Post photo: flashcards for better social behavior | © moses.Verlag
Not so long ago a term for lateral thinking, which by Edward de Bono was introduced in 1967 and wanted to reorganize thought processes in the spirit of problem solving. In the 1990s you could still find his books in many households. But also Joy Paul Guilford dealt with the topic and also published his theory of the "Structure of Intellect" in 1967.
From 2009 to 2014 there was even a corresponding magazine, “Querdenker”, whose website I enjoyed monitoring because it was based on the same software as a website I managed at the time.
Since 2020, the term lateral thinker has had a completely different meaning with the “sudden” appearance of the so-called lateral thinker movement, and since I myself passed such a protest during a walk in 2021, such gatherings have also made me feel uneasy.
But it is no use at all to simply ignore such movements and wait until they have dissipated again - I made this mistake myself in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was sure that a “green” movement was emerging can hardly be manifested without actual content. Nevertheless, this movement at the time clearly succeeded in filling a gap that was simply not properly perceived by established parties and other political associations. And once you have established yourself in a society, it is quite difficult for you to disappear into obscurity again - we can see this very clearly in the SPD and perhaps soon in the CDU/CSU parties.
The fact that we have had a problem for society as a whole starting in the 1990s (Berlin Republic) can be seen not only in the still acute Ossi-Wessi debate, but above all in the voter turnout, whereby it can be seen that At European, federal, state, district and local levels, voter turnout has been steadily declining since its peak in the 1970s.
Even more, the number of members of our parties has more than halved in this period, whereby only the previous "newcomers" can still book profits for themselves, which is only too human, since many fellow citizens simply hang their flag to the wind.
Today, only a million or so German citizens are organized into parties and if there weren't more citizens active in other political organizations, associations and movements, the ratio of politically active citizens to the population would be even worse.
The good thing about it is that these perhaps 10 million citizens still manage to motivate the 75% of eligible voters to vote in the federal election, which is called the multiplier function.
What's also good about it is that, at least so far, the majority of our fellow citizens vote democratically and radical left-wing and right-wing parties that appear again and again usually disappear again.
But it is better that the increasing emptiness of our "existing parties" now means that more and more new parties, groups of voters and lists of citizens are forming, which not only stand up for our democracy itself, but also very specific and own ideas about our future - for the first time also in the field of ecology, which incidentally took a very long time.
After 30 years of the Berlin Republic, a generational change seems to be emerging here, which also means that younger people can no longer be integrated into traditional structures so quickly and are looking for new ways to have a political impact and assert their own interests.
This goes hand in hand with the increasing loss of trust for which our professional politicians are not responsible for the many voluntary political activists in and outside of parties.
That is why it also happens that more and more citizens, who have not been politically active at all or only marginally, are motivated by young people to also begin to articulate and organize (Hic, the lateral thinkers).
The founding of parties in recent decades has shown that such self-organization can take a long time and that the "most interesting" and often very conflicting interests collide and have to be connected with one another.
In the case of the lateral thinkers, however, it seems to be the case that this is the last gasp of a departing generation that previously viewed politics from the sidelines and was satisfied that their interests were somehow already represented by the parties I am now quite astonished to discover that we will all be asked to pay at some point.
This means that the lateral thinkers are a product of our popular parties, a temporary voter potential for “fringe parties” and a phenomenon of upheaval in society as a whole.
This upheaval needs to be shaped now, and we will be able to observe how our young people come together in new structures or perhaps how the existing structures are reused. This depends entirely on whether and how the existing parties develop further, the new parties ultimately set up, but above all whether they are prepared to actually accept the problems and challenges of our time and thus help shape the future of coming generations to want.
The realpolitik approach of the current coalition: “After us the flood” will unfortunately also be that of the coming coalition and will hopefully lead to our current youth becoming more politicized. Because this is very urgently needed because, in contrast to my youth, this youth will not be able to draw on the full, but will only find empty coffers and a destroyed nature and will be involved in existential struggles for distribution.
"Lateral thinking ... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practiced and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics."
Edward de Bono, Lateral thinking: creativity step by step (1970: 5)
