Gerald Hüther - die Aufgaben guter Politik und der Weg dorthin

In today's podcast, I'm talking to Prof. Dr. Gerald Hüther. We're talking about inner images and patterns in thinking, how we could leave the visionaries, i.e. the brain highways. Other thoughts are flying around, about competition, progress, competition, talent and also talent. Another topic is less the turn of the times than a turn of ideas, especially regarding our hierarchical thinking. You will learn why there is an inner pig dog and what entangled people lead, who are entangled in their imagination, free themselves from their entanglement, i.e. have to develop. I can promise you a very short-lived brain politics podcast. My name is Claudia Lutschewitz. Nice to have you listening today. ServantPolitics, the podcast for political reflection impulses. Good morning, Prof. Gerald Hüther. Yes, good morning, Ms. Lutschewitz. I'm very happy. I haven't done a podcast about politics yet. Let's see if it's possible in politics to take brain research into account. I assume, and I'm very curious about your brain waves, what we're going to create now and maybe trigger. I would just start with my normal first question. Or if you have a first question for me, you are welcome to do so, otherwise I'll start. It would be to start with the waves. The brain is not about the waves, but about the connections. Very good, very good. Thank you. It's like with people. It's not about how wounded they are, but how well they can connect with each other and then be able to implement what is close to their hearts. And in doing so, politics should be helpful to us, if I understood you correctly. It would be best if politics connects or is the connecting link. Maybe you could see it that way. Then I'll start with my first question, Prof. Hüther. What is the task of politics for you? It's relatively simple. The task of politics is to create framework conditions within which people are able to apply the talents and skills they have, i.e. the potentials that are applied in the individual, but also in communities, so that they can come to fruition as well as possible. Basically, you would have to say that politics is a helper for the development processes of people. And since people can only develop in communities, it would be an important task of politics to create framework conditions in which such community-based development processes are possible. Do you have any ideas on how we could implement this in politics? We humans, because we are all part of it. This is society, these are the politicians. That will only become clear because on such an upper political, abstract level, it remains nebulous. There is always a lot of talk and you don't understand what is meant by it. And it is also never verifiable whether it is now being implemented. So I now live here in a small town. There is a mayor and a political committee, the municipal council or the city council. And now I can ask whether this political institution does everything so that the citizens of this small town can not only develop individually, but that they all feel together that they are here in a city at home, where they are connected to each other and where they all take care of what is close to their hearts. And that would inevitably be the future and the development of this city. If politics doesn't do that, because they think they have to make money and build up an industrial area somewhere, then you have to ask, does this really serve the development of this city? Or is this something that is the cohesion of the citizens and the cohesion of the people in this city? And then of course you hear quickly, without money nothing works. And then on the one hand that is right and on the other hand it is wrong. Because what good is the industrial area to us? We have so many examples from the past decades where the political institutions in such a community have initiated something and now it stands there as a ruin. At that time it was also believed that this was absolutely necessary and that it would not work without this industrial area out there and without this shopping center out there on the outskirts of the city. And then it was later found out that it doesn't work that way. It destroys the whole city center, the whole city structure is destroyed and I think they thought in the short term that they could make a profit first and in the long term the whole thing turns out to be an extraordinarily expensive business. So politics should, I just wanted to say that, create framework conditions, but they should also be considered in the long term and not be determined by four years or how long the election periods are. You once wrote a wonderful book, that is, the power of inner images. And when you agreed to this podcast, I immediately thought it would be wonderful if we could combine this book or the idea from this book also with politics. Because for me personally, sometimes it jumps into my thoughts or also comes to my mind that politics or politicians lack a bit of the vision to create images for the future. Do you see it similarly or how do you see it with the images that perhaps a politician, a politician has to creatively develop in her head in order to be able to shape something in the future? I'm a brain scientist and we actually made an incredible discovery about 20, 30 years ago. Has it finally come through? And this discovery means that the human brain is rebuildable for the rest of its life. It's not finished. And it's not put together by genetic programs, but it's a constant learning and experience process in which new networks are structurally connected in the brain again and again and you're basically never done with it. But if that's the case, then it means that we are actually time-seeking. We don't know how it works. The animals still have instincts and instincts, they guide them on their search how it works as a deer or as a fox. We don't have that anymore. These drives and instincts have been pushed back so far. And we all know that we can also get away with these drives and instincts. We can have humor and still not eat anything. Or we can jump off a roof, jump off a skyscraper or throw ourselves under the train because our loved one has left us. And that means that what guides us in our entire action, so you could almost say in thinking, feeling and acting, are ideas. Ideas. So I have the idea that I can no longer live without this woman. I have the idea that everything always has to be tidied up properly. I have the idea that I only find the recognition of other people when I work really hard. I always have to be the first and I have to pay attention to everything. All ideas. All ideas that people often carry with them for a lifetime, so to speak. They then determine their entire thinking, feeling and acting. Sometimes I have the feeling that politicians are also not prepared to run after certain ideas without being aware of them. And to get to your question, as long as you run around with a fixed idea and the belief that you now know what it is about, and, as I said, sometimes for 20 years, as long as you follow something fixed in your head, you can't think of anything new. That's the reason. That means we could be visionaries. And we could have future ideas, but then we would have to try to cling to the ideas that we put into our brains a few years or even decades ago. Because we thought it was good back then. But the world is changing, and thank God our heads are round and we can change that up there again. And then you just have to say from time to time what has been considered right back then. I'll give you an example so you can guess what the dimension is. What was considered right back then is that it comes to the competition and that there is no progress without competition. You have to rethink that today. Then the outlook opens up for the fact that a competitive society is never able to develop the talents and talents and the potentials in people and also in the communities of people. Competition is something for specialists. Competition produces, if I exaggerate, professional idiots and competitive athletes, but not comprehensively educated people who feel responsible for this life on this planet, considerate, loving and, what else do I know, for people who we could actually need for the design of our life in the 21st century. And if only for the worst consequences of this competitive society that has caused so much damage, to be able to put it aside again. So if I, as a politician, carry this inner image around in me that nothing works without competition, and many still do, then I can't get out of the number either. Then everything I think and what I do is carried by the thought of whether this also heats up the reasonable competition so that progress can be made. That is, what would you like for the politics of the future? It is difficult to talk about politics, because they are politicians and politicians. So they are people. What I would like is that in politics people look for a field of activity that they have dealt with themselves first. So someone who is only outside-oriented and no longer has a good feeling for himself, for his true, living needs, and who is partly willing to take all these appointments and suppress his own body and the signals coming from his own body, who is even willing to question his partnership and sacrifice the relationship to his children, he should rather stop doing business with him. Because he is an unhappy person. And I always like to call it entangled people. And if someone has entangled himself in this way, in his own imagination, then unfortunately he can only continue to entangle others. That's a nice play on words now. If you are so entangled, you should first free yourself from your entanglements. So develop. So, dear politicians, develop. Look for a development assistant. And when I am sometimes asked as a brain researcher, what can help an adult person to free himself from his entanglements, then the answer is relatively simple. Only someone who is not yet so entangled can do that. And who is not yet so entangled? My little granddaughter, age four. Children. Yes, the children are the best development assistants, because we have not yet turned them through our mill. We have not yet raised them. We have not yet planted these ideas in their brains. That is also wrong. We have not yet put them in situations where they could see it as an advantage to adapt to these ideas with which we have also mastered our lives. This is how every child adapts, quite often in the course of this problem-laden process of growing into society. Ideas from adults. Sometimes these are not the ideas of the parents, but from slightly older people. For example, from the peer group. Or it's the uncle or the aunt or the grandpa. But in any case, the children are looking for solutions. And we, adults, offer them the solutions. And the solutions we offer them are not always the optimal ones. These are the ones we have found. They don't have to be right for the children. If today's parents believe that you can't learn anything without pressure, then this is a solution that in the following century, when they were still in school, didn't work either. But at least in the following century, it led to people being very well disciplined through this pressure. We then learned with pressure. They never had the joy of learning. And that's why they never worked with joy. And that's why you have to put them in this difficult situation today, that you say, hey, your children would learn on their own, if you had joy in learning yourself. But you don't have joy in learning, so you can't transfer that to the children either. They can't take over your beautiful solution, because you haven't found it yourself yet. If a politician is still infected with such ideas, and walks around so confused, then he will pass this quack on to his others. And that's where it starts to get dangerous. If my neighbor is so confused, it's not that bad. He only has his wife and a few relatives and me as neighbors. But a politician, if he is confused, how many people can he confuse? By spreading his peculiar ideas out into the world. The media then also spread it. And you can see how fast that works. We only need to send the message once. And then you notice how many complicated ideas are given by people who apparently don't get along with themselves. In your performance, I just got a picture in my head, namely the song by Herbert Krönemeyer, Children to the Power. Well, that doesn't work like that. It's a nice picture, of course, but it's no use putting the children to the power, because they don't have the skills yet. That means, before you are in power, you have to acquire skills. And what I mean is, that you try to find your way around in life, that you always make sure that you don't get confused, that you don't separate yourself from your own living needs, that you stay with yourself and still be able to absorb everything that this world offers as surprises. And then you also learn to solve a lot of problems, so that you acquire the skills you need to be a good politician. But you would be more like that only if you actually designed this unwavering joy in your inner self, being together with others. And in this way you would also feel all this creativity, the joy of dancing, of singing, of whatever, as you felt it back then when you were 3, 4, 5 years old. Yes, I do want to grow up. I don't want to have a lot of children in the government. But I also don't want to have people who are so entangled that they are actually hardly alive and appear to me like voice machines that have been programmed somewhere. One could also say that people who have managed to get rid of their childlike curiosity and desire for knowledge, despite adverse circumstances, despite constant attempts to expel them from school. There are always a few who get through it, yes. Mr. Professor Hüther, I like to bring up the question in the podcast, sometimes I call it the glass ball question, sometimes I call it the chancellor question. With you I would really like to call it the glass ball question, because I hope that as a brain researcher you might give me a few answers to that. Imagine, Professor Hüther, you would now have become chancellor and you would have a team around you that is very open, very creative, perhaps not so much manipulated by school, but has consciously learned to shape and promote its potential. What would be two or three of your focus topics that you would tackle with your team as chancellor right at the beginning? I am quite sure that I would not accept this task. And that is because I know that at the moment we are in a difficult turning point. Time change is not really the right word, because what is changing here is not the time, but what is changing here are the ideas with which we have been on the road so far. And every society needs something that organizes it a bit. And we have brought an organizational structure from the past centuries, which is called hierarchy. And we still have it in our devices everywhere, in the administration, in the school, also in politics, in the parties. The hierarchy is actually not gone. And a hierarchy, as we all know, leads to the fact that the lives of people are arranged in a pyramid. They can connect with each other and from above the commands go more or less cleanly down. Otherwise the hierarchy does not work at all. That was the old model. These hierarchical order structures were highly effective. Everyone who was down there was exhausted, wanted to invent something new all the time, wanted high, did something. The result of this, because we have been doing this for 10,000 years, is a world in which it is getting more and more complex. More and more inventions, what is added to scientific knowledge alone every day. In addition, all the technical achievements. In the end, we live in a digitalized, globalized world that is changing so fast that one thing is no longer possible, namely regulation via hierarchy. And now you know why I don't want to become chancellor. That one imagines that a community of people will still be guided and controlled by a leader in the future. Or by a party. Or at least from top to bottom. What we need is that the people below feel responsible for the community and then do everything to ensure that in these towns, in the villages, in the communities and where they are at home, they can deviate from the talents of the people. Then the community would grow hierarchically from the bottom up. But that would only work if the people are so mature and so responsible that they can deal with themselves. Then prisoners of their own immaturity would no longer be prisoners of their own immaturity. Even worse, prisoners of self-indulgent immaturity. That's why the big changes that are now coming are not the change of parties and the exchange of the chancellor. And that suddenly protects the chancellor. We can only do what the people are able to do. What the people can do. And they are used to being told what to do. Wearing a mask or the vaccination campaign and what we have now experienced in the pandemic is exactly the sign. People are waiting for someone to tell them what to do. They are fearless. If I can say a little from my own life experience, because they are so separated from the things that are actually existential in life. For everything there is a service provider who does it for them. And the result is that at the moment we basically have to work to give back to people their humbleness. This also includes freeing them from their entanglements. And this also includes that they can unfold first. And not every single one, but together in the municipality. And then a politician, the mayor of this municipality or Mr. Scholz, who is then called Luther, would have nothing more to do. But he would ask, what do you need so that you can continue to unfold like this? And then they would say, we need a new school and we can't get the money together. We need an old age insurance for our elderly people in the municipality. We have already done this and that. But now there is still a share. We can't do it alone. We need the help of a higher authority. But the government is no longer a higher authority. It is a different level with which I can get in touch and from which I know that it helps me to solve the problems that I have on my municipal level. And when I describe it like this, you will notice how far we have gone from this future model. That there is also little effort to go in this direction. You would have to change so much. And it all goes very, very slowly. We have been talking about it all the time that if you have a certain idea in your head how to go about it, then at the moment it will lead to the more difficult the overall situation in our country, that the call for a powerful leadership will become stronger and stronger. Because that's the only thing people know. If it doesn't go on right anymore, then we have to give up responsibility, right? Could it be that we say, okay, he or she has decided? It always has two sides. People like to give up responsibility. That's the way the brain works. The brain works in such a way that it always wants to save energy. It's a real secret for politicians so they understand why there are internal decisions. To organize and structure the connections between the nerve cells in such a way that as little energy as possible is consumed to keep the whole thing in order. Basically, it's the same with society. Everything has to be arranged so that not too much energy is consumed. And if you consume too much, it goes like it's happening to us right now. I don't want to start thinking when I have a problem and when I want to take responsibility for something. Some people don't want that. They'd rather have less energy consumption because it's a bit of a strange feeling. You don't feel very well physically if it's smoking too much up there and it's messy. That's why most people prefer to sit down on the sofa and put on their video glasses and run off into some world that has nothing to do with our real world. TV also serves this energy-saving need in a magnificent way. The whole entertainment industry is there for nothing else than people. The need of people for convenience and amusement and distraction. Of course, we won't get any further like this. Then we'll have fun to death. At the moment, we're more afraid and the whole society is starting to realize that amusement and leisure can't go on like this. That's why they're getting more and more afraid. Then they have to inform themselves and constantly look for new messages. My journalist colleague recently published a book that says we inform ourselves to death. You can do that too. You can send so much stuff into the world and you can send so much information through the ether and through the world and distribute it in your circle of acquaintances that in the end no one knows what is actually important and important and what can flow into the trash. What is your own idea for the future? How could we individually make sure that something changes? We have to make sure that they don't do so much damage up there and try to do it as well as possible on site. So where we can really influence. So in a small circle, practically. That the future is not determined by super-ordered instances, but where the people concretely shape their lives together. That would be the communes. So my future picture doesn't mean that in 20, 30 years we will all sit around at home with video glasses and let ourselves be tampered with. My future picture means that in 20, 30 years the people here in the village where I live will all sit around at home and dance together on May 1. That's a beautiful picture. And with that I would like to end the podcast. Thank you very much for your time, Prof. Höter. See you soon. Thank you and goodbye. Leave us a rating. ServantPolitics, the podcast for political reflection impulses.