Frank Diebel - In Private
This is my private website. Here I introduce myself as a historian, economist and programmer and at irregular intervals also look at current events with the optimistic view of a layperson on our past and future history, ethics and technological progress. Just to start with: I am a family man, non-denominational, convinced European, I am firmly rooted in the republic and democracy. I am a friend of private space travel, convinced of the advantages of globalization, free trade and the social market economy, and I take the position that the state is committed to the principle of technology neutrality. But I also note that all of these positions are being questioned with increasing force in public discourse.
Fear of climate change, a noticeable anger over growing socio-economic inequality and the fear of social decline as a result of technological change dominate the political debates, while at the same time new utopian theories are emerging, which often link their promises with demands for restrictions on individual freedoms. I get the impression that people like to do business again with fear. Therefore, starting from my position and starting from this place, I would like to occasionally argue publicly about the above topics, in the sense of "think sensibly about something", and from today I would like to participate in the social debate....
We have to choose freedom again
In the past 30 years, Germans have made it a habit, in voluntary self-flagellation (initially barely perceptible, but in the course of the years in ever larger steps), to elect people to political offices that officially (not in secret) aim to make the life of their citizens more expensive, harder and more laborious, thus to complain that the entire social life has become more and more complicated and alien to its people.
For almost my entire adult life I have supported parties like the Greens and the Social Democrats as well as their top officials. I was a member of the Greens from 1998 to 2006 and a member of the SPD from 2009 to 2015. I have therefore at least indirectly made myself complicit in an increasing turn-away from belief in the reason of the individual and a growing turn towards a government piety in Germany that decapitates the individual.
I would therefore like to justify why I left these parties and why I no longer support politicians or movements that obviously continue to aim to make people's lives more difficult, actively or passively, to make life more expensive and with to provision of increasing restrictions....
The Great Alienation: Starting Point of my Thinking
People who historically, culturally, socially, politically, economically, religiously and also militarily belong to "Western civilization" are currently in a phase of increasing alienation, not only from their democratic institutions, by which they are still supported, but also from its history, its religion, its morality and its basic principles. This is a very dangerous identity crisis, a depression into which the people of Western societies maneuver themselves as a collective. But they have to find a way out of this crisis if they don't want to fail as a whole, even as a civilization, for good. Here I will very briefly outline the starting point of my search for answers to this present-day crisis of alienation.