In the big scheme of life.....civilization is often handed a German who able to think outside of the box, and challenges established standards.
Wernher von Braun, Einstein, Max Planck, Alexander von Humbolt, the Brothers Grimm and so on. There are probably a thousand guys who refused to accept things as they are, and went on bigger and bolder things in life.
The guy I tend to admire is Martin Luther. As a young kid, he's bought into the Catholic Church and all of it's dynamics. By 1503, he's deep into the Catholic ideology and progressing toward the simple world of being a priest.
At some point, questions arise. There are various pieces and parts to the Catholic Church which don't make much sense. The more questions that Luther asks.....the less that reason and understanding work.
At the age of thirty-four....the topic of Catholic Indulgences come up. The simplest explanation is that you've sinned an awful lot in life, and if you just had this great get-out-of-hell stamped letter (an indulgence).....then you'd be safe and be allowed into heaven. Naturally, it costs money and the money would go into a pot which the Catholics would use to build more temples, etc. It was a five-star gimmick.
Martin Luther looked at the idea of Catholic Indulgences. Basically.....if you bought one on a Monday, then by Tuesday night....if you broke some rule.....the Indulgence would not cover that new sin and you were back to condemned hell unless you bought a new one. How you'd take this with you as you died.....probably was also a issue.
So Luther asked logical questions that only led onto the fact that the Catholic Church was all screwed up and very unethical. It didn't take a rocket scientist but you needed to be clever enough to ask more questions.
I noticed today some German news item. There was this public school which had decided as a field trip situation.....they'd take a hundred of the kids (considered bright and likely to be heading onto college within a year or two)....and make them into refugees for a day.
You can sense some valuable lesson in life being taught in this deal.
Each kid is given some fictional ID, and told to be such-and-such refugee for the morning. They are taken to some island for 'affected people', and play out the role of refugee. After two hours of role play, the teaches lead the kids off for integration and to be part of German society.
I was amused by the gimmick. It works well and gives the one side of this story in some detail.
Naturally, if there were a Martin Luther in the group....he would have stopped the teachers at some point and asked....why would we not provide airplane tickets and just transport the people into Germany? Why would we not hand these people empty houses which sit in abundance in thousands of rural communities of Germany? Why would we not go and find the chief cause for these people being harmed and stop ISIS? Why is there any need to document people or deny people entry? Why are we paying Turkey to take back refugees? Why are refugees from various lands each treated differently?
This Martin Luther-like character in 2016.....would have been hustled by the teaches to some containment area and told to simply play the role play game.....don't ask questions.
The thing is, we don't really need a thousand Martin Luthers, or a hundred, or even ten.....we just need one Martin Luther-like character to stand up and start asking responsible people simple questions. When they can't answer them, or won't answer them....then we kinda know just how screwed up things have become.
Will the teachers do some role play episode now with a ultra-harsh extremist religious group? No....I kinda doubt that.
Will the teachers lead a role play exercise where some political figure has to admit that there really isn't enough affordable housing, or jobs....for the new immigrant, and then explain to the rest of the role-players why they just need to keep playing the exercise and pretend it'll all be good in the end?
Will the teachers run a role play episode where old DDR is invented and nifty and wonderful socialism was all the craze for forty years? Well.....no.....I doubt that too.
Will the teachers run some role play over Jews and Palestinians? Well...no, that would invite questions as well.
I came across recently a comment by a Chinese businessman which I admired.....which came down to his observation that education was worthless....first you learn, then you forget. He has a point....curiosity in life leads onto asking questions and looking for answers to improve your simple understanding of logic and reasoning.
Germany goes through an enormous reshuffling of civilization after Martin Luther challenges the Catholic Church, and opens up the possibility of some saintly organization being corrupted. The Thirty Years War? Oddly enough......engineered by Luther's questions. The new era in the 1700s that opened up? Mostly due to some pointed questions by Martin Luther.
German is layered over and over.....by Luther, Einstein, the Brothers Grimm, and a hundred other clever guys who refused to accept the given solution or answer. One guy....asking questions....is all it takes.
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