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Stone Age Fantasies
According to the logic of the truant organisation ‘Fridays for Future’, cars will disappear if all parking spaces are abolished. A commentary by Ludwig Bayer.
Even the popular truant organisation ‘Fridays for Future’ sent a speaker, 15-year-old Lena Müller, to the International Pedagogical Conference in Salzburg. Before 250 participants, she presented her ingenious trick for abolishing cars; elegantly introduced by abolishing all parking spaces. A clever child: ‘As long as parking spaces exist in cities, people will use them. If they are gone, people will switch – to bicycles or public transport.’ This way, blinkered socialists spare themselves the dramatic scenes that always accompany expropriations. (Bruno Kreisky knew: ‘Nobody lets anything be taken away from them.’)
The keynote speaker was the moral theologian Michael Rosenberger, who demanded drastic eco-taxes. As a spokesperson for the left-green wing, he advocated for renunciation and frugality, which supposedly enables ‘sustainable happiness’, because motivation via money is, in the long run, just as unsustainable as a ‘purely intrinsic motivation’ of fascination and love for creation. Anyone striving for frugality represents an idea diametrically opposed to modern performance-driven society. Consequently, the green theologian said: ‘If we want to experience renunciation as happiness, we must abandon this arrogant thinking that only the best, with an ‘excellent’ grade, is sufficient.’ For the happiness of life, one needs very little.
The barely empathetic master drinker Winston Churchill jubilantly declared in 1945 that the British Air Force had succeeded in ‘bombing Germany back to the Stone Age’. Today, it is the Greens who want to achieve this even without aerial bombs. Reinforced by left-wing Catholics, who, of course, do not speak for the majority of Christians. For in the 21st century, modern science is capable of developing new future-proof solutions for ecological problems. A ‘European Silicon Valley’, networked with other high-tech centres worldwide, can ensure what most people desire: the expansion of our economic achievements combined with responsibility and protection for God’s creation.
c Featured image: European Union 2017, Mauro Bottaro
