The decline of our country is possible with on-board resources, we don’t need dark powers for that. If you turn seven screws, you can set it in motion without any outside help.
We live in the age of do-it-yourself. Today you can build your own house with the help of the nearest hardware store – or at least your own tree house.
Thanks to the Internet, you can open a TV station in your own kitchen – or at least produce a podcast. And if you have the time and inclination like Judith Rakers, you can switch to self-sufficiency in your own garden after the news. Go then!
Even the decline of our country can be managed with on-board resources. We don’t need dark forces for that, just ourselves. So here’s the seven-point plan for dismantling a model of prosperity that some thought was indestructible. Listen and Repeat.
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1. Expand the welfare state, first take away the children and then the contributors until it groans and groans and then collapses later.
At the latest when an employee has to finance a pensioner, the contract between the generations is over. Then finally Adam Smith’s neoliberal sentence applies: “If everyone thinks of themselves, everyone is thought of.”
2. Ban the country from using its domestic energy reserves, from coal to nuclear to fracking gas, so as to intentionally increase dependence on foreign sources.
The resulting permanent price surge will not fail to have its devilish effect. Then we might be poor, but at least CO2-free. You can not have everything.
3. Tax this recalcitrant German middle class heavily and dump tons of bureaucratic forms on them. May she choke on it.
Everything can be reduced to zero, including the willingness to perform of those willing to perform. That worked quite well in the GDR.
4. Let the education system rust, since artificial intelligence will soon take over anyway. The new Goethe is called Google. We don’t need a second Einstein, we have Alexa. And as the only foreign language we learn Denglish.
5. Let the public sector, from city government to road construction to the railway, slowly but surely decay. This is more effective than the dismantling after the Second World War, since the people are not suddenly and symbolically weakened, but only very gradually.
The train comes later – and then it doesn’t come at all. In the age of the home office, it had lost its function anyway.
6. After the homemade bread and the specially grown lettuce, you also make the money yourself. Anyone who then gets upset about the unconditional basic income has not understood the mechanics of this decoupling of wages and performance.
The focus of our added value is no longer the factory building, but a special fund set up by the finance minister. The promissory note is the new steam engine. It couldn’t be more sustainable.
7. Allow writers, filmmakers and intellectuals of all persuasions to find and then lose each other in heated debates.
When everyone has called everyone else at least once as a racist, chauvinist or sexist, we become brothers and sisters again; and also something in between.
Conclusion: We don’t need Putin, Xi Jinping and Anton Hofreiter’s heavy weapons for this enjoyable dismantling. The Mecklenburg philosopher and prophetess Angela Merkel had always believed in our self-destructive powers: We can do it!
Gabor Steingart is one of the best-known journalists in the country. He publishes the newsletter The Pioneer Briefing. The podcast of the same name is Germany’s leading daily podcast for politics and business. Since May 2020, Steingart has been working with his editorial staff on the ship “The Pioneer One”. Before founding Media Pioneer, Steingart was, among other things, Chairman of the Management Board of the Handelsblatt Media Group. You can subscribe to his free newsletter here.
