Der Sokratische Marktplatz (engl.)

Der Sokratische Marktplatz
The Socratic Marketplace

No history, no salvific history, no automatic forces or powers
control the destiny of man.
The fate of man is man alone.

What he doesn‘t do, won’t be done.
No hidden hand forces him, no radical evil will stop him.
If he continues to act as a despot of nature, he will fail.
In proportion with natural beings he can survive.
 
At the Sokratischer Marktplatz you can meet self-confident democrats,
wanting to make their contribution to the successful life of humanity.
The center of life is on earth. Here and now on earth we must prove ourselves.
Man is to man neither a predator nor a god,

neither hopeless nor perfect.
When we learn in the spirit of Socrates to regard ourselves as natural beings,
as equal people, we can succeed.

The rule of the people arose in public places. When people come together spontaneously, they can freely argue, agree and make majority decisions. This happened  in Athens, where Socrates did not hesitate to call his fellow citizens to the intellectual contest in order to test their democratic competence.

The combat for the best way should make everyone more self-conscious in the daily struggle for a dignified life. Whoever makes man liable to the welfare of the community can not escape such challenges; Critically, he himself must examine what spiritual children are those who claim power for themselves and want to be elected in parliaments.

Private affairs differ, in that they can be shaped according to individuality; providing individual freedom does not affect the freedom of others. At the public forum, everyone show’s what they can and demonstrates how they intend to benefit the community.

In vital democracies, each individual must be able to meet the other without fear and on equal terms. The more strata, classes and estates that can tear a nation to pieces, the more striking and fragile society becomes.

Democracies live out of their own strength, from the insight of their self-determined and able citizens. They are not dependent on safeguards and moral support in the field of religion. They rely on their own reason, not on surmising promises of charismatics and saviors.

There are many ways to ruin democracies. One of the most dangerous is to cut down the influence of elected governments with self-governing and unbridled economy. The increasing divide between rich people and poor means the strengthening of the powerful to the unimaginable and the weakening of the expropriated to impotent apathy.

Those who speak indiscriminately of the state have not yet understood anything about democracy. If even dictatorships and anti-human regimes are regarded as states, democracy can never be a state. In living democracies the people, not the state are the decisive authority. Should opaque power clashes infiltrate a society, they would have to be recognized and destroyed as destructive malformations. A state in the state is the archenemy of every democracy.

It is not the state that causes or solves all problems. It is the mature man who commits mistakes and corrects them again, helps the weak, tames the strong. In democracies, there is neither a „father“ state patronizing the disadvantaged, nor a „tyrannical“ state that negligently succumbs to success.

Democracies decide democrats. Nobody else. No economic laws that define themselves as unchangeable. No progress in the name of a futile technology, an idolized future, or other automatisms that cannot withstand sober review by society.

There is no compulsion for unremittingly blind renewal. Whether old, whether new, everything must be submitted to the criticism of the sovereign. We do not live for the future, we live for the present. It is not possible to sacrifice meaningful foresight to the present day. We do not only look to the future, we also learn from mistakes of the past, which we must not hide or repress.

All power goes out from the people and remains under the control of the people. All decisions are sovereign wills of the population and their elected representatives.

Are secular democracies incompatible with truth – as religious healers who assault the separation of church and state to return to the power of the clergy and anti-religious beliefs?

In fact, no decision can boast of infallible truth. Majorities are not guarantees of unimaginable knowledge. Nonetheless, free competition between opinions can help us to approach what humanity has ever dreamed of in peaceful future designs.

In this sense, democracy, universal human rights and natural acceptability can be viewed as beneficial truths, which also give our children and children’s children a chance of survival on planet Earth. Such truths are not the exclusive possession of elites and the elect, but the result of continuous and jointly developed ideas.