The majority of Austrians are afraid of social decline. Many believe that their children will have to get by with less than they do themselves. The phenomenon of helicopter parents is increasingly coming to the fore. Helicopter parents and their children form combat groups with the aim of making the offspring competitive, “fit for the future” and assertive. In times that the principle of “homo homini lupus” dominates, when the fight of everyone against everyone is on the agenda, efforts are made to massively arm children with educational capital. Today, however, education does not mean dealing with Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Wagner, Nietzsche or Heidegger.
Education today is subjected to tough criteria of usefulness. The aim of drill training in postmodern schools is to produce computer nerds who excel in the so-called MINT subjects and who can later do justice to the superficial self-presentation and self-marketing logic of a “performative economy” in which the sale of services comes before the provision of services.
The fact that completely callous, anesthetic conformists are created in this way, soulless beings who pursue their personal success stories without a trace of empathy, has been exemplified in the last few months by the ridiculous trinket figures who stumble across the front stage of Austrian politics. Instead of humanistic representatives of the people, egocentrics are at work here, for whom words such as community, solidarity or even selflessness are nothing but dusty, romantic set pieces of a past in which one still believed that honor, sincerity, style and courage were hallmarks of a good and valuable life are. How simple-minded and foolish.
This decadent political caste is harmoniously added to a media culture that is mindless, vicious, purchasable and apolitical. Accordingly, the great social problems of our time, such as the preservation of civil liberties during a pandemic, the economic and cultural division of society, the devastating inflation and its consequences for the poor and the emerging, increasingly aggressive eco-totalitarianism, are no longer discussed.
Instead, one deals mainly with voluptuously dissecting and disavowing political actors on the most personal of all levels. In place of the expert discourse that strives to reach an understanding, attacks have taken place ad hominem, which aim solely at the personal devaluation, exclusion and extermination of unpleasant actors. One can be glad that the operators of these destructive discourses do not have the means of power and practices of a medieval judiciary at their disposal.
Resentment thrives particularly well in a society riddled with fears of all kinds. The dominant factor today is the fear of being punished or even socially annihilated for having a dissenting opinion or for belonging to an unloved group. A typical example of a press group that tries to influence politics with the personal disavowal of people and hateful comments are the old Trotskyists.
Her strategy has always been to sneak into parties and media and hollow them out from the inside and turn them around. The best known of them is Peter Pilz. He managed to keep the Greens on a tight left course for a while. Incidentally, his academic teacher at the university was Alexander van der Bellen.
Pilz almost managed to destroy the Greens, in the end it destroyed itself and today, like the basilisk once from its medieval well, drooled into the world, poison and gall. The climax of his recent unsavory behavior, the degradation of the new general secretary of the ÖVP, Laura Sachslehner. On Twitter, he said in a humorous way that if he calls out the name “Sachslehner” to the woodpecker who lives by the tree in front of his house, he will get a laughing fit and fly away. This story is not only disgusting but also untrue. In reality, the woodpecker is female and so flies away screaming because he is afraid that the calloused hand of an old white man will get under his feathers.
However, Pilz’s communication is typical of the many representatives of extreme left-wing positions who try to use brutal verbal attacks to prevent people from expressing their opinions freely. Especially the fearful and weak are forced to eat their emotions and affects into themselves. The little person who has to endure injustice every day and who at the same time is too powerless to rebel against his tormentors, systematically poisons his soul. Because he has to “swallow” his effects of revenge, he becomes a dogged hater of the powerful. The last stage of this increase game is the sheer hatred that wants the destruction of the opponent.
Laura Sachslehner is a confident, smart and assertive young woman. She will laugh at the simple-minded and self-revealing parable of the woodpecker by Peter Pilz and move on to the order of the day. In the case of opponents of a corona vaccination obligation, mostly small people from the middle and lower classes, some of whom march through the streets in protest, the humiliating condescension and threats that are hurled at them from the educated classes are not so confidently received.
Anyone who demands that they spray them off the streets of Vienna with water cannons must know that they are promoting resentment against the state and hatred of the authorities in these groups and contributing to the escalation of the situation. However, the majority of Austrians want peace and order. Instead of irresponsibly fueling the situation, politics and the media should adopt a different tone. Otherwise it will crack. And neither the electorate of the parties nor the readers of the tabloids want that.
