Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: How does reflection influence our moral and ethical convictions? Recorded on the road through Austria, Dr. Yasemin Yazan explores this question with Marc and Jürgen — from a philosopher’s claim that morality can be learned, to Marc’s own unconscious bias about gender roles, to why ethics is a product of culture while morality is a product of civilization…
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
A very good morning to you. This morning we’re continuing our topic of reflection and ethics, and I’m really curious how it develops following on from the last few days, so we can pick up on this or that on one hand, and on the other see how the room continues to develop with this focus topic under the reflection theme. So, today we want to look at how reflection influences our moral and ethical convictions — that’s the question we want to engage with. And I’m really, really curious what your first impulses and thoughts on the topic are. Especially those of you who were already here when we talked about the ethics topic quite classically, so to speak, without further connections — feel free to pick up on this or that from those rooms too, to refresh the memory. That’s maybe not a bad idea, in the sense of repetition. And then to actually build the bridge and look, with regard to reflection, at what ethics actually means in this context, or how the whole thing connects. And yes, as always, a recording running in the background, meaning we’ll publish this later too. So anyone who joins automatically agrees to that too. Just a note again for anyone joining the room for the first time today. And we have three small room rules: a profile picture where you’re clearly recognizable, first and last name, and at least one sentence in your bio, simply to make sure these are genuine contributions and not random trolling. And anyone who doesn’t want that can of course, as always, use the chat to bring in thoughts, questions, or impulses, so we can pick up on that over the course of the conversation too. And with that, I’d like to warmly welcome Marc. A very good morning, dear Marc. What are your first thoughts on the topic?
Yes, dear Yasemin, today I really just have to say good morning to the group. I’m coming onto the stage today and I’m here with you. I know Jürgen’s joining a bit later, and I’ll openly admit, or I’d like to say, I want to hold back on today’s topic. Something came up, and I’d like to tell you about it, share it with you. I watched a video this morning, and I came across — let’s see if I quote him correctly — Georg Lind, on the topic “Can morality be learned?” And a flood of new insights opened up for me there, which I haven’t processed yet, because the topic is so complex that I really don’t presume, not at all, to say more than a hint about this topic, reflection and ethics and how it works, because it was so complex and interesting. But what I could share with you — I tried to structure it a bit — the topic, the video I watched, is called “Can Morality Be Learned,” and this Georg Lind is a philosopher, and I came across his theories, which aren’t so complex that you can’t understand them at all, but which are new territory for me. But so I can share something with you at all — this Georg Lind starts from the assumption that democracy, or our society, can only function if there are moral principles, and if we all discuss and reflect on them together. And then he did a study, but I’m not in this scientific context enough to reproduce it in a way where you’d say, ah, that’s what he means, because I myself still have trouble understanding it. So there are various experiments. There are also various psychologists, and it’s also about unconscious bias and conscious bias. And he then more or less argued why many psychologists simply arrive at wrong results trying to get at our unconscious bias. Which is so complex for me that I really still need a few hours to understand it. But to at least be able to touch on your headline a bit — what I understood is that you can say, morality, yes, morality can be approached. And morality is one thing. There’s a difference — some people say morality is a matter of attitude, not of ability. And he believes morality has to be learned. These are skills you can learn. And most people — I found this point he makes very interesting, and I can follow it — there are various testing methods, both regarding the difference to these psychologists. And we’ve already had this too, that we recognized that someone uses their own arguments just to support their opinion. So whether we only look for what we already see, or whether we reflect, whether we reflect on our opinion and can then change it. But the topic of the video was really just about whether morality can be learned. Yes, it can be learned. But he came to the conclusion that most people aren’t capable of it, and that’s why I can’t really go into the topic, because I’m still not clear on it myself. The topic is, how can we change our morality through reflection? I can’t answer that today. Maybe we can talk about it together and the room will develop on its own. But I noticed that the topic is so complex, and I had such a flood of new information, that today I actually started with the sentence, I know that I don’t know.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. I think it’s great that you watched something like that. I’m sure that over the course of the room, this or that might even get reinforced and connected more strongly through this exchange. And let me briefly go into the definitions. I simply looked up morality and ethics on Wikipedia. For ethics it says, ethics is that branch of philosophy concerned with the preconditions and evaluation of human action. Its subject matter is therefore morality, especially with regard to its justifiability and reflection. So here we already have this concept of reflection again, and ultimately it’s also about justifiability. And then we especially also have evaluations, because if we look up morality, morality is defined as the part of behavioral conventions, or rules, whose observance is evaluated as good, right, in interpersonal relations, and whose non-observance is evaluated as evil, wrong, or similar. And we’d already talked about this topic before, and among other things we’d established that morality can be different everywhere, depending on what cultural background you have, how you grew up, how you were socialized. That means, just because something is considered fine or acceptable in a certain society here, that doesn’t mean it’s the same in another cultural background. It can be exactly the opposite. Other topics might be considered more important there, other interpersonal rules followed, and so on, where you might even be totally surprised if you’d never encountered that before. And we often only notice this when we, for example, stay longer in another country, and not just at a resort hotel or a club vacation, but actually get to know the people and the customs there, and encounter things that might initially be foreign to us in our everyday life. Then we often notice, oh, okay, sure, it can be different. And we’re initially maybe irritated. That’s really, really exciting at that point. And so also being cautious with these aspects of evaluation, especially this good, right, or evil, wrong, or similar. Those are evaluations we make, each against the backdrop of the socialization that took place, so we can make this classification. We’d also established, to reconnect to the neurosciences here too, that humans need a certain orientation. So it’s also important to have a certain morality that gives us guardrails and so on, and at the same time it’s also important that we’re aware that our morality doesn’t necessarily correspond to someone else’s morality, and that there can be really big differences here, and not in the sense of “our morality is the right one and the other person’s is wrong,” but that it develops contextually, historically, and accordingly different moralities can prevail in different places. And that ethics, so to speak, is what’s superordinate. And that’s also nice here again, you mentioned it too, with the philosopher Georg Lind, whom I personally don’t know, and I haven’t seen the film either, but maybe that’s a reason to take a look. I’ve already made a note of it and I’ll watch it too. Maybe you can also say something about where to find it, where you just watched it fresh. Maybe there’s a way to look it up. And that ethics is, so to speak, the superordinate area that concerns itself with the evaluation of human action and looks at that as its subject too. And then we also get into the area of reflection. Marc, would you like to build on this?
Yes, I’ll gladly say it again, because this was really one of the films… I had to sit down for it. I got up really early. And really concentrate on it. That’s not something you can listen to or watch on the side while also having a book open on the table. I found it on YouTube, because you find several things. The title is “Can Morality Be Learned? Georg Lind in Conversation.” I’ll gladly send you the link afterward too. And what I found, to put it more simply again, is that he explained that all people want to be moral. I understand that too. But putting that into practice is really hard. And 90 percent — we’ve discussed this often too — 90 percent is determined by unconscious feelings. And the video is really just about the methods, what different methods different psychologists have to make the unconscious visible. Starting with Freud. And what I find really interesting, Georg Lind said about himself that when he retired, there were a lot of psychologists who were happy he was gone, who also couldn’t stand each other, because of course there are different scientific approaches. He also compares, in the video, the approach of a psychologist to that of a physicist, and so on. But what I’ve seen so far, from the gut, I can follow everything he said. So I wouldn’t dismiss him as a crackpot at all — it was all coherent to me. Just certain terms are so new, and that really requires such high concentration, because we’re being invited to follow a thought process that’s foreign to us. That requires an incredible amount of energy for our brain. But I can come back to your explanation, dear Yasemin. You’re completely right. We’re shaped, or what we’ve been shaped by, or what we consider right, that shapes our morality too. And an example I have, which I’ve mentioned several times before, and I also recently saw a current article on LinkedIn from a woman — it’s about this: I also grew up with the classic gender role model. So, dad earns money and mom takes care of the kids. Taking care of the kids means, mom cooks, mom makes sure we do our homework, mom makes sure we’re dressed, mom drives us places in the evening. So really the classic role behavior. I grew up with that. And through this role behavior, which was also right for me, because I probably assumed as a child that this is how it is in every family, at some point when I was older I met a management consultant who lived next door to us. And I wanted to be polite. And she told me — I’ll tell you now what happened — we talked, and she said, I’m a management consultant and have my own company. And I knew she had three kids. And without thinking, through what I’d learned before, that mom takes care of the kids and is responsible for that, I said, you’re a management consultant, how do you manage that with the kids? And the answer she gave me, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. She looked at me and laughed and said, funny, nobody asks my husband that.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. And I think, right after we picked up these one or two definitions from Wikipedia for ethics and morality again, and made the first approach a bit easier through these examples, the way you’ve now brought them in, to look more closely now at what’s actually happening there. And exactly what you described as an example — that means, an irritation arose there, and that possibly led to you reflecting on it again. Maybe you’d like to describe a bit more closely what that actually did to you. So, in that moment it was at first just an answer. But the answer from your counterpart doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a reflection or anything like that. But apparently it caused something in you that led you to engage with it, and maybe you made a correction here, or however you’d put it. And exactly, let’s first take a closer look at that, dear Marc.
You ask good questions, dear Yasemin, I’ve always told you that. That’s exactly what happened. I asked myself the question, dear Marc, reflection is nothing other than checking your thinking. And then I checked whether the thinking, the experiences I’d had, whether they really applied to everyone. And then I arrived at the insight, after the reflection, so after checking my thought pattern, I thought, well, who says that all families are structured that way, that dad works and earns money and mom takes care of the kids. And this thinking, this behavior pattern and this thinking, also led, for a really, really long time, to exactly that happening — when someone told me, my husband stays home and takes care of the kids and I earn the money as the woman, that popped up unconsciously without thinking. Hm, strange, the man doesn’t work and he takes care of the kids, that’s a bit foreign, because the man has to bring the money home, the man has to be the earner. And that’s when I noticed what kind of — I don’t want to say conservative, that would be an evaluation again — but I recognized what behavior pattern I move in, how I grew up, what I consider right, and then I saw something that’s also right, but that I just wasn’t familiar with yet. Because it was unfamiliar, I noticed it, and I only noticed the difference at all once I asked myself the question, well, just because I haven’t seen it yet doesn’t mean it can’t be right and exist too. And that’s exactly the reflection you asked me about, this checking way of thinking. Who says — even if everyone does it — but who says that’s right, from a democratic point of view too, why does the man have to bring the money home if the woman has a doctorate or is a professor and, with her opportunities, earns three or four times as much, and who says a man can take care of children worse than a woman? That’s our role behavior, shaped over at least a century. Of course also by the church and also by the state, which also prescribes a behavior pattern for us, where the state at some point defined that a family is mom, dad, child, two children are even better, and that also led to it not being possible for a long time, or in many countries still not being possible, for homosexual couples to marry, or for people who love each other to live together, because the state doesn’t want that, because there are prescribed thought patterns and structures there too. And questioning that is really, really exciting. And that’s why I stepped into this pitfall, and then started thinking about it, and thinking about why do I think that? How did I arrive at this answer? And then, what I already said yesterday, can I think something different? Could I have come to a different answer? And that’s exactly this reflection process that then takes place, but that can only take place if I engage with it, and if I’m not looking for answers or asking myself questions that only confirm that what I already think is already right. So openness is part of that.
Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much. And there’s of course a certain difference here too. I can’t judge it a hundred percent, but as for what the result of this is or will be, maybe we’ll see that over time too. But interestingly, exactly this example you picked up is really a recurring thing, I find. At least for me, because we also live these reversed roles, so to speak, with my husband. That means, I’m responsible for earning money and my husband for raising the kids. And that really does keep leading to irritations, and to exactly these kinds of follow-up questions too. So quite regularly, either I or my husband get asked what he does otherwise, in his — and I’m pretty sure that question generally doesn’t get asked of women. And this time it actually came from within the family again too, so it leads to irritations within the family too, not just among friends, acquaintances, or strangers. And this time it was that my aunt somehow brought up the topic again and asked why my husband doesn’t work. And I then turned the question back, because my aunt
had raised children herself and never worked in her life, but really took care of raising the children. So why had she worked, then. And then she said, she took care of raising the children. And then I said, my husband does that too. And then came the answer, yes, but I’m a woman. And then I said, yes, and my husband is a man. And then we both had to laugh. And that was totally exciting. But that’s exactly where you see these patterns, so to speak. My aunt then said, I think I just come from a different generation. And then I said, well, that may be, that it might be more pronounced in your generation. But honestly, this is still really, really widespread today, that these kinds of questions keep coming up. But the question is, what actually makes the difference? Doesn’t the man have exactly the same right to decide to take care of raising the children, and so on? And so an accordant conversation developed. As I said, I can’t judge what the result of that will be, or what got triggered in her brain, so to speak, and how she might evaluate that in the future, or whether her stance on it changes. But it’s definitely totally exciting to see that different things happen here, that unconscious bias also takes effect here accordingly. That means, what we’ve learned socially to evaluate as right or wrong — against that backdrop, really interesting questions automatically pop up, and it’s only through the conversation, through the discussion, through the exchange, through the dialogue, that it becomes possible, for example in this context, to actually lead into irritation and open up the possibility of entering into reflection too. Whether the person then reflects on it, how the person then deals with it, remains to be seen for now, because that can be really, really different. One person might take it in to think about it, another might not, but it does show, I’d say as a tendency personally, that reflection can also enable us to reconsider moral convictions, approach them differently, and so on. Because only in the moment when we become aware of certain things, then reflect on them, and maybe arrive at new evaluations again, can we also change set boundaries, societal ones too, because the more people who do that, the more change ultimately takes place too. And that’s then the societal shift we can also observe, by the way, which also keeps happening continuously with many, many topics. Jürgen, a very good morning. I’m curious what you have to say on the topic.
Good morning, dear Yasemin. Good morning, Marc, and everyone in the room. Unfortunately I’m jumping in right in the middle now, which I already said I don’t like to do, but as far as I remember, the topic has a connecting point to previous rooms where we exchanged views on ethics and morality. I don’t know if you’ve already gone into the distinction — what’s the difference between ethics and morality — what triggered me, like it was for Yasemin, was this thing about different generations. Where a flash immediately came to me — right, one of the essential insights from that earlier room for us was that we said, morality, or maybe ethics, but morality doesn’t actually exist, because it’s subject to constant change. And that’s also why I felt triggered to come onto the stage now, even more triggered than my favorite topic, conscious bias. And I’m asking now, because I don’t know if you’ve already directly addressed the answer to the question in the room’s subtitle. How does reflection influence our moral and ethical convictions? I’d like to ask you that, dear Yasemin — has that already been addressed or even answered? Thank you.
Yes, thank you so much, dear Jürgen. No, we haven’t answered it yet. We’ve now, so to speak, first briefly addressed the terms ethics and morality again, to draw the differentiation more clearly. I find it wonderful that you’ve already built the bridge to the previous room we had, with the intermediate results. And in the next step we’d now, so to speak, go through the examples, to maybe illustrate it better, and address the answer to the sub-headline. Jürgen.
Yes, I’ll assume you’ve picked up the results from that earlier room’s definition. I’ll gladly go into the template and give an answer to your subline. Let me say it again, for my own understanding and so we have a shared understanding — for me, morality is the answer to, or expression of, what we consider right or wrong. What we consider right or wrong. Ethics, for me, is the answer to the question of why we classify something as right or wrong, good or evil. That’s the basis, just to be clear again, that’s the basis for answering your question, how can reflection now support these two subareas, and if I go by this definition — morality addresses the what, answers the what, and ethics the why — then, for me, two different levels of reflection emerge that I can engage in. And with that, also triggers that lead me to reflect on it. Namely, when I reflect on my morality, my morality, then those are the positions I classify as good or as evil, or classify as bad. That’s something absurd. If I rise up to reflect ethically, then I’m on a completely different level, in my view. Because then I go into reflection with myself, and ask myself, how did you actually get to the point where you hold these very specific moral understandings of good and evil today. And there, in my view, we’re in a dimension, a superordinate, I’d say meta-level, because then I’m reflecting on what the learning processes actually were, or what the socialization was, and what the status of my education is, that I have this ethics today and can trace it back to the morality I hold today. I hope that wasn’t too confusing, but I hope it became clear. I find this subline of yours today extraordinarily demanding, like with many other rooms too, extraordinarily demanding, because when I read it, it opened up such a wide range for the answer, and it also became clear to me, through the connection with reflection, what dimensions morality and ethics actually have, which in everyday language, you could maybe confirm, are almost treated as synonyms. But it became clear to me that it’s a completely different dimension we’re talking about here. Thank you.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. And I find, especially against the backdrop that we’ve already discussed ethics and morality before in at least one of the rooms and entered into reflection there, it’s easier from my point of view today to pick up on this or that again and look at this reflection aspect once more, like a kind of continuation, so to speak. And I’d like to ask you again, Jürgen, these two things you just named at the end, I think that’s really important again, these considerations you made. When I reflect on my morality, that means, and when I rise up to reflect ethically, that means. Could you please summarize those two points again, that would be great.
Yes, gladly. So when I’m operating morally, I think about my value framework. Maybe that’s enough as an explanation — my value framework, namely that I evaluate very specific character traits in myself as evil or good, and categorize them into these subaspects. So, an answer to what my values actually are. And when I try to reflect on the ethical level, I’m saying this quite deliberately now, then I go down into the depths to find out why I arrived at these values in the first place, at my current status today, with more than 70 complete orbits of the earth around the sun. And if you’d asked me this question 20 years ago, the answer would have been a completely different one, and that’s also why my opening statement was to say, morality, in any case morality, is subject to constant change. I hope I’ve answered your question accordingly.
Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much. Marc, would you like to build on this too?
I’m not sure if I’m quoting the video correctly. And that’s exactly the crux of it, dear Jürgen. I sent the link to that video this morning too. This question, and if I understood Georg Lind correctly, morality can be learned, you can practice it, but where most people have difficulty is with this ethical evaluation — why did I arrive at these values, am I willing to accept other values, and can I reconsider that, because that’s a matter of training, and that’s why they still end up with a morality that results from everything we’ve learned, and that’s what makes the whole thing so difficult, and that’s what’s occupying me right now, because we’ve talked about this before — if we assume that, if we assume we’re a sum of our experiences and everything we’ve lived through. And the biggest topic we currently have in Germany is integration. And I can’t find an answer for myself, is it even possible for integration to take place in certain areas at all. I once saw a show with Lanz, where it was explained by Lebanese people why it turned out this way, and so on. But I’ll keep it short now. There’s a certain group of people who are adults now, and they’ve simply learned that there are corrupt politicians, that there are corrupt police officers, that there’s no justice, and the only, the only values that are really always there, that’s family. That’s the only thing you can count on. And now I come to these clan structures that exist in Germany, and you’ve understood that much, much better too. They have certain moral values now too, and if I’ve learned that by the time I’m 30 or 40, and then someone comes to us and says, listen, with us it works differently. Our politicians are all totally nice and you can talk to them, and the police are totally fair, and the justice system, you don’t need to worry at all, after all we’re in a democracy — for someone to just rattle that off, and then reconsider their morality and their ethics, I think that’s really, really difficult. And I’d find it more honest if our politics, or politics in general, said, of course we help other people, but we can’t expect that we can integrate them, and we also can’t expect them to adopt our morality. And that’s exactly this difficulty, the wish we have that someone changes their behavior, that someone adapts to our behavior, and then, looking at a topic scientifically, really without any feelings, is that even possible, if the person never learned it? Can we even expect people, exactly what you described, Jürgen, that the ethical can be changed, that someone can do that, if they never learned it? And I’ll repeat your definition again, Jürgen, if I understood you correctly. Ethics is when I think about why I arrived at these values in the first place. In the example with the police or in clan structures, why did I arrive at the insight that you can trust politicians and the justice system? Well, simply, because that’s how it was for me in that country. And just the statement alone, “with us it’s different,” doesn’t, in my opinion, lead to achieving that kind of behavioral change. And whether that’s bad or not, that would be an evaluation again. But just looking at the fact, that’s just how it is. And that’s what I miss in the discussion — that since we judge 90 percent, sorry, 90 percent from the gut, from feelings, just to stay scientific and factual for once and say, this person currently has no other option to do it, because they never learned it. They maybe never learned this ability, morality, which is what the video I mentioned this morning was about. Can morality be learned? Yes, it can be learned. But to be able to learn it, you need certain abilities. If nobody taught me these abilities, and if I’ve never done it, you can’t expect me to suddenly have a different morality or a different ethics within an hour.
Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much. I love your examples, Marc. And this example you just picked up also shows the explosiveness, so to speak, or the challenges that come with it. One aspect, we already mentioned this today, is the point of unconscious bias, which applies here on one hand. That means, a lot of this isn’t really consciously known to us at all, and maybe it first requires this awareness-raising, to even realize that we evaluate certain things morally, how we feel about them, and then to look at a meta-level, how did I actually arrive at thinking the way I think in this context, having this attitude, and evaluating it that way. And on the other hand, especially in practice, when you look at it — and that’s why I found the example so great — especially with migration and integration policy and so on, there’s been a lot of discussion, a lot done, for many, many years, and still, in quotation marks, with manageable results, against the backdrop that on one hand this unconscious bias applies, and on the other hand there’s always this expectation of the other person adapting to our morality, so to speak, and adjusting their behavior accordingly, without engaging with what happens on the other side and whether that’s even desired at all. And at the same time there’s this level, how can I even accompany that, because that’s also a question of accompaniment, because the other people with a different culture who are, say, taken in here in Germany, they’re also partly not even aware of it themselves. Now regardless of their willingness, whether they want to change something or not, this process of change also requires appropriate accompaniment, with appropriate questions, appropriate spaces where reflection also becomes possible. And all of that usually doesn’t happen in this form, but instead, for example, maybe you look at what language courses can be offered. And that’s certainly important, so they can communicate with us. But that’s not everything at this point. That shows this complexity, and at the same time this expectation, on one hand to say, well, if someone from another country is taken in with us, then they should please adapt their behavior accordingly. Because they’re a guest here with us, in quotation marks. But we don’t only have guests here. It depends on which groups we’re talking about here, whether these are people who are here temporarily and might leave the country again, which you’d at least initially assume, or whether — especially with integration policy and so on, much discussed — if we look at the former guest workers who worked here for a long time, started new families, had children, and are now in the second, third generation, already the third generation, living here in Germany. What does that mean in this context, because then the discussion maybe also needs to be led on completely different levels, and the change also needs to be accompanied, and not just with “the others have to adapt to us,” but what does that mean for us as a society, growing together and dealing with each other here too. That’s why I find what you picked up totally exciting. Jürgen, would you like to build on this too?
Yes, I think a really essential aspect that you and Marc both addressed, dear Marc, thank you for the link, I wasn’t able to watch this video due to time constraints and for another reason — I know, in quotation marks, Mr. Lind, and I know you have to be really well-prepared to follow him. But the topic itself, under which the video runs, is actually the bridge to what you said, dear Yasemin, just now at the end. Namely, the necessity, if I’m here, from my point of view, the necessity, if I’m in this area, both with regard to morality, so the prevailing values, and the justification, namely the derivation, why do we have this morality, on one hand on our side, on the other hand on the migration side, that this is a process that must be assisted and guided by a very wise companion. Because I think, let me say it from another angle again, ethics is actually essentially connected for me, it’s also such a classification topic for me. Ethics, for me, is a resultant quantity from culture. And morality, for me, is a resultant quantity from civilization. With that I’d like to explain the distinction between culture and civilization exactly with this point, saying that culture is what has developed, over generations, as a foundation, a base of ideas, of value attitudes, and has had a very long dwell time and also confirmation through time. In our example, that’s the ethical construct based on Christianity and the Ten Commandments. Which — sorry, I have to quickly go around the corner here — morality is a resultant quantity from civilization, meaning from the currently prevailing form of society, in our case a democracy. And just from this distinction, if you compare it now — from the world of those who’ve always lived here, I’ll use that term now, and the people who come to us from completely different areas — then, I’ll repeat myself now, an enormous range opens up, not just of helplessness, but also of the emotion of belief and cultural understanding. And that’s why I say, who, please, can claim to master and conclude this process on their own, purely from reflection alone. And that’s why I say it requires a very wise, very insightful, and above all
an integrative and mediating companion, because we’re touching the very foundations, really, that’s my firm conviction, the very foundations of our own understanding with this topic. Thank you for listening.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much, dear Jürgen. And this couldn’t be more current, dear Jürgen. And then I come back to what I always say, 90 percent — now I’m getting into politics, but without wanting to drag it in here — 90 percent is influenced by feelings, because this understanding isn’t there. That has nothing to do with intelligence, or with someone having studied, but because you also have to learn this ability to reflect. And the best example just occurs to me again, because 90 percent is influenced by feelings — the absolute best example is Brexit. And it’s so simple once you’ve at least understood this mechanism from an educational standpoint, how populism is made through feelings. That’s the most important instrument. You see it with Trump, you see it with Brexit. And with Brexit, for example, it was like this — people were told, listen, this can’t be, in Europe we pay billions, billions flow into the EU, and here in our own country we can’t properly treat people because our hospitals have no money. And I promise you, if we leave the EU, we’ll have so many billions that we’ll have the best healthcare system ever. And then someone sits in their country and says, what’s more important to me now — well, people are also egoists — do I want someone in Greece to be treated well with EU money, for them to be doing well, or do I want, if my parents get sick, for them to have the best medical care, and then a politician stands up front and says, okay, these eight billion or ten billion or whatever, we can invest that much better in the country, without mentioning that if the country isolates itself from the European Union, the economy might go down the drain just the same, jobs get lost, and the whole scenario that comes with it — then people react emotionally, and I find the art of politics, and generally the art of rhetoric, is simply to leave out very specific areas, to search for the feelings that influence all of us, that’s family, health, survival, and the fear of strangers, and you don’t need to study for that, we just need to look within ourselves, and this room has, more than ever, and your statement has, more than ever, led again to the insight, if 90 percent is influenced by feelings, to learn, and for education to think about and reflect on that. There we are again with reflection. Why do I feel what I feel? Why do I think what I think? Can I also think something different? That doesn’t yet help me answer many questions. But understanding these processes, this reflection, that’s a milestone. That’s at least a milestone, to be able to carefully push open new doors and to then also arrive at new insights.
Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much. And I think that shows, at this point too, how important — and here we’re back at this concept of education — how important education is as a foundation in this context, and not understood as what we learn in school today, so not understood as qualification, but really as the concept of education with the mandate to enable a person’s self-determination, through appropriate accompaniment, in which it becomes possible to know, to recognize, who am I, what do I want, where do I want to go too, and to arrive at self-efficacy and to also be able to establish life competence. And that’s where aspects like reflection come in — I find this makes it really, really clear again, against the backdrop of what complexity this topic has that we’ve addressed today, and how important this foundation is, and that has nothing to do with any school diploma or anything like that. I think that becomes relatively recognizable through this exchange, this discussion we’re having right now, that it’s not done with a school diploma or something like that, but that it’s really about this. And we’d also picked up the topic of future skills and things like that. From my point of view, it’s always been important to practice reflection, in order to be able to make the right — in quotation marks, whatever that is — the fitting classifications and so on, and to form your own opinion and your own stance, attitude, and so on, and maybe also to make adjustments, make corrections where necessary, etc. And in that sense, from my point of view, it’s not a future skill in that sense, but we could package it as a future skill too. So, what skills and competencies do we actually need for the future to find our way in this world? And reflection is certainly one of the components that plays a really essentially large role here, that represents an urgent necessity in this toolbox, so to speak, as a capability to be attained, because without reflection, a lot of everything else that comes after — and specifically the conscious reflection we’re talking about here, under the heading reflection — a lot can also be derived quite differently, and dealt with quite differently as a result. Yes, go ahead, Marc.
These past few days I’ve also had this going through my head, dear Yasemin, you mentioned it too. When I’m traveling, I’ve also already said, I have to go back to Germany. And I had to think about that again, because you mentioned that recently too. And then it really went through my head again yesterday, what madness — I say, I have to go back to Germany, while people want to come to Germany who are drowning, who are dying, who are losing their families, and I say, I have to go back to Germany. What madness. And then I thought about it, went into reflection, thought, the only luck that separates me from these people — I’m glad to be able to live in Germany, let it rain, my god, and let it be expensive gas, doesn’t matter either. And let’s complain about politicians, doesn’t matter at all. Germany is really one of the countries where I’d want to live if I were born here. And so yesterday I reflected and asked myself, dear Marc, what would you bring to this country if you weren’t German, what abilities would you bring to make this society better? Or what have you actually already done in Germany, so people would say, wow, that Marc, yes, that’s really a good German, he’s really moved our country forward, he’s really done something great. I was simply born here and I use these structures, and I haven’t done anything special yet that distinguishes me, that would earn me a Federal Cross of Merit or something, but these thought processes only arose through reflection, that I said, what madness, and what — to even be able to say that, I don’t have to, I get to go back to Germany after a trip, I have no problem at the border, I just enter, I can enter ten or twenty times a day. And what did I do to deserve being allowed that? I didn’t earn that. So I didn’t earn it by making such a great contribution to Germany. I’m only allowed that because I had the luck, the great luck, of being born here.
Yes, thank you so much. Jürgen, would you like to build on this too?
Yes, heartfelt thanks, dear Marc, for your emotionally delivered position, which I fully, sorry, which I fully — you saw it — share. I’d like to make one more attempt, to build a connection to our former overarching topic of education, which you mentioned, dear Yasemin. Back then I took away that, for me, education, this ability to act and live self-determined, self-controlled, represents the pinnacle, the actual meta-level of our science, so to speak. And I took away that there are at least three essential preliminary stages to that. The first preliminary stage is learning, in its various forms, however we can learn. The second level is socialization. That means, the influence and benefit that the environment brings to me personally, or that puts me in a position to act as a social being. And the third point was knowledge. That includes not just factual knowledge alone, but also methodological knowledge, how I approach a problem, and it includes experiential knowledge. And these three preliminary stages toward education are, altogether, four levels, swim lanes, or layers, whatever you want to call them. And now, after our discussion today, I’ll say that reflection has to apply at least once on every level. And the reason for me is how important this topic of reflection is, in its full scope. First, the knowledge of what reflection means. Second, the knowledge of what types of reflection there are, self-reflection and reflection of the social environment. And third, now here comes the topic again that we haven’t covered yet, the methods, how I reflect. And specifically, at each of these individual stages I just named. And I’ll go so far as to claim that this is practically an inevitable sequence, because reflecting on whether, and on what, I’ve taken from learning and socialization into my life in terms of moral values — if I don’t do that, I’m questioning whether, with my education in the final shape of my personal education, I can even answer this question about morality and ethics. Precisely because I haven’t reflected on it. Thank you for listening.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. Marc, would you like to build on this too?
I’d like to build on this, but I’m currently overwhelmed by what Jürgen said. So many words. And I just tried to imagine, if I hadn’t engaged with the topic so much and really already reflected on it, that I’d be completely overwhelmed right now as a listener, because there are so many words where I have to be clear on the meaning so my brain can put together a new picture from it. The only thing I’d take away, if I’d heard about this topic for the first time, is how important this is, and I can fully underline this, how important reflection is, whatever method, how important this checking, reflective thinking is, because this checking way of thinking, and questioning things, and doubting, as you call it, dear Jürgen, that really opens new doors, and we suddenly see things we hadn’t seen before, and they were there. And I sent Jürgen a photo this week — I was pumping gas, a totally mundane process, I was pumping gas and photographed the prices with my phone, because I wanted to show them to my partner. And in doing so I noticed these numbers were flickering. I hadn’t perceived that with my eye. I said, what is that? And then I made a video and saw these numbers, it was like a wall going back and forth. It was an LED display. It was just flickering. I put the phone down, clearly. And in that moment, seeing it, it became clear to me that in that moment, I can’t even trust my own personal perception of what I see, because my phone saw something completely different. Why? I can’t explain that technically now, why the display was flickering. But this realization, that even I, when I step out of the car and look around, everyone perceives the world differently, and even my phone perceives the world differently, and I can’t trust my own perception — Marc can’t trust his own eyes, which isn’t particularly hard, because I’m blind as a mole, I think I have minus six or seven diopters — but that was another insight for me again on the topic of reflection, and really up close, not just reflection in the sense of thinking about things, but also the perception that comes at me through eyes, ears, and smells.
Yes, wonderful, dear friends, thank you so much. Then I suggest that, with a view to the time, we move into the closing round today, and then I’ll also gladly announce the author breakfast for tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to that too. Marc, Jürgen — or Jürgen, Marc, let’s do it the other way around today, since Marc just spoke. What are the essential highlights from the room you’d like to underline once more from your point of view?
Way too many. Way too many, and I’m glad, because I’m exhausted, because — I already said this is a heart topic for me, first of all. Second, the room again pushed open new doors, new insights, seeing things from a completely different side. Heartfelt thanks, dear Marc, and to you too, Yasemin, for always building these bridges and asking new, wise questions, to keep moving the topic forward. And now I’m going to withdraw, I already said this, within the scope of this topic, to reflect and go inward, and say, and note once more, what did I learn today? Thank you and a wonderful weekend to you all. And yes, we’ll be in touch.
Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much, Marc.
I’m endlessly grateful to you, dear Yasemin, for the room. For me, the highlight is what Jürgen just said — always asking, questioning, what could this be good for? And I think, if each of us individually questions for ourselves whether what we think is right, and whether we could think something different, then we enter reflection, and probably only in hindsight will each of us at some point realize what a great room this was, and what new meta-level it brought us to, brought them to. This room exhausted me too, because it’s really intellectual. It demands such high concentration, and at the same time a thousand thoughts are shooting through your head while you’re also dealing with your own feelings. I can only thank you, dear Yasemin, for this room and for this topic. This is, for me, in the three years I’ve been on Clubhouse, one of the most exciting, and not just one of the most exciting, but also one of the most important topics, because this topic, this reflection, has the biggest impact on the rest of our lives. Thank you.
Yes, thank you so much to both of you too, dear Jürgen, Marc, and also everyone else here, for listening to so many episodes, being here, joining in, also bringing in questions through the chat and contributing your own thoughts. Because that’s what has made this reflection room possible in the first place, over 961 episodes now, so to speak. And I hope we’ll have many, many more episodes together going forward, and keep picking up many more topics, to go into this depth too. Because it shows how complex the topics are on one hand, that it’s important to draw intermediate results, in order to then keep moving forward, keep building bridges too, and then always, with a certain insight, intermediate insights we may have gained elsewhere too, to go back and look again and go into a re-evaluation, after a corresponding reflection has taken place, in order to also put intermediate insights we’ve had back to the test, so to speak, to see what that means when we look at the same or a similar topic again a few weeks, a few months later. And I think really, really important aspects came together today. It shows the complexity on one hand. But I’m also glad we’d already addressed ethics and morality before, so that, I think, we managed quite well today to really transition into reflection relatively quickly in depth, and build the connections, and then make the continuation, in the sense of, what does the whole thing mean when looked at in the context of education. Very specific examples were picked up, which also show this complexity, or show these challenges too, and make clear why this is actually so challenging, because that’s also an understanding process at this point. And maybe question marks arose for one or another of you here. If so, that’s actually a good sign, because whenever we’re irritated, whenever we’re left with question marks, that means change is being initiated, in the sense that learning has taken place, and only when learning takes place can change also take place. And for one or another of you it’ll connect to what you’ve already experienced before and learned somewhere before. For others, depending on where we stand, it might be the first time, and you think, wow, what is this actually? Then it might take a bit longer. But still, every one of us, regardless of where he or she stands, has the possibility here now, with what happens as part of the process, the synapses, this networking in the brain that takes place, to let the strands keep growing, seen neuroscientifically. And that’s what’s important for us in this context, also to bring about societal change, to shape it, to initiate it, which is also, among other things, a thought behind these Deep Talk rooms here. And with that, I’d like to announce that we have our author breakfast tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to that, with Miriam Hof, and the book she’s bringing along for us, so to speak, is her work “Mind Is Magic,” and here we might be able to build a few more connections too, maybe also look toward tools already. I’m already really excited about that, so I’m really, really curious to build the bridges accordingly and see. Feel free to join again tomorrow morning at 8am German time. We haven’t managed to set foot on German soil yet. We’re currently in Austria, but it won’t be long now. That means, we’ll soon be back in Germany, so to speak, and I hope to really have the author breakfast tomorrow calmly with you, with the corresponding technology running smoothly in the background, and be able to carry it out. With that, I wish you a wonderful weekend, and hopefully see you tomorrow morning at 8am. Ciao! Ciao.
