, at least partly. Of course we are still right and good-willing, but we want to be recognized that way. Electors and customers are not meant to feel simply informed, but convinced. And therefore a different strategy is required - instead of plain announcements something mutual, communicative - a dialogue, for sure.
Holding communication in high regards belongs to the most blatant paradoxa of erroneous human history. After all, dialogic communication seems to be the perfect tool to realize the vision of an all-embracing harmony. For this reason, everybody who wants something from someone else, demands dialogues - between philosophers, cultures (which ones exactly?), religions, politicians and citizens, companies and target groups, generations. We are not short of motivation to emit sounds into the atmosphere. But, strangely enough, listening carefully one cannot help but notice that the communicative problems resemble the multi-headed Hydra; solving one problem means creating another. That good old truism that one word generates another should be taken into account. For instance, couple therapists can confirm that the yearning for perfect partnership mutates into perfect divorce. And this is because unsuspicious groups which are suddenly promoted as dialogue partners tend to be strenously interested in remaining to be so - especially when the offering party has already lost interest in equal communication, perhaps because it has achieved its object. So whoever initiates communication might have difficulties in saying good-bye to the invited guests. Furthermore, one runs the risk of achieving contraproductive results; the partner might insist on his view and steadfastly refuses to be convinced. Diappointment casts its shadow, and beyond notice the dialogue has turned into a quarrel. And it is not before this state one remembers absolute consensus (or disinterest in others' plans) is always silent. It dawns too late what normal consensus is really like before we want to conjure it up dialogically: justified dissensus.
From that perspective, dialogical PR does make sense; you keep the customers in need by advising him to keep his dialogical lines open. Until tomorrow. And tomorow never comes.

Consulting

At his risk of semantic pedantry, the author is compelled to admit that the present consulting culture confuses him. Whenever a financial scandal comes to light, the public issue enjoys examaining the value of consultation. As usual, the controversy emerges too late and, in return, too upset. There is no denying the fact that public indigniation is in a way justified. However, it poses the wrong questions. Because instead of wondering if consultation, be it financial, communicative or psychological, is appropriate or not we should rather doubt whether consultancy is the right term or whether language use misleads us once again.
Consultation is a highly paradoxical issue. At first sight, it is a communication form which separates two parties with divergent levels of knowledge- here the advice seeker lacking knowledge, there the consultant knowing something. An everyday issue, indeed - and often for free. Day by day people drag others into stores to help them buy mobile telephones. Young parents ask their ancestors for educational advice. Colleagues give lessons on problems (for instance on how to avoid uninvited advice). But under corporate conditions, in firms, offices, seminars or political organizations, the constellation gets quite tricky. For here, the advice seeker rings his hands, while the consultant is rubbing his. As soon as adivice is professional, it has ceased to be a favour. And, as a consequence, who spends lots of money on rejecting advice?
Nevertheless - consultation means it remains up to the client to make a decision himself. He can, but need not accept the advice. If he had to, we could not speak about advice, but, with increasing obligation, instruction, direction, or order. In turn, this also means professional consultants are virtually obliged to rather give instructions than advice. So examining the consultant's competence is not so much a question of whether his advice is good, but whether he manages to point out his view must count as a recommendation, not as an instruction. So his salary limits his full scope of competence, since it inevitably raises the client's expectations. Apart from the money, the everyday advisor is in a much more comfortable position. If, for example, asked if parents should punish their spiteful child by applying house arrest or reducing their pocket money, he will be free to examine the question itself. Perhaps the parents should send their child to a psychologist, apply spanking or liberally raise the allowance. In contrast, a professional who acts this way, is in the imminent danger of being regarded as a babbler talking his way out, as soon as things get a little tricky. And this goes especially for business consultants. As a service agent, he is not expected to help his client decide, but to decide himself. And this might be the only thing a consultant cannot do. Here lies the core of the problem - nolens volens professional consultants trivialize themselves as coaches, the clients as obedients. There is no arguing about the clients' goals the advisors are entitled to help them achieve; more often than not they are consulted too late, anyway, when only bad and evil are at stake. And, what is more, the consultant cannot know what is good for the client; that remains to the latter. Nor the consultant can know beforehand what his client does not know. But he can know, if he is competent, what his client unconsciously knows, that is what the latter can know. But under the present conditions this is quite a disappointing outlook. That is why is is such a big issue.
But this does not imply consultants are useless; all the same, it is dubious if they are useful as advisors. Their avail is to make decisions in uncertain situation possible - even if these decisions turn out to be wrong and to be based on instructions instead of advice. In a way, a consultant is something like an imaginary crutch to help the client make things go on. And if it fails, the advice seeker still can defend himself from his stakeholders, perhaps even his shareholders, by pointing out he has taken highly regarded consultation. And perhaps he even might succeed in doing so. So really competent consultants insist of differring from coaches - although, as we have seen, they are functionally the same.
One question remains open: Since one is not a born consultant, since one usually gives but also takes advice, it might be interesting to know who advises the consultant. And what the advisor's advisor advices. Does he tell him that the problem of consultation should be tackled differently, thus securing critical self-reflection on consultation? Or is it just the other way round - does the advisor's advisor train his client even more bluntly, telling him: 'If your client asks you whether he should do X or Y, you must always (!) tell him to do the one without letting the other'? And who advises the client to select a consultant? As soon as the author will have consulted an appropriate person, he will be able to give helpful advice.

Compliments

It is customary to evaluate language use morally. Especially the idea of truth and lie plays an important part. As early as in the Bible we were taught not to lie, and as an exception to the rule we obey. Unless we are caught lying. Many promising careers came to a shameful end because it could be proved someone had not toldt he truth. And what is more: Sometimes it is sufficient just to suspect a lie.
The truth/lie distinction also applies, as the term implies, for white lies; however, in that case truth of a higher order is claimed, for whose sake the liar acts. It is presupposed the interlocutor will not be able to bear the truth or to realize it. Hence the white lie. Especially parents whose children are old enough to believe in Santa Claus appreciate that mechanism. It helps bridge time until a child receives pocket money which can be pedagogically cut. So there is no arguing about the difference between true and false, but it is a matter of evaluation.
Only providing that we can fully appreciate the fasinating way compliments are constructed, for they absolutely neglect the true/false criterion. That is, compliments can never be totally true nor false. This indifferent state is due to the fact the complimenting person has no choice between truth and falsehood. The social constraints do not assign that alternative. As a consequence, we will sometimes run the risk of reaping head-shaking indignitation instead of head-nodding appreciation if we prefer truth to lie. Assuming, we confront the General Manager's wife at the champagne buffet with our observation she must have increased her weight for about 20 per cent since the last social contact. This might be truth-, but not helpful for our career planning. This goes for her husband's receding hair-line, too. Reversely we are not allowed to lie too ostentatiously. Congratulating the General Manager's wife in the same situation to her spectacular weight reduction does not count as a compliment either - quite the contrary, it is regarded as malicious passing shot bluntly denying the obvious facts to emphasize them. As can be seen, compliments mean skating on thin ice and being dependent on that joker called delicacy. It decides if a compliment X uttered in situation Y still is a compliment when uttered in situation Z. So compliments are highly situative and culture-bound.
Taking historical information into account one cannot avoid the impression Germany has not been an area predominantly ocupied with sophisticated conversation and complimenting. Quite the contrary: Vast parts of the population have mistrusted Western European courtesy ever since. Perhaps that attitude rejecting intended face work has been a constituent factor on the way to developing German national identity. Dismissing the art of complimenting, as was cultivated on the left side of the Rhine, underlining its Machiavellist implications made it possible to insist on German sincerity and profoundness the French poseurs lacked who talked the severity of Life away. In turn, German severity was interpreted elsewhere as typical lack of politeness, fantasy and wit. The history of German politics is abundant of diplomatic confusions, affairs and embarrassments of that kind. We only have to think (in various degrees) of Wilhelm II. or Ribbentrop, even, much more harmless, of a former German Federal President. In films, the typical German of that time is always very strict, strained and stiff, presenting his duelling scars and parting of the hair executing his bow in such an abrupt way as if he wanted to knock his interlocutor's head. During the whole evening he will not indulge in a smile, be resistant to irony (which qualifies him as the perfect victim) and need large amounts of beer to generate a kind of humour which roughness will aggravate the apalling imprssion he has been making. The aftermath of this image still defines the international stereotype of being German.
Till the last quarter of the 20th century German mentality examined whether compliments and lies were the same. This attitude has not changed until the irony boom of the 1990s. This might have promoted the culture of complimenting, but unfortunately now the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist, is hindering, for either a compliment is regarded to be plainly cynical or to be bluntly harassing. The latter goes especially for naive men who simply try to be polite meet ladies susceptible to molestation. The USA, which own without a doubt the cultural supremacy, are less reserved, in contrast. Apparently it is the American fashion to ask somebody about his or her secret, to assure him or her he or she looks young, he or she has flawless - in other words: false - teeth, and flourish! he or she has reduced some weight. Anyway, it is very telling hardly anyone compliments a person to his or her education and intelligence.
So making a compliment is a difficult thing. It might be helpful to become aware this is a case in point of a win-win situation: I compliment you and become increasingly appreciated. Therfore the conventional way of complimenting is everybody thinks they are empty phrases which are indispensable.