IMAGES OF THE WORLD: IDEAS OF FREEDOM, EQUALITY, BROTHERHOOD AND THEIR TRANSFORMATIONS
Wolfgang SassinFor the survival of Homo sapiens, joint efforts and a strong desire for expansion were of the utmost importance. Our today's emotions and instincts are a relic of the era of hunters and gatherers. External expansion against rival communities and internal expansion, aimed at a closer social organization, gave birth to a mass man, a man of the crowd, who dominated the world until the 19th century. The modern mass man, Homo billionis, whose global civilization covers the entire planet, appeared only in the twentieth century. His archaic craving for expansion gave birth to industrial civilization as the dominant form of life. Today Homo billionis encounters natural boundaries, which are perceived as a hindrance, but he fails to understand that destruction of self-regulating nature is caused by his activities. Behind both world wars, there was a belief in the need to maximally expand the exploitation of nature and other people for the sake of one’s own freedom. This expansion and the freedom won at someone's expense have come to their logical end. For the last two generations, the planet of unlimited possibilities has turned into a closed market, where everyone seeks to displace the other, and where not only individual freedom but also national identity fades away steadily. The mass man as a modern version of Homo sapiens and monotheistic ideological constructions are closely connected with each other. They have to be overcome in order to avoid the death of civilization as the result of further exponential growth. This requires two conditions: the rejection of the expansionist idea of the state and the recognition of differences between people.