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Table of Contents
The happiness of giving
A poem by Bertolt Brecht
The greatest happiness is to donate
Those who have it harder
And elated, with happy hands
To scatter the beautiful gifts.There is no rose more beautiful
As the face of the recipient
When filled, o great ones
Joy, his hands lowered.Nothing makes you so completely cheerful
Than to help everyone, everyone!
I'm not giving away what I have
I can't like it.
disillusionment
I've had numerous conversations over the last few days, some of them together with Herbert Burkhardt, which quickly put my recent efforts to get some more momentum into the city into perspective. I have to admit that a big hit is not as easy to implement as I was used to - different cities, different customs.
In any case, I am very grateful to all those I spoke to for bringing me back down to earth. Now I'm going to try to just bake with smaller buns, which doesn't have to be bad. What is reassuring for me is that it's not just me, but that even proven professionals fail because of the urban structures, even though they have the best connections in the most illustrious circles.
And so I can say once again that structural problems ultimately affect all citizens without exception - except for those who routinely move around in the third dimension. And since many others are now recognizing this, it might not be so bad if you think about breaking up the encrusted structures and letting a breath of fresh air into the city.
Unless you make yourself really snuggly in the contemplative coziness. And so, at the beginning of the day, I simply overlooked the Nivea cream, sweat and obstacles in the swimming pool laden with hairspray and, at the end of today's face-to-face events, I treated myself to my first Affogato al caffè of the year in Sülmerstrasse.
Donate
Without question, donations have become indispensable in our world and the sums that are donated worldwide are astronomically high. It is interesting that people in democratic countries donate more than in dictatorships, and that Americans have probably been the most generous people in the world for decades.
Also without question, this willingness to donate has created its own market that lives exclusively from the willingness of other people to donate. And organized crime has also established itself quite well in this money cycle and I wouldn't be very surprised if more is now being earned there than in drug, human or arms trafficking.
If you donate, which I can only recommend to every citizen, but please not as a new form of selling indulgences, but out of the conviction that someone who has something can always give something of it — except of course in the case where the State already cashed everything in advance.
Which in turn suggests that functioning democracies do not generally have more generous people than in other countries, but that these people simply have more money left over at the end of the month.
And so, in my opinion, one could draw conclusions from the willingness of the citizens to donate to the capacity for democracy in their respective countries — which, of course, would still have to be proven.
In any case, it makes no sense for a citizen to just donate like that, because then you run the risk of only feeding “professional beggar organizations” and organized crime and thus not making the world better with your own donations, but actually making it much worse might.
And precisely those citizens who see donations as a modern sale of indulgences should be warned not to just donate to anyone they like, because in doing so they are securing their very own place in the sun in hell and not in heaven as they wanted!
Therefore, as a donor, you always have to pay close attention to who you are donating to and, above all, through whom you are donating today. In my experience it is always best to donate directly to those affected and those who cannot do so have difficulty finding a trustworthy organization. And so it is also easier to donate in your own environment, because there you can see for yourself who is taking care of the donations and what this organization is doing with it.
For professional reasons, I had had very, very bad experiences in the last few decades — especially with very prominent aid organizations — and my willingness to donate to such organizations tended to be almost zero, but I always made donations directly on site. And even then, when I had to watch how poorly the recipients of the donations handled it; in any case, it was ensured that the recipient of the donation at least had a chance to make something out of my donations.
Today I am very happy that I have organizations like meseno where I can see for myself how every donation reaches the recipient and how they are even helped to make the best of it - admittedly that doesn't always help either, but it's much better than in other places.
But what doesn't work at all is that huge sums of donations are sent to designated dictatorships, especially currently in those countries where the potentates are very happy to have palaces with a thousand rooms built in nature reserves. It would actually be much better if you bought all kinds of luxury sports cars together and handed them over directly to the illegitimate sons and cousins of these potentates. Because that saves the poor local people at least from being killed later by new buildings, again built by criminals.
"But Nietzsche himself taught the amor fati, 'You should love your fate.' That, it says in the epilogue of Twilight of the Idols, is his innermost nature. And the question might well be asked whether there is any more reason to love what happens to one, to affirm existence because it is, than to hold true what one hopes for.”
THEODOR W. ADORNO, MINIMA MORALIA (14th EDITION 2022 [1951]: 110)
