The confusion of confusions

The confusion of confusions
(WDR 1998)

At first it was just a coincidence. An inheritance, a lottery win. Something like that.
Then came the discovery of a safe in the inherited house, which contained another fortune.
The hero of the radio play - "The Confusion of Confusions" - takes it in his stride. Humorously. He is unfamiliar with the technical jargon of his "financial advisors" - at first - and invests his money according to indicators that seem practical and within his grasp: The (short) skirt length of his girlfriend and the birthdays of his acquaintances as six-digit security codes, forwards to buy, backwards to sell, sort of like that. He could have rolled the dice.

Over time, he also begins to take an interest in the flight behavior of butterflies in China and ponders methods of manipulating the occurrence and color of his preferred species.
But this happens at a later stage. Our hero is starting to get suspicious. No matter what he does, it works to his advantage. He gets richer and richer and doesn't know what to do with his money. Like Hans in Luck, only in reverse.

When his girlfriend wants to break up with him to pursue her own business idea, to gain independence from his wealth, he makes one last attempt to get rid of everything he has accumulated. He sells, come hell or high water - and ends up with more than ever. And has to resign himself to his fate...

The radio play comedy by Martin Daske and Uli Aumüller uses motifs from Max Weber's "The Birth of the Capitalist Spirit from Protestant Ethics", from Adalbert Stifter's story "Rock Crystal", biographies of the famous stock market gurus Kostolany and Soros, and many small and big stories from the world of finance. An entertaining and bitter parable about unstoppable global progress, ever-increasing wealth and a guaranteed happy ending for a chosen few.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Essay on the subject of the radio play (by Uli Aumüller)

Capitalism is the subjugation of society to a rational purpose. And in this respect, capitalism is very inventive. The crises that it causes in the process have, so far at least, been far from calling the system as such into question; on the contrary, they have served as a challenge, as an incentive to further stabilize the system as such. This has not shaken the rationality of the rational purpose as such.

What rationality of purpose are we talking about here? First and foremost, it is about increasing productivity, i.e. producing as many goods as possible as cheaply as possible and selling them as expensively as possible. The price and quality of a product are controlled by consumers' purchasing decisions, i.e. by the competition between several equivalent suppliers on a potentially free market.

In itself, that doesn't sound very dramatic. So what is the problem?

"In the past, we had a very stable triad between labor, knowledge and capital. Together they increased their productivity, increased their value added, and this led to an increase in consumer income for the labor factor, property income increased, knowledge was generally left out, it was not valued separately. This triad has broken down. Capital can increasingly make do with knowledge. And be productive in combination with knowledge. And that means that the factor of labor has been pushed onto a slippery slope. And on this slippery slope, labor is slowly but surely slipping from the highly productive, well-paid segment of the economy to the less productive, lower-paid segment of the economy. That would not be a bad thing, one could say that it is a very welcome development that we can leave certain activities, which were not so nice, they were very standardized, often monotonous and so on, to the machines, and that we can turn to things that are actually humane, namely the direct care of children and old people and neighbors and all the things that open up there, if it were not for the difficulty that these areas generate low incomes due to their low value creation, and at the same time the working population is no longer linked to the value creation of knowledge and capital. That is our real problem. The problem is not that labor is being pushed out of these segments, but that at the same time the possibility of participating in the value creation of knowledge and capital has been broken, and here I see a real historical mistake that is now taking its revenge, In the past we have only ever looked at increasing consumer income, and we have not looked at the fact that at the same time we had to ensure that the workers, who are slowly but surely being pushed out of this part, retain their contact with this part, namely by participating through wealth, capital accumulation and today property income. The consequence of this is that the very strong increase in property income flows to the few who have assets, and the others no longer have a share in it. This is not the result of any sinister forces at work here, but the very simple consequence of the fact that this wealth has become so productive and no longer requires the factor of labor." (Meinhard Miegel, Institute for Economy and Society, Bonn)

In other words, the increase in productivity not only meant that higher and higher wages could be paid to the employees and workers of commercial enterprises, but also that - stupidly - fewer and fewer workers and employees were needed to achieve the same level of productivity. At the same time, the average amount of capital invested per job increased due to the use of ever more expensive and complex machines, technical know-how and ever more complex computer programs. This is what is meant by the link between knowledge and capital: the money to buy these machines and the knowledge to construct them.

Essentially, two social groups have been able to profit from this development, which by their very nature are largely identical: on the one hand, the owners of capital, who, for example, as shareholders in stock corporations, put their money to work productively for themselves in these companies, as capital is only invested here if it can be expected to generate the highest possible profit sooner or later, taking into account a certain residual risk.

Secondly, the operators of the knowledge factor, i.e. the blessed part of the population available for wage labor, which is necessary for basic research and the development of these highly productive machines and programs. Because only those who have work can put a small or large fortune on the high edge of their income, which then earns interest in this or that way, i.e. provides for property income. It goes without saying that only highly qualified workers can succeed in this segment of the labor market.

This process is irreversible and develops beyond all moral objections. It would only come to a standstill when the division of society has become so radicalized that, due to the sheer poverty of an army of unemployed people worldwide, there are no longer enough consumers to buy all the goods produced with high productivity and low unit labour costs. Without sales, the brave new world of optimized rationality will collapse.

But we are still a long way from that, at least here in Western Europe - and as I said, capitalism has so far proved to be very inventive when it comes to averting the crises it has caused.

For example, the ecological crises and disasters triggered by the rationale of increasing productivity have led to the development of a whole new branch of industry dedicated to reducing emissions, resource-conserving energy production and the production of residue-free food. The destruction of nature already seems to have reached a level that makes the renaturation of contaminated wasteland economically viable. Moreover, not only mankind but also nature has a history. So you have to take a more dynamic view of the whole thing.


Bernd Niquet: These limits to growth are far too static. I do think that at some point our natural environment will cease to exist. I mean, what is the natural environment in our country? In the past, everything in Germany, in Europe, in Italy was forested. Today everything is a cultivated landscape. God, and maybe one day we'll be living under glass domes. We spend most of the day indoors and no longer outside, and somewhere we're doing quite well, and when we can no longer breathe the air and we're all living under glass domes...
Aumüller: Then the company that produces filter systems will make a lot of profits...
Bernd Niquet: Well, that's madness! Then everyone is busy, everyone has something to do, everyone can afford an insane amount, and there are a few romantics who are still crying about it. But I wouldn't find that somehow... There would certainly be more tragic things. I would find it more tragic if we killed each other or if we had to starve. But like this. Personally, I have to say that I'm not interested in many of these consumer goods, but I can make the decision myself, simply because it's nice.
(Bernd Niquet, business author, operator of a hotline for equity investors)

According to the model of the model nation USA, there will not be such a dramatic increase in unemployment figures in Western Europe either, rather an expansion of the tertiary labor sector, as already indicated by Meinhard Miegel, is to be expected, the service sector, which also includes care for the elderly and children, i.e. the traditional housewives' work, the - as Miegel expresses it - "humane" activities in the true sense of the word. This area also includes all forms of care and the provision of leisure activities, which will enjoy growing demand as more and more people in society as a whole have to spend less and less time on paid work. We are rightly standing at the gateway to paradisiacal conditions, apart from the fact that employees in this tertiary sector can only be remunerated at a very low level, as their work is beyond the rationality of purpose. In other words, an increase in their effectiveness can either not be measured or can only be achieved by investing more time. Paradoxically, employees in the tertiary sector, including those in the leisure sector, will have the least time for leisure activities, as they have to work the most to earn a living due to their low wage level.

Aesthetic production also faces new challenges here, in the visual arts, literature, music, theater, new media, ... ... whose commissions will primarily come from the educational and wealthy elites, as the directive and management competence of politics and the state, and thus also of cultural policy, which attempts to achieve a balance of interests for all, will be pushed back further, or voluntarily withdrawn, as a streamlining of the state, a high cost-benefit efficiency invokes the very rationality according to whose primacy even the most potent taxpayers act and who try to keep their tax burden low out of their own interest. The state will not be able to escape this influence and pressure in the long term.

Capitalism is the culmination, the perfection to a certain extent, of the Enlightenment. The basis for its development was a humanity liberated from all social institutions, ultimately the emancipated, self-confident individual, unrestricted by the ethical rules of the estates, the church or other moral institutions, and now, ultimately, the institution of the family. A society of singles has the highest mobility and willingness to consume. The design and staging of an individuality that is as conspicuous as possible as a social guiding principle feeds an entire fashion and design industry, and it is good that it does so, because otherwise there would be a few million more unemployed.

Uli Aumüller: Why is capitalism destroying everything? Because it actually produces an incredible amount. So it's becoming more and more productive, it's becoming more and more international by rationalizing the whole world, ...
Alexander Schuller: Yes, it destroys the old, it cleans up...
U: It requires tremendous discipline from the people who work in this system, among others, it's a philosophy of the early birds, if you like. But on the other hand, why does it ruin everything?
S: Yes, it is destroying it because there is no other force that is as innovative as capitalism, it is so innovative because it has no ideology. It doesn't care about anything. It is only concerned with maximizing profit and subjects everything to this rationality. Everything such as human values or solidarity or culture is irrelevant. In this respect, he is extremely innovative on the one hand and extremely destructive on the other. It is clearing away everything old. Faster and faster. The process is running faster and faster. You can see that in the development of the media and technology landscape worldwide, so Bill Gates is a metaphor for this process. He is also a metaphor for other people, but that's what he is for me too. He also symbolizes this tremendous speed. 20 years ago, you know what computers could do then, what they can do now. And what it has changed in terms of quality. Every car, every bank, every tourist industry can't do without this technology. And all the old structures are gone. I'll give you just one example that I like:
There is now a market in America where you can say: I want to buy a sperm and these are the characteristics: he has to be this big, he has to have this skin color, he has to have this IQ, he has to have this physical performance, I want a sperm from him. So it will become a market product. And despite my full emotional solidarity, I think the attempts to stop this are nonsense, because it's not working at all. If there is something on the market that allows freedom of choice, then this freedom of choice will prevail. Traditionally, in normal families, the woman got the sperm from the man, her husband, and that was that. No decisions were made there either. And if the sperm was any good, fine, and if it wasn't any good, too bad. So, then it was just a bad bangertz. If it's a beautiful child, everyone is happy. Now you can say, well, take it easy. Why? My husband is a bit small, perhaps not exactly beautiful, I love him, but: I want my child to be more beautiful! I want a different sperm because my husband is dark, I want to have a blond child. But what that means for the institution of marriage, and I don't want to be so pessimistic about it, you can think of it.
U: And if the egg is fertilized, then after a while you look to see whether you really want to have the child that has been created.
S: That's also done then. And if it doesn't work out, there are already lawsuits in America where the sperm bank is held liable. There have been cases of confusion.
U: Lawyers have discovered another field of activity.
S: There was a case some time ago where a woman, it was a Jewish lawyer's family in New York who were very well known, and they bought some sperm and it turned out that they had mixed it up in the lab. And it was definitely a Negro child. What do you do now? They didn't want to have the Negro child. But they're not allowed to say that because they're liberal New York Jews and of course have nothing against Negroes. But they didn't want to have a Negro child. Now they got into hot water, hot water in Germany, because they said they didn't want that. Then all the Negroes came marching up and said, what are you, anti-Semites, no, anti-Negroes or something, why don't you want the child, do you have something against black people? I'm only telling this somewhat stupid story because it illustrates that freedom of choice creates new conflicts for which there are no institutional precautions, and none will exist according to my prognosis, because these developments are happening so quickly. Because what were institutions, namely congealed history, cannot develop at all, but that there will really be a hic et nunc culture, in which decisions have to be made in the moment and here, so to speak, and there will be no cultural guidelines.
(Prof. Alexander Schuller, Professor of Sociology at the FU Berlin).

Only a completely liberated humanity creates the prerequisites for the capitalist rationalization process, also in the human being itself, in its innermost, most intrinsic part, i.e. the genetic code that it passes on to its descendants, its children. But here, too, the logic of efficiency forces every participant in the free labor market to make a series of decisions. A number of American companies demand a genetic fingerprint before hiring new employees: not only should it be ruled out that a new employee has AIDS or another epidemic disease that could impose high social costs on the company, but the occurrence of possible hereditary diseases should also be ruled out before employment: a genetic tendency to alcoholism, to violence, to heart attacks. Alcohol-dependent employees damage the company's efficiency and reduce its chances in global competition.

So what could be more obvious for a responsible parent than to have their own genetic information tested before producing offspring and - as soon as this becomes technically possible - to cleanse it of carrier sequences of potential hereditary diseases. Until then, the purchase of medically flawless genomes is recommended. In this way, it would also be possible to manipulate the hair color, physique, intelligence and so on of one's own children.

Das kapitalistische Zweckrational hat also die Gesellschaften, die es bislang erreicht hat und in denen er zur Blüte gekommen ist, nicht nur von einer Fülle menschenunwürdiger Arbeit befreit, stupide monotone Arbeiten auf dem Feld oder am Fließband und hat für eine dramatische Vermehrung der gesamtgesellschaftlichen Freizeiten gesorgt, von denen noch vor 100 Jahren niemand zu träumen wagte, in einem neuen Sprung biotechnischer Machbarkeit reinigt es die Menschheit von vielen vermeidbaren erblichen Krankheiten. Unsere Kinder und Kindeskinder werden also in Zukunft nicht nur noch weniger arbeiten müssen, sondern sie werden auch schöner und gesünder sein als wir. Bedingung für diese Entwicklung ist, daß die Teilnehmer des freien Marktes sich zur Analyse ihres eigenen genetischen Potential entschließen und dieses gegebenenfalls nach ihren eigenen Wünschen und Vorstellungen korrigieren, um die Marktchancen und Marktgängigkeit ihrer eigenen Nachkommenschaft zu verbessern. Wie die Kinder der Zukunft aussehen werden, was sie können oder nicht können, liegt also nicht mehr im schicksalhaften Zufall einer “analogen” Befruchtung, sondern ist der freien Entscheidung der Eltern überlassen, die aber auch vor dem Zwang einer Entscheidung gestellt sind. Sie werden vor die Frage gestellt sein: Überlasse ich die Eigenschaften meines Kindes dem Zufall, oder soll es blond oder braun oder schwarz sein. Dumm oder klug, mathematisch oder handwerklich begabt.

Claus Koch: The new basic innovations that we are already in the midst of are taking place in the bioindustry and the healthcare industry, and everything that goes with it, because we have already practically entered an era of a new positive eugenics that reaches so deeply into society, because it forces all individuals to know what they can know about themselves with the help of predictive medicine. That will be enormous. With every new gene that is discovered, so to speak. But it's not just the genome project, it also concerns the compulsion to know and the compulsion for individuals to make decisions, which is increasing. So the right not to know is a conservative hope, even if it comes from the left, and if you look at the investments of the pharmaceutical industry and the bio-industry, especially the testing industry - and in America we are already in the middle of it - this is the next big innovation push there. I would say that capitalism is partly denouncing and attacking itself, because it is also a pressure to emancipate people.People will not become less free with the ability to observe themselves and expose themselves to therapies, or to want them, because if you can identify hereditary diseases, behaviors that are inherited but related to other things, can control them yourself, as a market individual, not forced by the state, then it is progress for the individuals, from which they can hope to derive pleasure.
One could perhaps come up with the more sensible idea of saying that this idea of producing one's offspring from one's own genes in order to have an identity in the survival of the children is actually from yesterday, it comes from an archaic time that has continued to have an effect into the industrial age, this idea of the causality of production, man as homo faber of his children, we can, if we already believe that we want to have a family, we can also get our children in another way. In fact, this has already been introduced with the whole repetition medicine, i.e. in the technical production of children who no longer happen through procreation in the classical sense and who also escape the necessity of chance to some extent, so to speak, but who can be consciously produced, that is, the further the genome analysis progresses and the big program is completed in 5 years or 7 years, the greater the possibilities of choice and decision. To the point of agonizing compulsion, you have to see that too. Choice is not a pleasure, or having to choose when you know too much about yourself.

And this offers, if you speculate further, two directions of behavior. One can be a hard Darwinian one, but the other can also be a society that treats each other empathetically, because no one is really healthy, so to speak, and the rich gene owners can no longer be legitimately separated from the poor or the poorly equipped. If one imagines, which is possible on paper, that there are those with a rich untouched genome, for which they can do nothing at all, and there are the poorly endowed, one can of course also draw the barbaric conclusion. The Americans are in a position today where they would behave like this with their belief in logistical competition, but the Americans can still learn a lot. It is unimaginable for us, but we have to think in this perspective in the meantime, and of course this creates situations of upheaval ...
It naturally creates new situations of which we have no idea. At the same time, it is linked to a surge of economic interests, of investments, and if a merger of these pharmaceutical giants is causing such a stir in the entire pharmaceutical industry, driving up shares since the day before yesterday, then this is already partly involved...
Claus Koch, publicist

When shaping these perspectives, I think we have to bear in mind that - as already mentioned - capitalism, as a genuine child of the Enlightenment, set out to expose the promises of paradise and salvation made by religious, especially Christian, institutions as what they are and were, fantastic myths that one may or may not want to believe, but in any case they have no rational basis. Instead, a project was launched which assumed that a social and economic order based on the principles of reason and efficiency would be able to come close to fulfilling this paradisiacal promise in this world.

The adoption of precisely this originally Christian vision of a fulfilled and happy end state, for which one saves and invests, towards which one works, if not for one's own good, then at least for the good of children and children who should have it better, more beautiful, faster than we do, partly explains the immense penetrating power of capitalist thinking, the quasi-prophetic visionary devotion of its outstanding representatives, whom I believe in their faith to make humanity happy with their actions. In my opinion, the enthusiasm of the Internet apologists, whose display of energy resembles a crusader campaign, can only be understood against this background. (Here as there, it was and is simultaneously about tangible economic interests, but the thesis is that both - quasi-religious substructure and economic rationality - are identical, emerged from each other and support each other. It is absolutely impossible to imagine one separate from the other).

Niels Werber: The idea is to rely unrestrainedly on technical progress and to believe - as prostheses have already become a matter of course today, and as people are slowly beginning to help the deaf or blind with implants. There are experiments at MIT - that the next technical revolution will be the creation of a kind of cyborg, the Robocop model, and the next step would then be to do away with the body altogether, to capture consciousness in a kind of matrix (science fiction films are full of this, William Gibson, the inventor of the word cyber-space, described it in his novels), that rich people will have their consciousness implemented in a computer at enormous technical expense and become immortal, so to speak. And that has strong religious overtones. The desire is immortality, the desire is to leave the body. All of this is very Christian. However, the medium is not redemption in the Last Judgement, but redemption is the technology that brings this about. And that is why there is also the vision of the final frontier that we are now crossing with cyberspace, i.e. the frontier that we are crossing is not just a spatial frontier, it is the body. The body is left behind as annoying ballast and only then does cyberspace take on its true meaning. That's the vision. And then there is, so to speak, a highly religious idea of a kind of super-intelligence that is then realized in this medium, that the consciousnesses that have completely entered cyberspace, so to speak, couple to form a kind of new super-intelligence and this super-intelligence becomes the interlocutor for God...
Aumüller: Or is God
Werber: Yes, there are several variants of this story. But one variant is that the technical development is, so to speak, the executor of creation, and that the whole creation has the meaning that God wants to have an interlocutor equal to him, and that these consciousnesses merged in cyberspace merge into a globe that has become conscious, the fiber optic cables are the nerve cords and the computers are neuronal points. And then there is a process of becoming conscious and that is then the interlocutor for God: it is called the No¬sphere.
Niels Werber, research assistant at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Bochum

Is there a form of aesthetic production - cinema, literature, music - that stands in the way of the developments outlined here? Apart from the question of the possible efficiency of an objection or an aesthetically formulated and organized opposition - I have already indicated above that I consider these processes to be unstoppable and irreversible - the question of whether such an opposition is desirable at all needs to be clarified. Against what and for what should opposition be organized? Does anyone know? Against the so-called dangerous technologies that are not entirely transparent or proven, i.e. nuclear power plants, biotechnology, Star Wars, yes, but not against the automobile and the Internet? Does such opposition interest anyone at all? Certainly, in the free market economy there is a group of buyers for every opinion, who put together their own package of conscience from this or that source, unknot it and put it together again. It cannot be the task of art to illustrate opinions.

This is why the path that Hanns Eisler tried to take, the early Eisler of the 20s and 30s, is blocked. There is no longer an industrial proletariat on whose shoulders Eisler hallucinated a dawning golden age. The work of these workers has been rationalized or relocated abroad, temporarily, as long as wage costs remain low overseas or elsewhere. If they rise, only machines produce there too.

Capitalist societies are so individualized and atomized that solidarity for whatever can only be enforced either in the short term, in the form of a fashion, or by force. Neither alternative seems very promising.


Paradoxically, the reconstitution of communal forms of living is currently being discussed among the American educated and wealthy elites and is already being practiced to some extent. High-earning Internet workers have discovered that it is much more pleasant to live and work in a peaceful, village-like atmosphere where everyone knows everyone else and helps out when needed. So communitarian instant villages were founded, shielded from the outside world, shielded from the reality of the average. The children can play in the street, there are no racial conflicts in the school classes, no violence on television. A drawing program paints a blue sky in the clouds every day.

What this communitarian approach (a communism for the rich, so to speak) opposes to radical capitalism is the attempt to establish something like a binding ethical and moral value system in these communities, associations of voluntary individuals: The redefinition of gender roles, the family, the village - much of what there is to read about this seems inspired by the pioneering spirit of Western films.

I have my doubts as to whether this will be sustainable in the long term or whether it will suffer the same fate as Commune 1. Either way, this model is only suitable for a small, select group of well-heeled and well-educated elites who come together on the basis of a number of common (rational) interests. This does not change anything about the traction and speed of the developments mentioned.

What remains for art and music is perhaps the articulation of fear or anger - or, as has been practiced extensively since Scesli and the late Nono at the latest, artistic silence, so to speak. Silence for lack of alternatives, because if you have nothing to say, it is better to remain silent. Then there is the silence that creates space for the perception of something that is still there beyond this economic hustle and bustle: the beauty, the dignity of creation, which is simply there in itself, for the purpose of no one. Humility.