IT'S ALL ABOUT UNICORNS

 Illustration: Anne Geßner I often loved to walk on the green meadows, near the forest. Above all, however, I enjoyed the greatest natural spectacle of the mating season in the early morning hours. The ritual of the fight between two male deer when they become adults. Biologists call it comment fighting. With their antlers the big deers demonstrated their supremacy for the future offspring. There, hidden among the bushes and shrubs, I observed a fight between rivals that could continue for hours. When I saw them facing each other, I thought they might kill each other. Their antlers bumped into each other and produced a sound that was as unusal as it was familiar. At some point I had the idea to provoke the separation of the fighters by coming out of hiding. But soon I realised however, that the deer only measured their strength within a biological ritual. Until then I tought rituals are something cultural. But such a ritual was only an instinctive behaviour of species. After wa...

  Illustration: Anne Geßner Have you ever heard of energy vortices? Many people claim that such places exist on Earth and are considered to be magical places where people can not only capture the present energy, but also use it to empower their faculties, heal illnesses and open up to other realms of existence. One aspect of the energy vortices that I do not fully understand, or at least find very difficult to believe, is the concept of the polarity of energy that becomes manifest in such places.   In my opinion, those who claim the existence of these invisible energetic vortices, want to give it a scientific and physical appearance since there are different physical manifestations where energy divergence occurs. For instance, in the magnetism there is always a positiv and negative pole. Equally, such an energetic difference can been seen in the electricity.  In addition, there is another argument from the hermetic tradition which is the law of polarity contained in...

  Illustration: Anne Geßner  As I was walking through the streets of a German city, I suddenly noticed a surprising scene: a woman in her forties was lying on the ground next to the entrance to an underground station. What caught my attention was that nobody bothered to help her. No one dared to look at her, it seemed as if everyone was in a hurry. Suddenly I heard voices whispering: "I am sure she is an alcoholic. I think she is a drug addict. If she is so, it's because she deserves it." Those who went for a walk or shopping tried to ignore her by looking at their mobile phones or the shop windows. The people who passed her gave themselves excuses to avoid feeling guilty. After seeing people ignore her and leave her to her fate, I understood Rousseau's words very well. I wondered when society and its citizens had forgotten that first instinct that had brought them to the highest point of evolution. Instead of listening to his natural inclination to help his fellow hu...

Illustration: Anne Geßner     According to Rousseau, the human being is good, naive and close to nature. His universally developed body allows him a high degree of adaptability. Surely, human sensorial performance is not as highly specialized in habitats as it is the case with other animal species. However, it can cope with its environment and can therefore satisfy its basic needs. As soon as hunger and thirst have been satisfied, he rests. The human being is satisfied with it, without desire and free.  Rousseau's view of humanity is partly in contrast to the current conception of the human being, which says that humans, due to their cultural heritage and level of intelligence, are a special kind of animal that stands its ground against nature. He sees himself as the crowning glory of creation and at the same time separated from it. In this case, nature is seen as a reservoir of his desires. Of course, according to Rousseau, people do not have a perfect life in paradise. ...

Illustration: Anne Geßner  What is in our control?  Power is not only an expression of aggression or evil, but also of law, power and authority. According to Epictetus there are two types of power. The inner and outer form. The first means an ability of the human being to shape his life independently of other factors. This ability could today be called the own will. In contrast, external power is everything exoteric, i.e. things that people cannot control through their will. People can suppress their instincts, positively influence their opinions and attitudes. These human actions, as the German word "Handlung" indicates, show us that they are in our hands or in our power. However, other human products or developments are not in our power, such as a house, a reputation or even our own body. For example, the house is expropriated by the state, the doctor completely loses his reputation due to a mistake during surgery and a virus makes the person sick. All these events occur ou...

  Illustration: Anne Geßner     According to the stoic conception, the human being is capable, not only of recognizing the divine world order through reason, but also aligning their actions to it. For stoics, it is good to live in conformity with destiny or nature, through which the world order can be seen. Therefore, the wise man must learn  to control his emotions in a detached way, in order to face the inevitability of his destiny like illness and death. This approach has been used until today as a relevant moral ideal through many Western ethical theories and studies.    There are things in our power and others which we can not control. In our power are things like opinions, instincts and aversion, simply put: everything which is our own work. On the contrary, there are things beyond our power like our body, possesions, prestige and social position, basically: everything which is not our own work. What is in our authority to control, can be prevented by...

   Illustration by Anne Geßner    As always, in August it was very warm. The only place where you could tolerate the heat, was at the seaside. There, between the dunes I felt the breeze touching my skin gently while I could hear voices of children playing on the beach. For days, I kept my mind busy asking myself what makes life a good one. But I wasn't able to find a satisfactory answer, so  I dediced to enjoy the rest of the day doing nothing but having a refreshment at the seafront. Suddently, something caught my attention when I saw the children building sand castles. The way they were playing, made me understand in the blink of an eye, what at first true happiness means. I could see how absorbed they were, ignoring time and surroundings. Thoughts about school didn't come up at that time. Only the sand castles mattered to them. Aristotle suggests that happiness at first can mean different things. To sick people, happiness means health, for poor people, wealth...

  The sun allows all visible things to flourish without becoming part of it. What does this statement mean? According to Plato the real nature of the existence is Eidos, viz. Idea while the material world is the latest and poorest expression of being. The universe is plenty of ideas, each of one is unique, eternal, unalterable and complete. All of them are made of spirit. As a result we can't accept the possibility of evil.  The concept of evil means not only a bad and violent behaviour aiming to destroy life in general but also corruption, decay and finally death. This general understanding of evil contradicts the platonic universe and therefore Platon rejects evil as an idea within the world of ideas. First, ideas are eternal. Assuming that evil exists means also that ideas could decay. Secondly the meaning of evil could imply that ideas participate in nature which is inconsistent with his theory of archetypes. According to Plato although nature can participate in the world ...

Why does the accused go unpunished when the crime was committed under the influence of drugs, alcohol or a schizophrenic attack?  Generally speaking, both moral philosophy and criminal law accept the idea that a subject who commits a crime under such circumstances, has lost his mind. Expressions like being out of your head, losing your mind, or not knowing who you were, show clear examples of how to deny someone's guilt and consequently responsibility for their actions. In moral philosophy and law it is also assumed that a subject takes responsibility for his actions and therefore for his consequences, as long as he admits to being the author and cause of them. Moreover, the belief that we can choose our lives and decide on our actions makes us moral subjects. In Walden Two Skinner claims that human beings do not have a free will just because they feel one. However, this statement is not harmless but is largely a provocation as it compromises the entire institutional buildin...

In his novel Futurum II, Skinner shows an advanced and future society that seems to have found a solution to all social problems. It is a scientific approach to shaping human behavior. These psychologists enjoy a very good reputation among scientific circles because they have found the key to modifying behaviors whose ethical criteria they have previously planned and chosen. With this social and engineering technology, behaviorists plan to increase the happiness of society. They believe that human behavior is a bundle of environmental reactions, either because of their presence or their lack that a person shows in connection with their contextual or environmental variables. Consequently, the concept of free will is an illusion. In fact, for this school, the behavior people show is a consequence of their surrounding and learning stories based on the principle of reinforcement. If the consequences of the actions are bad, then there is a high probability that they will end. However, i...

According to Huxley individuals are primarily determined by genetics and genetic manipulation. For Skinner, the behaviour is determined by the manipulation of the environmental variables. But for Huxley, legal drugs are the only way to provide a way out of the conflict. According to Skinner, there is no conflict between the way citizens think and act, as they are convinced that the life they lead is the best, given the possibilities available. A perfect society is achieved by regulating the genetic material and planning jobs according to their genetic abilities. However, according to Skinner, a harmonious society is achieved through the complete regulation of the external factors that cause a particular behavior. With this in mind human actions are highly predictable and therefore controllable. Huxley's utopia is all about the happiness of the citizens. As long as citizens live happily, they will avoid confrontation and war. Nevertheless, Skinner's utopia tries to persuade...

Self-control, childhood and lifestyle A child of seven years old sits at the piano seven hours a week. After seven years he plays Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 7. What does this remarkable achievement have to do with self-control?  It is generally understood to be the ability to suppress the primary instincts, desires and inclinations through a technique in order to achieve a certain mental or physical performance. The virtue of playing the piano is the reward for a long wait, which is often painful, since waiting is contrary to the inclination of the child's will. Often self-control involves renouncing short-term pleasures. This is then a delay of the present pleasure, which the child sometimes interprets as a punishment, especially with negative reinforcement. The result of enjoying a later and long-term pleasure is a rational motive, which can be incomprehensible to children and contrary to nature. The will of the child tries to satisfy its own wishes here and now. The ...

Here is my attempted English back-translation of an excerpt from the 1948 novel "Walden Two" by B. F. Skinner published by Rowohlt in 1985.     The discomfort we systematically create is far milder than the ordinary discomfort we seek to avoid. The discomfort that a well-trained child experiences even during the height of his ethical training is ridiculously trivial. First of all, we don't want to punish children. Neither we don't use something unpleasant to suppress or eradicate undesirable behaviours. Instead, it is prefer to guide the child. Does he behave as we desire, then we provide him something he likes or we remove a situation he doesn't like. As a result we increase the probability that the child behaves as we expect. Now we know how the positive reinforcement works. We can now proceed with clear intent and long-term goals with our scientific approach to modify behaviours. We can exercise a kind of control where the supervised feel free although ...

Time As a Condition Sine Quanon In the wintertime I usually go for a walk in the forest. I like to see nature sleep. There are no cars, ads or neon signs, just the sound of the leaves and pebble gravel under my feet and the silent view of the oak trees. Walking along the hiking path I see hundreds of acorns lying half-covered by leaves on both sides of the trail. "This is unusual fot this time of the year," I thought. I picked one of them up from the ground and observed it carefully. At first glance I wasn't aware of it,  but it seemed to be germinating. As I was holding this seed in my hand I tried to imagine how one day it would become a giant oak tree like the others around me. "How long does it take for a oak tree to grow? Twenty, maybe thirty years?" I asked myself looking down at the acorn. The process of growing from seed to tree requires a very long time, in some cases an entire human lifespan. This growth seems invisible if you merely stand in fron...

Owning a Business According to Graham, Munger and Buffet we should own a company not a stock. Doing that changes our attitude to how we see a stock and most important: we shift from a short focused behaviour on stocks to a long term investing pattern. Outside the market buying a company will demand all your savings, take out a considerable loan and make a life-long effort to consolidate the business among other competitors. Imagine you want to buy a company which already has products, cash flow, workers and customers. The price you would pay for it, would be enormous. Therefore if you decide to acquire a company, it will be the most important decision in your life. And you wouldn't do it if you didn't believe in it. You couldn't reverse it easily unless you commit an economic and social suicide. When you start thinking like that, something changes in the way you look at the stock market. You wouldn't sell a company tomorrow if you bought it in real life. If you d...

Seeds are always the origin of life. This comes into existence from seeds and nurtures itself from them within the first few hours.  Plants draw nourishment from earth and human beings obtain all that good from the seeds. They satisfy our primary needs of subsistence. Giving up on them  is impossible because seeds are the first level in the food chain. It doesn't matter if you eat vegetables, nuts, animals, dairy products, fish or fruits. Seeds are always at the beginning of the food chain.  Seed companies, which hold knowledge about genetic engineering techniques and develop new seeds, have therefore a tremendous economic moat.  The defensive shareholder will benefit from this great edge over other stocks in the long term. In addition the agressive investor will take an advantage and gain substantial profits in the future. If we consider all the preceding arguments we mentioned in the other entries, we can foresee significant growth coming f...

Sixth Argument: Not Only Fruits, But also Brands On weekends I usually do my shopping at a local supermarket. I mostly buy dairy products, but also fresh food like fish, vegetables, potatoes and fruits. So I went to the vegetable section looking for my favourite fruit: kiwis. There are may different types: yellow, green, juicy, smooth and sweet. In Europe at least kiwis have become very popular. I guess because their vitamin C content is very high. So you have in a small piece of fruit a lot of important nutrients your body needs.  Last time when I was in the vegetable section I caught myself looking not just for kiwis but a particular type of kiwi known as "Sungold". This behaviour caught my attention because I was searching for a specific brand rather than a particular fruit. Nowadays apples, oranges and tomatoes can be identified by labels stuck on their surfaces. The fact that people can distinguish between kiwis through labels seemed new to me. I've never b...

 Fifth Argument: Consumption of Vegetable Protein in Developed Countries A growing interest and greater awareness for a healthier life, as well as a sedentary lifestyle and the defence of animal life, has led an increasingly large part of society to give up the consumption of meat without wanting to suffer from protein deficiencies and therefore to look for them in plant sources. Although the process of industrialisation of meat production has led to lower costs, this process has a number of health and environmental consequences that the middle class, given their purchasing power in developed societies, are unwilling to assume. In addition, the sedentary lifestyle of the majority of the middle class requires low cholesterol diets, reducing the consumption of animal protein and increasing instead the protein of vegetable origin. The most protein-rich legumes include soybeans, peanuts and peas. All of them have been long studied and improved by the seed companies. This type of...

Fourth Argument: Meat Consumption in Developing Countries   The daily consumption of meat in developed countries has always been associated in most cases with the middle and upper class, as its consumption was in comparison with other foods quite expensive. However, thanks to the current cattle farming in European countries and the United States, it is practically possible for all citizens to consume meat at least twice a week. In fact factory farming has allowed all classes of society to eat meat without taking into account the consequences for the environment and health. This pattern of behaviour associated until now with Western industrialized countries, has recently been extended to the Asian continent, especially China and South Korea. The economic growth but also the industrialization carried out in these countries, has led their citizens to assume another type of behaviour related to their eating habits. This change is due, as has happened in Europe and the United Sta...