Inside views of a fellow of the same species

In his autobiography Interior Views of a Conspecific - My Balance Sheet , Hoimar von Ditfurth (1921–1989) presents the insights he has gained in the course of life (fossil brain, closed world views , evolution as an act of creation ) and relates them to his biography, which covers the periods NS System (adolescent in a national (-ist) -conservative home), Adenauer time (professional experience as a psychiatrist) and the 1970 / 1980s (Ditfurth's "actual life" as a publicist).

The brain

The brain (of humans and animals) is composed of three parts:

Brain stem (evolutionarily the oldest part of the brain): regulates the metabolic balance, heartbeat / respiration, body temperature, monitoring of all vegetative functions to maintain the viability of the organism
Diencephalon: Makes people (and animals) be in a special mood (funny, sad, worried, angry). Instincts (drives) are contained in the diencephalon as programs that can be called up in the form of neural switching patterns (imposing behavior, gestures of submission, urge to flee).
Cerebrum ( genetically the youngest part of the brain): Consists of approx. 15 billion nerve cells . Each of these nerve cells is networked with up to 10,000 other nerve cells via conductor paths ( dendrites ). The cerebrum is the actual human organ of thought. Thought follows thought in whatever way ( Ignoramus et ignorabimus ). Thoughts are perceived by the cerebrum, such as B. the eye perceives an image. Humans can have flashes of thought (a thought shoots through the head) and spontaneous “insights” ( Arthur Koestler (1905–1983)). According to Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) the world is composed of layers: a) the material-inorganic layer, b) the organic-biological layer and c) the layer of the spiritual. The cerebrum should then be understood as an organ for perception, for producing the “spiritual principle”.

All parts of the brain have their function. That is correct with the cerebrum, because it makes the human being , Homo sapiens , a spiritual being, the crown of creation on earth and important for the brain stem, since without it no human being could survive even ten seconds. The diencephalon is the "mood maker" of the human being. The person is "in tune" at all times. In the case of physical well-being, the diencephalon reports: “You feel good, take a risk.” When people are depressed, objectively they are not at the peak of their performance, the diencephalon allows people to be cautious and reserved.

The problem that Ditfurth sees: in the diencephalon, the experiences made (and inherited) by the genetic predecessors of humans, the early humans, in the Stone Age are also effective in the form of instincts.

Mismatched instincts

Ditfurth considers the following four "Neanderthal Laws" to be inappropriate for today's civilization:

Xenophobia (xenophobia)
Willingness to intraspecific manslaughter (human against human)
Subordination of the individual to the interests of one's own society
the interests of one's own society take precedence over those of all other competitors (chauvinism)

Today's man opposed the Neanderthal laws inherited from the Stone Age with the ten commandments of Moses (approx. 800 BC): You should not kill, not steal, not commit adultery, not covet your neighbor's property. Remarkable: The Mosaic Commandments are all prohibitions , the Mosaic Commandments are therefore about curbing the Neanderthal laws, stopping the old Adam.

irrationality

Ditfurth racked his brain over an incident from the war without (at that time) arriving at a clear result. In October 1939, a young lieutenant with a wounded arm in a uniform adorned with religious orders, thick white with a plaster cast in a sling, entered a café on Kurfürstendamm where Ditfurth (as a freshly baked medical student) was sitting. Everyone in the café, including Ditfurth, fell silent and looked at the lieutenant in awe. At that moment Ditfurth felt guilty and would have liked to have been the lieutenant standing in the doorway. Ditfurth tried to analyze his feelings of guilt in order to get to the bottom of his behavior and that of the people in the café. But it was in vain. It was only decades later ( The Spirit Did Not Fall from Heaven (1976)) that Ditfurth came up with the solution. He tried to understand an unconscious and instinctual behavior, which is to be assigned to the intermediate brain, the Neanderthal, with rational means, through thinking (i.e. with the cerebrum). But there is nothing to understand. Instincts are unquestionable processes that ensure the survivability of humans (and animals), but are not "right" or "wrong" (objective, rational), but rather "good" or "bad" (subjective, irrational). In the case of the lieutenant, the feelings of guilt were aroused by the fact that the lieutenant gave his life for the community (the German people) while Ditfurth pursued his private interests (studying medicine in Berlin). From the Neanderthal's point of view, the lieutenant's life as a soldier was good for the community, but Ditfurth's selfish behavior was bad for the community.

After the war, Ditfurth also realized that there was an objective side of the matter. Objectively speaking, the lieutenant took part in a criminal policy (a predatory war of aggression on Poland), which was wrong from a rational point of view.

The Nazi system

Ditfurth writes that the National Socialists managed to reinstate the Neanderthal laws. “Many people believed that the archaic affects mobilized from the cage of their unconscious were a gain in strength and freedom.” Ditfurth sees how active the instincts are in the old newsreels and propaganda films. "Ecstatic faces of the people, glowing in ecstatic admiration, who cheer their leader like a savior." "Now it turned out how thin the wall actually is that separates modern people from the state of mind of the Neanderthal."

The worldview of the Nazi system

In Ditfurth's opinion, National Socialism in Germany (1933–1945) was based on a worldview, namely that of Social Darwinism . There were two “educational films” that Ditfurth was shown as a pupil in biology class that were supposed to illustrate this worldview. a) A chicken eats earthworms with appetite. For the nat.-soc. Authorities a proof that there is a "struggle for life" in the world. b) A “professor” explains a different process to a “naive blonde”: A stag beetle fights another stag beetle and ultimately defeats it because of its superiority. According to the nat.-soc. Authorities a proof that the fittest survive ("survival of the fittest"). So, according to the nat.-soc. Rulers, be shown how things are in the world, among the peoples. Ditfurth writes that “National Socialist propaganda tirelessly endeavored to convince us that the members of non-Germanic peoples and races, especially Jews and Slavs , could not be viewed in the full sense as people like us (but only as subhumans, so to speak as Members of degenerate branch lines of our kind). "

Darwinian teaching

Ditfurth admits that there is a "fight" in nature. But this struggle for survival is on completely different tracks. There is the essential difference between intraspecific aggression and interspecific aggression. The struggle for survival that occurs in nature takes place between individuals of the same (biological) species, i.e. intraspecific. In the comparison of the abilities it is decided which individual reproduces more successfully and thus appears more numerous in the following generation with his genetic make-up ( DNA ). The chicken-earthworm process is therefore from the nat.-soz. Rulers misunderstood and distorted because it represents an interspecific aggression and has no meaning for the evolution of biological species.

The stag beetle fight shown by the camera (intraspecific aggression) already shows the truth, but the “professor” explains to the “naive blonde” that the defeated stag beetle would have been killed by the winner had he not run away. But nature is not so stupid, writes Ditfurth, to willfully waste life. The intraspecific aggression ("the struggle for survival") ended with the flight of the inferior stag beetle. It is now certain that the victorious stag beetle can occupy the contested territory, the contested source of food or the contested female. An additional killing is superfluous and does not occur in nature because of innate behavioral programs (urge to flee, inhibition to kill).

And even interspecific aggression - the "educational film" with the chicken and the earthworm already shows the truth - is nowhere as brutal under natural circumstances as in the intraspecific conflicts within the human world (wars, civil wars), writes Ditfurth. Without exception, all organisms played the roles of hunter and prey in nature, depending on their species in a changing distribution. For example, humans breed and slaughter chickens, pigs and cattle to consume them. On the other hand, from the point of view of a pathogen ( cholera , yellow fever ) , the human body presents itself as prey.

However, there is no such thing as raging killing. Konrad Lorenz concludes e.g. It is assumed, for example, that under natural conditions a Bengal tiger fights with a python and immediately afterwards this with a crocodile . “What interest would one of the animals have in destroying the other? Neither of them disturbs the vital interests of the other. "( Das so-called Böse (1975), p. 30)

What did the Germans know?

After the Second World War one often heard the soothing formula that none of this was known and Ralph Giordano (1923-2014) confirms that the Germans did not know anything about the extermination camps (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidanek (Lublin), Chelmno (Kulmhof) , Sobibor, Belzec) knew. But the following facts were known, because they were obvious, according to Ditfurth:

Jewish stars on tattered lapels
Deprivation of civil rights
Prohibition to enter public parks
social democratic and communist politicians are driven from their posts
no ordinary jurisdiction ("protective custody")
Looting and "Aryanization" of Jewish shops
Jewish citizens are chased out of the country in droves
Mixed marriages between " Aryans " and Jews are under inhuman pressure
Place names like Dachau and Oranienburg suddenly have a special sound ( concentration camp )

Ditfurth regards the claim not to have known anything about it as a “pathetic excuse”, as “pathetic self-deception”. Incidentally, Ditfurth does not exempt himself from this judgment. “I mark my silence at the time as culpable. Even if it is only because the existence of an albeit pitifully small number of resistance members [Scholl siblings] has proven that we could have known if we had only wanted to know. "

However, it is of no use to walk around in "sackcloth and ashes" from now on and to humiliate oneself in "contrite self-incriminations" in front of the other peoples. Among the peoples affected (Jews, Russians, Poles) this behavior would only arouse contempt.

Adenauerzeit

Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) was elected as chairman of the CDU as the first Federal Chancellor of the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany - with a majority of one vote. Ditfurth sees his politics as pragmatic. Adenauer was faced with the task of welding a defeated, disaffected people who lived in ruins together into a community that thinks and acts alike and is politically controllable through shared values.

The Russian fear

Adenauer chose fear of the Russians as the glue that was supposed to hold German post-war society together. The still widespread “Russian paranoia” had been “consciously cultivated and fueled” by Adenauer, “officially and officially”. And with success. Adenauer won four elections (1957 with an absolute majority). This convenient route via a common external enemy (“the Russians are coming”, “all roads of socialism lead to Moscow” (election posters from the 1950s)), according to Ditfurth, “was perhaps the only practicable method of defeating the troubled bunch of To weld post-war Germans together into a politically manageable society. The Adenauer government, as the first post-war government, has to be given credit for that. ”The purchase price for this short and easy path to a functioning society is said to have been“ renouncing immunity to new forms of misconception ”. A self-critical and certainly laborious reappraisal of the Nazi past was omitted. The loss of reality led to a life in a mad world that did not exist:

Hoarding of petrol cans in garages and basements in order to be on the English Channel earlier than the Russians ("the Russians are coming!")

the resistance offered by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) against the Nazi regime is rated by the Federal Court of Justice in 1956 as high treason (in the sense of the Nazi injustice justice at the time), ie Bonhoeffer was rightly sentenced to death and executed

no member of the Nazi People's Court (chaired by Roland Freisler (1893–1945)) was ever tried or even convicted in a Federal Republican court

Roland Freisler's widow is awarded a compensation pension, in addition to her widow's pension, on the grounds that Freisler could have achieved a high post after the war (Freisler died in an air raid on Berlin in 1945)

Willy Brandt (1913–1992) alias Frahm entered Germany after the war in a Norwegian uniform and speaks Norwegian at home

stolen eastern provinces ( East Prussia , Silesia , Pomerania ) - a screaming injustice!

Heinrich von Brentano , Foreign Minister under Adenauer, first attempted reconciliation with Poland at the end of the 1950s. In a speech in the Bundestag he said that “the German people are ready to forgive Poland”. The truth, however, was different: Germany attacked Poland in 1939, established a five-year arbitrary regime, killed three million Poles and three million Polish Jews. Brentano never received an answer from the Poles.

Hateful slander against the policy of reconciliation with the East initiated by the social-liberal government under Willy Brandt. What makes Ditfurth concerned: These slanders did not come from primitive and vulgar people, but were uttered without hesitation by “completely normal” people (his dentist, his fellow board members at Boehringer Mannheim ).

In a speech in the Bundestag in November 1983, Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) said that the Soviet Union had rearmed itself on an unprecedented scale after the Second World War. Kohl may have been right about that, according to Ditfurth, but the whole truth is that the US has upgraded to an even greater extent (qualitatively and quantitatively), with the result that the Soviet Union had no choice but to do it now to make great (or better: almost equally great) efforts. (Armament spiral) An example of how one can show untruthfulness with half truths. Result of this Bundestag speech: the NATO double resolution came into force. 108 Pershing-2 missiles and 464 cruise missiles were deployed in Western Europe. This in turn led to the stationing of Soviet medium-range missiles in the GDR and Czechoslovakia.

Ditfurth states that "we ... in reality moved like conditioned rats in a Pavlovian experimental arrangement within the framework of a fictitious, demagogically constructed reality [ie in a delusional world] given by a caring authorities ."

The groundbreaking old texts

According to Ditfurth, the Bible cannot be surpassed in terms of depth when it comes to knowledge about people. The old texts are supra-individual knowledge, the "quintessence of the experiences of many generations". The tendency to reject the statements of the Bible a) because they cannot be rationally justified and b) messages of salvation from heaven and thus not applicable to earthly problems (wars), arouses concern in Ditfurth. Because, in his opinion, the following applies: “But if there is a way out, then it is here, mapped out in the ancient texts. The attempt to use it has never been seriously attempted. We don't have much time left to make up for the failure. "

Enemy love

Jesus Christ demands in the Sermon on the Mount : "If the legionnaire asks you to lug his luggage for him, then carry his luggage not just one, but voluntarily an additional mile." (Enemy love) Because of this unusual behavior recommended by Jesus Christ , the legionnaire (the enemy) would get into conversation with the Jew who he had signed off the streets. The member of a provincial people, who had previously been underestimated and harassed by the legionnaire, was suddenly seen as a fellow human being, as a person like himself, with the same fears and hopes (see below the "Hope for the future"). As for the alleged lack of practicality in love of one's enemy, since it is a “message from heaven”, Ditfurth refers to Matth. 5.5: “Blessed are the meek, for they will own the earth. "

Hope for the future

According to Ditfurth, people are to be understood as beings that unfold in time. Usually people are so deeply embedded in the lived time that people take time for granted that the existential meaning of time is not recognized. In the case of mental illnesses ( endogenous depression ) the context of time (past, present, future) is disturbed, the sick person falls out of time, so to speak. For those suffering from endogenous depression, time is "frozen", he is "frozen". There is no more future for him. All past omissions (actual or imagined) are seen through a magnifying glass. The affected person feels abysmal guilt. Ditfurth writes: "Comparative, transcultural psychiatry has found that someone who develops a depressive delusion is always caught up in one of the three fears mentioned [delusion delusion, impoverishment delusion, disease delusion ( hypochondria )] - whether atheist or pious Christian, whether European, Chinese or African. Here, accordingly, from the extreme burden of pathological melancholy, something has been uncovered that could be described as anthropological existential, as an essential characteristic that constitutes man in his innermost core. ”The human desire for freedom / redemption from guilt, the urge to do it in the Wanting to make the future better - people suffering from depression lack this hope because the dimension of the future has broken down. Ditfurth sees this topic already discussed in parable form in the Old Testament . The angel of the Lord shows Moses the promised land (the inaccessible (phylogenetic) future for man, which Moses (man) will never be able to enter himself, according to the Bible.

The task of mankind

In order to achieve existential freedom (from the Neanderthal man, from the old Adam), in order to be redeemed, Ditfurth sees humanity faced with the following task: “Our existence does not serve to justify the cosmos and its history. ... We are not required to be flawless or even to be perfect. The only requirement is that we strive to secure the progress of cosmic history [evolution] in our regional planetary area and within our biological lineage. That we guarantee his continuity [nature conservation] in order to keep open the possibility that he could achieve perfection [theological: redemption] at the end of evolution. That is all. "" Something would already be gained if we finally saw through our belief in the existence of total solutions for our political and social problems as superstition and carried it to the grave. "The insight must exist, according to Ditfurth," that a society, which is composed of non-rational members, is in principle incapable of developing rationally conceived behavior maxims for their behavior that are suitable for use. "

Quotes

“If the Fuehrer only knew that!” Of course he did. We just didn't want to admit it.
A fascist regime can be recognized by the fact that it is engaged in the release of the beast [the Neanderthal man] lurking within us.

literature

Hoimar von Ditfurth : Interior views of a conspecific. My balance sheet. Claassen 1989, Bertelsmann Club 1990, DTV 1991, Geest 2013.
Konrad Lorenz: This is how humans came across dogs (1949/1998)

Remarks

↑ Ditfurth refers to the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who sees the meaning of life in “ rising to the authenticity of one's existence” within the framework of the fundamentally given possibilities . ( Being and time )
↑ The diencephalon sits anatomically “between” the brain stem and the cerebrum.
↑ Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989, behavioral scientist) calls instincts "incarnate advisors" who ensure a quick and appropriate reaction (e.g. in the event of danger). If a chick had to learn what a shadow with a short neck ( hawk , behavior program: shape recognition ) is all about, the chickens would have long since died out; see. also Konrad Lorenz (1959): Gestalt perception as a source of scientific knowledge. On: klha.at
↑ An example of a diencephalon is the dog. He is unconditionally at the mercy of his moods, since he does not have a cerebrum like humans do. The dog cannot control his moods, e.g. B. suppress or delay them. Dogs relate everything that happens in the environment to themselves. That is why dogs hide in a protective corner with their tails trapped in a thunderstorm. In the (un) consciousness of the dogs there is a demon living in the thundercloud, aiming at them with lightning. Dogs do not know anything about the objective natural law of electric sparking.
↑ Australopithecines (4.2 million years ago - 2 million years ago), Homo habilis (tool, 2.1 million years ago - 1.5 million years ago), Homo erectus (tool, 1 million years ago - 50,000 BC), Neanderthals (tool, burial of the dead, 220,000 years ago - 27,000 BC). The early humans lived in the Stone Age ( Pleistocene ). For comparison: Homo sapiens (anatomically modern man) (language, art, agriculture, cattle breeding, for 130,000 years)
↑ Affect = strong emotion
↑ Man does not live in the world, but in the image (worldview) that he makes of the world, according to Ditfurth. If the worldview should then turn out to be wrong - Ditfurth claims that it is always wrong if you take it exactly - “the world collapses for a person” (“You no longer understand the world”). All worldviews are false in the following sense: They only depict part of the world (in Ditfurth's opinion, a negligible one). Worldviews are closed in the sense that they still allow individuals of a species to find their way around the world. The worldview of a chicken or a dog z. B., although definitely poorer than the worldview of humans, is sufficient for the chicken or the dog to find their way around the world.
↑ Reminder: shotgun = interspecific aggression, military carbine = intraspecific aggression (Konrad Lorenz)
↑ Ditfurth considers the argument that evolution no longer takes place in today's world because humans have overridden natural selection through the establishment of civilization. Of course, there are no more saber-toothed tigers from which humans have to flee. The rule of law and the police (in principle) rule out being killed. A person no longer needs to starve because of the establishment of the welfare state. But, according to Ditfurth, “genetic selection continues uninterruptedly in our species too, with the only (serious) difference that we have replaced natural selection factors with civilizational factors. As a result, the average genetic makeup of the population continues to change, now no longer according to the measure of physical survival, but according to moral values. "
↑ "It can be considered certain that the majority of Germans neither had nor could have had a clear idea of the scope or the details of this policy [what is meant is the Nazi extermination and extermination policy in the East]." (Ralph Giordano: The second guilt or From the burden of being German (1987), p. 197)
↑ Ditfurth emphasizes the importance of correspondence, shared values, since otherwise “human society will dissolve into a chaotic ensemble of schizoid loners haunted by mutual phobic fears.” “None of us need to learn as an infant what a smile on our face is the mother means or, later in life, the expression of skepticism, anger or sympathy on the face of some other member of our kind. If it were otherwise, human society would fall apart in the next instant. "
↑ delusion = objectively unfounded, misunderstanding of reality
↑ Ditfurth's dentist feared he would be expropriated as a “capitalist” if the “Sozis” won an election. But the reality was different: Neither Willy Brandt (SPD) nor Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) (SPD) expropriated the capitalists / entrepreneurs or nationalized their companies after their election victories.
↑ Every Roman legionnaire had the right to single out any Jew in the street and to ask him to carry his equipment a mile for him.
↑ “What do you see the splinter in your brother's eye and not see the beam in your eye?” (Luke 6: 41-42) The motor of the armor spiral. The fears in the head of the other person (“splinters”) are insignificant compared to your own fears (“bars”) that you yourself harbor about the intentions of the opponent / enemy. (Asymmetry of fear perception) This is why counting rockets and tanks is ultimately a wasted effort, since fear of threats is a psychological fear, but not a rational, quantifiable quantity. (cf. also real is only one's own fear )
↑ “It is unlikely that Jesus Christ called himself the Son of God . It is fairly certain that Jesus Christ was the Messenger of God [that is, a prophet] has understood. "( Rupert Lay (theologian): Credo. Ways to Christianity in modern society (1981), p. 35)
↑ “Up there the Lord showed him the land that was spread out at his [Moses] feet ... He [the Lord] said to him: ... I will give it to your descendants! You have now seen it with your own eyes, but you are not allowed to enter it yourself. ”(Deuteronomy 34: 1-4) Ditfurth considers the following interpretation to be possible: a) Your descendants = phylogenetic successors of man, measured in millions of years b) You saw it with your own eyes = the awakening human consciousness in the form of the cerebrum (biological life in the form of single cells has existed for three billion years, the brain stem for 1.5 billion years, the diencephalon for a billion years and the cerebrum for approx. 500 million years ago (see also the review of the book The Spirit Did Not Fall From Heaven (1976) in the mirror and Ditfurth's reflections in the mirror on the evolution of human consciousness / spirit ))
↑ The late antique philosopher Plotinus taught "that in our temporal condition we are not what we should and would like to be, therefore we always expect better from the future and look forward to the fulfillment of our lack." (Quoted from: Arthur Schopenhauer , Parerga etc. . I / 1 (Explanations on Kantian Philosophy), 1977, p. 73)
↑ Ditfurth alludes to the tendency of people to seek their salvation in ideologies / dogmas . But sooner or later they always turned out to be delusional worlds that had nothing or not much to do with reality, e.g. B. National Socialism. And just as a hiker never reaches his destination with a wrong hiking map, ideologies have so far always collided, based on experience in the form of (civil) wars, with the - in the final analysis - the only valid standard in this world: reality, truth , of justice; with the goal towards which evolution, in Ditfurth's opinion, is heading: perfection.
↑ DNB book inventory of interior views ...

[1] Ditfurth refers to the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who sees the meaning of life in “ rising to the authenticity of one's existence” within the framework of the fundamentally given possibilities . ( Being and time )

[2] The diencephalon sits anatomically “between” the brain stem and the cerebrum.

[3] Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989, behavioral scientist) calls instincts "incarnate advisors" who ensure a quick and appropriate reaction (e.g. in the event of danger). If a chick had to learn what a shadow with a short neck ( hawk , behavior program: shape recognition ) is all about, the chickens would have long since died out; see. also Konrad Lorenz (1959): Gestalt perception as a source of scientific knowledge. On: klha.at

[4] An example of a diencephalon is the dog. He is unconditionally at the mercy of his moods, since he does not have a cerebrum like humans do. The dog cannot control his moods, e.g. B. suppress or delay them. Dogs relate everything that happens in the environment to themselves. That is why dogs hide in a protective corner with their tails trapped in a thunderstorm. In the (un) consciousness of the dogs there is a demon living in the thundercloud, aiming at them with lightning. Dogs do not know anything about the objective natural law of electric sparking.

[5] Australopithecines (4.2 million years ago - 2 million years ago), Homo habilis (tool, 2.1 million years ago - 1.5 million years ago), Homo erectus (tool, 1 million years ago - 50,000 BC), Neanderthals (tool, burial of the dead, 220,000 years ago - 27,000 BC). The early humans lived in the Stone Age ( Pleistocene ). For comparison: Homo sapiens (anatomically modern man) (language, art, agriculture, cattle breeding, for 130,000 years)

[6] Affect = strong emotion

[7] Man does not live in the world, but in the image (worldview) that he makes of the world, according to Ditfurth. If the worldview should then turn out to be wrong - Ditfurth claims that it is always wrong if you take it exactly - “the world collapses for a person” (“You no longer understand the world”). All worldviews are false in the following sense: They only depict part of the world (in Ditfurth's opinion, a negligible one). Worldviews are closed in the sense that they still allow individuals of a species to find their way around the world. The worldview of a chicken or a dog z. B., although definitely poorer than the worldview of humans, is sufficient for the chicken or the dog to find their way around the world.

[8] Reminder: shotgun = interspecific aggression, military carbine = intraspecific aggression (Konrad Lorenz)

[9] Ditfurth considers the argument that evolution no longer takes place in today's world because humans have overridden natural selection through the establishment of civilization. Of course, there are no more saber-toothed tigers from which humans have to flee. The rule of law and the police (in principle) rule out being killed. A person no longer needs to starve because of the establishment of the welfare state. But, according to Ditfurth, “genetic selection continues uninterruptedly in our species too, with the only (serious) difference that we have replaced natural selection factors with civilizational factors. As a result, the average genetic makeup of the population continues to change, now no longer according to the measure of physical survival, but according to moral values. "

[10] "It can be considered certain that the majority of Germans neither had nor could have had a clear idea of the scope or the details of this policy [what is meant is the Nazi extermination and extermination policy in the East]." (Ralph Giordano: The second guilt or From the burden of being German (1987), p. 197)

[11] Ditfurth emphasizes the importance of correspondence, shared values, since otherwise “human society will dissolve into a chaotic ensemble of schizoid loners haunted by mutual phobic fears.” “None of us need to learn as an infant what a smile on our face is the mother means or, later in life, the expression of skepticism, anger or sympathy on the face of some other member of our kind. If it were otherwise, human society would fall apart in the next instant. "

[12] usion = objectively unfounded, misunderstanding of reality

[13] Ditfurth's dentist feared he would be expropriated as a “capitalist” if the “Sozis” won an election. But the reality was different: Neither Willy Brandt (SPD) nor Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) (SPD) expropriated the capitalists / entrepreneurs or nationalized their companies after their election victories.

[14] Every Roman legionnaire had the right to single out any Jew in the street and to ask him to carry his equipment a mile for him.

[15] “What do you see the splinter in your brother's eye and not see the beam in your eye?” (Luke 6: 41-42) The motor of the armor spiral. The fears in the head of the other person (“splinters”) are insignificant compared to your own fears (“bars”) that you yourself harbor about the intentions of the opponent / enemy. (Asymmetry of fear perception) This is why counting rockets and tanks is ultimately a wasted effort, since fear of threats is a psychological fear, but not a rational, quantifiable quantity. (cf. also real is only one's own fear )

[16] “It is unlikely that Jesus Christ called himself the Son of God . It is fairly certain that Jesus Christ was the Messenger of God [that is, a prophet] has understood. "( Rupert Lay (theologian): Credo. Ways to Christianity in modern society (1981), p. 35)

[17] “Up there the Lord showed him the land that was spread out at his [Moses] feet ... He [the Lord] said to him: ... I will give it to your descendants! You have now seen it with your own eyes, but you are not allowed to enter it yourself. ”(Deuteronomy 34: 1-4) Ditfurth considers the following interpretation to be possible: a) Your descendants = phylogenetic successors of man, measured in millions of years b) You saw it with your own eyes = the awakening human consciousness in the form of the cerebrum (biological life in the form of single cells has existed for three billion years, the brain stem for 1.5 billion years, the diencephalon for a billion years and the cerebrum for approx. 500 million years ago (see also the review of the book The Spirit Did Not Fall From Heaven (1976) in the mirror and Ditfurth's reflections in the mirror on the evolution of human consciousness / spirit ))

[18] The late antique philosopher Plotinus taught "that in our temporal condition we are not what we should and would like to be, therefore we always expect better from the future and look forward to the fulfillment of our lack." (Quoted from: Arthur Schopenhauer , Parerga etc. . I / 1 (Explanations on Kantian Philosophy), 1977, p. 73)

[19] Ditfurth alludes to the tendency of people to seek their salvation in ideologies / dogmas . But sooner or later they always turned out to be delusional worlds that had nothing or not much to do with reality, e.g. B. National Socialism. And just as a hiker never reaches his destination with a wrong hiking map, ideologies have so far always collided, based on experience in the form of (civil) wars, with the - in the final analysis - the only valid standard in this world: reality, truth , of justice; with the goal towards which evolution, in Ditfurth's opinion, is heading: perfection.

[20] DNB book inventory of interior views ...