Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). One might expect that a society in which half of young people have passed their A-levels would be more capable of critical thinking and not easily taken in. The reality, however, is quite the opposite. On the contrary, too many people have been conditioned to believe everything.
One of the most striking phenomena of recent years is the extreme susceptibility to manipulation of certain groups within the population. There are certainly many factors at play here – for instance, the social groups that are particularly susceptible are largely the same as those that have historically been so. But unlike other periods of intense political manipulation, the volume of freely available information is enormous, despite all attempts to control and censor the internet.
At the same time, judging by school-leaving qualifications, the level of education among the population is higher than ever. Even taking into account a constant fear of social decline (which, since the introduction of Hartz IV in 2005, has likely become so taken for granted that it is scarcely noticed consciously), and despite all the punitive measures such as debanking etc. – the question remains as to why even the most stupid and illogical propaganda is still accepted.
Certainly, the now ritualised demand for gestures of submission also plays a role. Submission can only be evoked by an illogical narrative, and submission was, after all, a core component of the whole training act known as Corona. And yet, even if one takes into account how much people try to avoid cognitive dissonance – that feeling that something doesn’t add up, a sort of mental screech – it’s still far too easy.
And it’s not as if geopolitics were the only field in which very peculiar things are believed. If, for example, people actively entertain the idea of supplying major cities by cargo bike – that fails mathematically, and it doesn’t involve complicated formulas.
One would assume that anyone reading such a statement could make the mental leap needed to verify it. Even if you take just a single lorry delivering to a supermarket as a basis, the distance to the distribution centre and then the resulting working hours – the result quickly makes it clear that this idea won’t work. Not even with conscripted asylum seekers as rickshaw pullers, where even the minimum wage is saved.
Every tonne of weight that a lorry carries translates into ten cargo bikes. Which, moreover, take longer to cover the distance due to their lower speed, especially when fully loaded. And that’s not even mentioning downhill stretches, which do exist after all; just think of Stuttgart or Wuppertal …
Well, in a few years’ time, all this could be done by robots, so there would be no need for bicycles either, provided, of course, there is enough energy to power these robots, but that naturally leads straight to the next problem: the lack of sunlight at night.
What characterises this way of thinking, which gives rise to such plans, is a lack of connection between different areas. And this is not an unusual phenomenon. When representatives of the federal government react to the massive rise in petrol prices by remarking that people should simply drive less, it clearly shows that logistics does not feature in their thinking. Or the famous just-in-time production. Or the inflation that is spreading from fuel prices to virtually all goods. Admittedly, only in terms of the percentage that transport costs account for in the price of goods, but still …
It is a way of thinking that is neatly divided into disciplines with no connection to one another; one that no longer establishes any link between cause and effect. In theory, this should not happen at all. In theory, a higher level of education ought to lead to the recognition of interconnections and an understanding of the potential consequences of actions. In practice, however, recent years – particularly in the case of the sanctions against Russia – have demonstrated that the simplest consequences are neither recognised nor considered. Take, for instance, the collapse of European artificial fertiliser production in 2022.
The answer to this puzzle may lie in changes to the education system; which, of course, faces the challenge of constantly integrating new developments and insights; but which, in Germany, has responded to this in a very specific way that could trigger all these phenomena. The simple term for this is ‘bulimic learning’.
Everyone is probably familiar with the term. It refers to a method of knowledge transfer in which specific things are learnt in separate, isolated sections; once they have been tested, they can be forgotten again – and are forgotten. This forgetting has a simple basis: the complete lack of context. This fell victim to the additional volume.
I once saw a particularly striking example with the daughter of an acquaintance who was taking her A-levels in Brandenburg. She had been given a text with the task of explaining why the position expressed in the text was not democratic. So ultimately, it was a search for keywords. The text was an excerpt from a speech by Rosa Luxemburg in early January 1919, shortly before her assassination. However, not only was there no information about who Rosa Luxemburg actually was, but the 1918 revolution had not been covered either, let alone who was fighting against whom and why.
What made this task particularly absurd was that it originated from a history lesson, and by no means served to open up this whole context and link all the missing details to it, but rather was intended to deal with the entire topic, as it were. Tick the box next to Luxemburg, slap on the convenient label, and move on.
No understanding remains from this. Everything that enables understanding is denied. What remains is an empty formula (“Rosa Luxemburg was not a democrat”, derived from ten lines) that can be tested. Conveyed in a way that guarantees no connection is made.
And that is fatal. For human memory is not a data-processing machine, but, like so much that defines humanity, the result of social processes. Memory is what enables a group to develop coherence. By ensuring that reactions to one another are determined not only by the moment, but by a shared history. Memory demands a story, a context of meaning, even where none exists. Research into learning techniques shows that connections make it easier to remember things, just as emotions linked to information help us integrate it better. And last but not least: it is the act of passing on information that anchors it most effectively.
Memory cannot be separated from communication and social life, and all knowledge needs a ‘why’. Even in my school days, we spent years on triangles and had to recite when two angles are identical or what the ratio of side lengths is, but no one ever even mentioned that all this forms the basis of cartography. Land surveying. But if one considers the above example with Rosa Luxemburg, it is far worse today.
When professors today complain that their students are not even prepared to read a single book, that is the direct consequence of this. For what students were drilled in throughout their school years is, at best, the abstract, the brief summary. Which is called up, ticked off and forgotten again. What this shapes is a way of dealing with information that completely ignores context and is alien to any subtlety. This ultimately leads to the ‘classic’ way of absorbing information – by reading a book – seeming superfluous, because the disconnected details can be retrieved from the internet at any time.
Of course, this is an illusion, for even if information is available far more quickly and in far greater quantities than was previously the case (and a single internet search can, when calculated backwards, easily equate to several days in the library) – the crucial key remains asking the right questions. But this can only be learnt through context, for the intuition that such connections might exist is the first prerequisite for it.
But what happens when, over a total of eight or nine years, one is trained to take in and regurgitate only fragments, without embedding them in a context? Long before the more or less randomly recalled fragments of information, something quite different is burned into the mind: that authorities are to be believed.
If the entire history of the November Revolution had revolved around this passage by Rosa Luxemburg – from the civilisational rupture of the First World War through the famine in the hinterland, the military dictatorship that actually ruled, the sailors’ revolt, perhaps even the willingness of the majority Social Democrats to strike a compromise with the old regime – then this would certainly not have yielded a uniform, desired answer, but rather many different positions on this historical phase. These would still not have been free from a limiting selection, and the school’s purpose of reproducing the existing society will never disappear, but the result would have been a conviction arrived at through one’s own efforts, which the recipients of this education would certainly have remembered better than the tick next to ‘Rosa Luxemburg – not democratic’.
Instead, the crucial lesson is that what is demanded is true. Nothing needs to be proven. Criticism is not on the agenda. If, under these circumstances, something resembling critical thinking does emerge, it is a happy coincidence. Coupled with the German school system’s rigorous selection mechanism—which forces even the brightest pupils to choose between expressing what they believe to be true and getting a good mark—this results in a social drill that, on the one hand, prevents an independent pursuit of knowledge (for the rewarding “Eureka!” is only experienced in the context of connections) and, on the other, establishes a reflex to accept unquestioningly whatever the teacher—or later, the state—explains.
Contradictions go unnoticed simply because the fundamental need for context is so suppressed that no coherent narrative can emerge from the individual pieces of information. Yesterday’s narrative has nothing to do with today’s, because it has already been erased and the truth-creating authority has replaced it with a new one.
Yes, this is reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania”, only the pace is much faster. After all, it worked to convince large sections of the German public, for example, of the story of Navalny’s poisoning, even though three different versions were presented as the truth over the course of a few weeks, and the originally poisoned tea turned into a bottle of water and, in the end, even a pair of underpants.
The normal reaction to such inconsistencies would be to reject the whole story by the third version at the latest. But what happens when the ‘bulimia drill’ dominates thought and memory? The contradictions are no longer even noticed, because, on the one hand, no overarching narrative is being created any more, and on the other, belief in authority has been so ingrained that it takes control first and foremost, even in the event of a conflict.
The misfortune of this is repressed, because that too has been practised thoroughly from an early age. For in reality, this drumming in of fragments is a constant disappointment, because the narrative upon which our social being depends is denied. Just like the joy of insight. And that completes the mechanism – for the moment when the contradiction or even the unbearable nature of what is demanded almost rises to the surface not only triggers cognitive dissonance, but also opens the door to this disappointment, to the unhappiness that this drill leaves in its wake. So there is not only the threat of having to admit to an error, but at the same time the repressed pain of a deep frustration of the desire for knowledge. This results in an almost complete intellectual prison.
Is this an oversight or intentional? Like so much else, this will only become clear in historical retrospect. But the many parties involved in this process, from the drafting of the curricula to their implementation in schools, suggest a process that is, at best, only half-conscious. Perhaps this is exacerbated by the fact that migration was met with increased pressure to conform. For society, at any rate, the result is devastating, for the handling of the Covid-19 blunders shows that neither a reckoning nor, certainly, reconciliation is possible. It actually sounds absurd, given that earlier generations had quite different skeletons in their cupboards – but the willingness to engage in self-criticism, the ability to abandon a misguided path, has probably rarely been as low as it is now.
