Mankind, Death and Initiation

A political philosophical manifesto

by Wolfgang Behr

Table of contents

1. Today
2. Dichotomy
3. Unimaginability
4. Name
5. Progress
6. Death
7. Initiation
8. STRING

Humanity, a very familiar cry. But in fact it is a subject seldom thought about in concrete terms. This is especially true when humanity is considered in political terms, often from the point of view of outsiders, who are fighting to protect some common good or other (e.g. the Rain Forests). Or it surfaces indirectly in the vision of the deregulated world market and submerges into struggles between lobbies.
This manifesto will deal with the fact that humanity can very well be a political subject and thereby develop its own imperative. The title STRING plays a central role as a provisional nomenclature and definition of Mankind.





Today(1)

As participants in the global news network we are exposed to a constantly alternating hot and cold bath of emotions whose deepest colours are anger and principally fury. Fury at our impotence and helplessness. Too often stupidity, ignorance and the thoughtless striving for power and profit, and unspeakable acts of violence too often dominate life.
Many people travel to the sites of the most evident human disasters - Tibet, the Sudan, Bosnia, Ruanda, Burundi, Chechnya, ... and try to help. But the large majority stand aside and experience that feeling of horror which is a mixture of dismay and relief. Ascribed by the classical author Lucretius to someone observing a shipwreck whilst he himself is standing safely on the shore.
If we withstand the pressure to view everything our politicians broadcast in a positive light, and also resist the attempt to hold politicians responsible for all perils, we will then emancipate ourselves. The price will be that of taking responsibility upon ourselves.
But who are we? Consumers manipulated by those from the world of commerce using the subtlest resources of psychology and market research? On the gravy train? Petty minds which reject all strangers out of fear for our own prosperity? What should we do with this immense responsibility? Anyone prepared to risk his life for his goals without further ado, whatever they might be, finds us pacifist citizens ridiculous.
Nevertheless "humanity" must be approached in a calm, philosophical key. In fact we are stuck in the midst of life and involved in events throughout the world. But history, and in particular its significance, begins in the head, or more precisely in thought. Getting all excited does more harm than good. So much do current events call for action and struggle, so much does the world's overly complex state of development call for a theoretical perspective - intellectual action if you like - as is yet to be seen. And this can also require the courage to combat Death! Therefore this manifesto begins with a very abstract observation as an opening chord.



Dichotomy (2)

Each individual human being is physically separated from all others from the moment of his birth. Experience shows that his membership of human groups and societies which puts a bandage on this physical separation and isolation is in no way a development of Nature, as for example the biological family, but is a product of culture. It consequently follows that within the framework of this cultural organisation, the asserted blood ties of each particular political community - race, nationality - are the ideological relics of a long gone horde environment. The more level-headedly and honestly that this can be understood, the easier it is to be in a position to consider the zenith of the culture of human society, namely the global community of all human beings, as something that has still to take shape under the demands of our special, cultural, creative force.
In the modern political world even the most advanced societies do not provide any true pattern for this. Yet at the core of the concepts of nation-statehood still lies that ideology of "naturalness". Limited recourse to the concept of empire in the days of antiquity and the Middle Ages would be more conceivable. Only the USA and its history should be excluded in this connection since its society is hardly seen as arising out of natural development and in a counteraction attaches special importance to the individual. To that extent it is a possible paradigm for a world community, and there is good reason for its origins being so recent. Looked at soberly in the context of the modern age only the individual, the individual human being, remains as the indispensable base unit before any common form of society can come into being from which Mankind can fashion itself into a political community.

Man's fundamental individuality and the unity of all people beyond ideological group identity will be the twin notes at the centre of this manifesto. There are two different reasons for this. First there is most people's desire for physical and spiritual freedom from injury as well as for the good life in both a material and ethical sense. The fulfilment of this desire has turned out to be one of the preconditions for democratic togetherness based on the individual.
Secondly it is a question of a political concept for the community of all human beings, whereby this concept contains a policy acceptable to all men of good will. In what form and under what regime should the newly arising collective of Mankind evolve? And will this regime succeed in overcoming the perils facing the world on its present course?
It is emphasised that we are talking here about a concept, for a society of what is no longer an envisageable number of people, in fact the whole human race, exists primarily as an intellectual, symbolic entity.

It is easily seen that the elements of individuality and collectivity are directly related to each other in this crucial phase of history. For only people who are concious of themselves as free individuals can interact with each other, and can become open to the concept of a global community, without surrendering their own identity and traditions, regardless of potentially very diverse cultural bachgrounds. Countless numbers have long since made this discovery. The path via the individual as the pillar and hinge of a politically united humanity replaces the principle of a uniform culture, which is identical to the pre-eminence of power - perhaps the main problem in the world of today.

Why do we need such a ponderous formula? The concept of a "global community", in itself contains a policy acceptable to all men of good will. The reason lies in the fact that we use easy words like "Mankind", or "everyone on the Earth" which neither encapsulate a political reality nor represent a more precisely comprehensible concept. Of course whoever is rich enough can nowadays visit every country and culture and get to know "Mankind". Naturally the majority of people "communally" experience the Olympics or world championship football games on their screens. Of course one can create many bridges between nations and people with books and films. But all this remains restricted to individuals and groups and does not constitute any new political subject. This is also true of the activities of economic organisations, although they in part shape the worldwide public arena in an eminent fashion.



Unimaginability (3)

There is no community of Mankind with a political existence and possessing a constitutive individual status - comparable to the position of a "citoyen" or citizen in a republic - for its members and for the political culture of today.
We know about the earlier attempts at giving large social structures a concrete political form, such as e.g. the British Empire's Commonwealth. And the UNO's Community of States as a replacement for the obsolete concept of a world state is now as then indispensable. However when the time really is ripe for the political union of all Mankind - if not now the case after the end of the Cold War - a dogged lack of conception then blurs our intellectual gaze into the future. What will Mankind be like when it is no longer subject to the veto of super powers or is no longer just an uncontrollable, suicidal amalgam of egotistical mega interests? What political form will it adopt in order to be a true community? This inability to imagine a political social structure for all human beings lies amongst other reasons in the fact that such a vast generality as "Mankind" cannot easily be connected with the conditions of conventional politics and a conventional society - indeed not even with the formality of jurisprudential concepts. It also stems from us seeing insurmountable obstacles in the world of real politics which lie in the path of a true global community. In fact in the case of Mankind, so that this expression is not just understood in vague cultural terms, it appears to be a question of a new dimension of human political coexistence, the conditions of which still have to be invented and developed.

Some of these are easier to see since they represent familiar theses. For example, the thought that Trotsky somewhat misleadingly expressed in the formula "permanent revolution" and which concerns acknowledgement of a necessary degree of dynamics in social structures. For in our history to date, the anachronistic nature and encrustations of ruling orders and elites have always had to be brought to an end by wars and acts of violence instead of through peaceful development.
However in the context of Mankind this thought acquires an independent meaning. Here it is indeed a matter of a concrete political form necessitating an unparalleled permanence because there is only one Mankind and its spatial conditions are fixed. Therefore if this stage of social integration is reached, the previous historical dynamics of the creation and destruction of empires and states by warfare will come to an end. But that means that in the political structure of "Mankind" the possibility of "encrustations" must be excluded from the outset since the process of violent adaptation will no longer take place. Unless that structure could be fashioned as a result of wars, crumble, build itself up again and so on - an unrealistic concept which puts off facing the problem and the reality of which is one Mankind could scarcely survive. So in order to constitute itself, will political humanity not have to renounce a definitive concretisation of its constitution and laws? For all experience shows that these regulators become obsolete and consequently no longer represent any appropriate political means.
Such a level of coexistence which can dispense with rules without as a result sinking into particularism, permanent feuds or criminality in fact requires extremely innovative individual and global steps forward and shows the immense scale of the task before us.

Because they are even more unbelievable, other conditions are more difficult to perceive. And at the head of them all are the dual notes of the individual and a world community as shown above and what comes out of it. The political pattern we now know, comprises nation states having more or less fixed rolls (i.e. rights and duties) for their members, e.g. active and passive rights of choice, the right to freedom, to be active economically and thereby gain influence, to protection from violence, etc.. But what should we imagine the individual's partnership in the political structure of "Mankind" to be?
The oligarchic model of political life, i.e. the rule of the few as it is today even in parliamentary democracies, but above all is customary in the economy which is growing ever more powerful, cannot be any type of lasting principle for a regime for political Mankind. The different races, religious communities and other cultural identities scarcely let themselves be brought voluntarily under a central government since this is always connected with subordination and the demands made by power. Consequently we must find a form of participation for the individual in the existence of Mankind as a political entity which is at the same time more direct, individual and less fixed, that is to say not established expressis verbis. This could be achieved by giving the same primary political status to the individual as to the community of Mankind and which grants their autonomy from all traditional institutions. In this way both, as new political institutions, will form the basis for the world order. The large majority, represented by the global community of all Mankind, will then guarantee and support the independence of their smallest unit, the individual. As paradoxical as that may sound, the community of Mankind appears to be achievable only through more instead of less freedom for the individual. In this context one could talk of the necessity for a new political aggregate status.

It is demonstrated that consideration of the fundamental conditions of this new political dimension revolves more around its aforementioned unimaginability, than directly approaching and surmounting it. Therefore I will attempt to tackle the concept of the political format of "Mankind" head-on, in a type of terminological study which can be expanded into a terminological formulation.

Why is the political union of Mankind inconceivable?
Because it must resolve almost unsolvable contradictions within itself. On the one hand, it requires the enduring form of a community which no longer substantially changes externally and could possibly fall apart. On the other hand, precisely because of the definitiveness of its internal structure, this form depends upon a fundamental openness in the future which not least means doing without definitive, fixed rules for coexistence, although time and again the criminal nature of Man's behaviour to date has forsaken any acceptable criterion!
Political unity is unimaginable because there is nothing in the offing with which to commence this unification - and it cannot be through a war!
Because what one understands by history might end as a result of such an event of unification which will launch our history proper - its previous course will be seen from that point in time as mere prehistory!
Because political identity, like identity itself, always arises out of delimitation, but the whole of Mankind can no longer be delimited by any other political unit! Because the differences between the states and cultures seem too great!



Name (4)

One can see that it is not easy to think of Mankind as a political concept. Even classical philosophical formulations such as Hegel's "Absolute", Heidegger's "Sein" and Marx's "Proletariat" cannot claim this encapsulation for themselves, since all experience shows that it cannot be derived from a theory. "Mankind" must be considered in yet more complex, less sharp and freer terms in order to become politically meaningful as a idea. This makes one think of an artistic concept such as devised by Joseph Beuys for example in his idea of plastic thought ("with one s knee"). But even this perception remains caught up in theory.
Therefore we need to create a new concept, even a new type of concept whose task consists of drawing upon the intellectual powers of human culture and history to do justice to Mankind's demands as a political subject.

Perhaps the proverb "giving the child a name" leads us on the right track. For politics consists of concrete action and a baptism, a christening is an action. If people on earth give themselves a name and could grasp this event as an essential moment in the birth of their community, their political constitution, and celebrate it with a grand festival, that would be a political act in the highest degree and the dawn of a new era.

There are two aspects which cogently urge the name as the concept of a Mankind, to be understood in political terms. First, Mankind will only build itself into and recognise itself as a conscious community when it learns to perceive itself as a one off individual entity, and such an entity or being will then be given a name or will name itself. Secondly, in the name it takes and which describes this new identity, it will find exactly the right unrestricted "material" to construct its own existence, since it does not seem possible to apply any conceptual notion of a structure, or a conventional political model, to the birth of the political community of "Mankind". For a name, or a new name, is completely unburdened politically and first and foremost is, abstractly speaking, a top formula. In principle one could take it to mean anything. But on the one hand, even classical concepts are exposed to extremely varying interpretations and meanings and on the other hand, a more concrete name anchored in human culture, such as that of the person called "Charles de Gaulle", or of the community of states called the "USA", is the most comprehensible in political life and life itself.

Political Mankind will be given the provisional name of STRING in this manifesto. (The term "STRING" comes originally from a theory of the universe as being a self-organizing entity). Naturally such a name will have to undergo a reasonable amount of adaptation to do justice to its task and to capture a place in the world. So how can this name become the concept of a unified Mankind? A series of political actions will be defined which are appropriate to the concept and the conditions portrayed. First will come an event at which people will constitute their community themselves. This event is associated with the act of naming which gives expression to the uniqueness of Mankind, and a festival celebrating this christening and the birth of the community. The event will at the same time be the single collective institution of Mankind, which however will not give rise to any new power structures or bureaucracy, this being primarily determined by its limited duration. The institutional continuity of the community of all Mankind will be founded solely in the individual. Therefore a status of individual political autonomy will be established and ascribed to the individual on the occasion of the event. A new beginning will be made and an order created based on the fundamental social element of the individual, which, after a transitional period will replace the previously existing orders. Projected into the future, this does not in any way signify the end of every type of collective structure and regulations. People will fashion and if necessary alter such structures and regulations for reasons of practicability. However, these collective elements should no longer possess any political might or power of sanction of their own.

The majority today are no longer able to acquire the personal maturity to embody such an individual status and the associated civilized behaviour. The best way of leading people in the future is to instill STRING s policies in the children of succeeding generations in a totally natural manner, and especially the initiation (see below). It follows from this that changes in material and bureaucratic living conditions will only take place slowly, step by step, as they prove to serve a purpose from the point of view of the newly acquired status of the community and the individual. There are no clear cut rules for such a transitional process. It will be advanced by individual persons, who, starting out from the world event and their own capabilities, proclaim and formulate this status. They will often come into conflict with existing institutions and must overcome the latter's power through the authority of STRING. However, since the existing institutions represent important common interests, time and again it will be necessary and sensible to work constructively with them, e.g. when it is a question of whether and how much tax one should still pay.
STRING's process is basically distinguished in terms of its realisation by the fact that its main feature lies in a political act - the world event - at a constitutional level and not on an immediate change in the prevailing order or material living conditions.

A name and a naming ceremony or baptism, is a very personal affair, even when it is not a question of an individual person but the largest collective of human beings. That is to say this act of naming will only fittingly materialize when the vast majority of Mankind can develop a more or less personal relationship with this event. That brings the already established need for physical and spiritual freedom from harm as well as the good life into play. Without doubt the baptism of Mankind, through that of all human beings, is a political, cultural act of the highest quality which needs a certain degree of freedom to bring it to fruition. So if everybody has not secured this freedom when the festival is held, which can alas be taken as certain, the political unity of Mankind materializing in the baptism must at least open up another perspective which has to be taken seriously, namely that everyone in the foreseeable future is due the prerequisites of education, chattels, the capability and not least freedom to lead a life determined by themselves. This is STRING's great goal. The status of political independence for the individual is perhaps a decisive condition thereof but not the outcome itself.



Progress (5)

In this connection one must reflect that never before in known history, either through technology, in economics, social legislation etc. has so much consideration been given and efforts made to secure and alleviate our everyday life as there has been in the last 100 years. Assuming a spirit of invention and creativity, it does not appear far- fetched that within a few generations the chance to lead a materially independent life will be the norm for everyone, even in today's Third World. At present one might get the impression that this will remain a Utopia because the states are ever more losing their way in power struggles and cannot and will not fulfil their social contract. But our era has chosen the option of science, technology and economic development and through the force of innovation must bring these to a rational conclusion in respect of that contract as well. There is no alternative, even if much of nature has already been destroyed and is still being destroyed. The target cannot of course be social aid for all but relates to what today are still not fully known possibilities allowing even the weak to more or less autonomously and independently master their everyday life and its necessities. We do not know what the world will look like in a hundred years. This is our chance, if successful, to restore technological and capitalistic progress in a form serving that goal.
At this point we come up against the question of whether the perspective of a secure life for the individual can constitute the whole concept of a political Mankind. And if what must be described as human bestiality is thereby to be controlled.



Death (6)

We know almost unspeakable abysses of the human soul. We live on top of a mountain of acts of violence and crimes stretching backing into the most distant past and which increases daily. Each one of us can very easily fall into the situation of directly or indirectly sharing responsibility for or being affected by it.
The Marquis de Sades' tales of cruelties take place behind thick walls. These walls can be invisible too, even today. They are everywhere. Even small children are subject to violent and abusive relationships of the vilest kind within the family, at school, in institutions. One agony begets the next. What history, what future can be founded on the hatred and spiritual destruction of so many? The massacres of the past millennia may have been forgotten, but neither the Crusades nor the French Revolution have yet been completely forgiven and forgotten, to say nothing of what has happened and still happens today. However the extreme vulnerability of humans in their childhood years makes it abundantly clear that it will only be possible for people ever to join together in peace and equanimity when the circle of hate and violence during the moulding of a child has been broken. Here the world has a crucial chance. For no matter what has already happened on the Earth, every child starts with a clean slate and the world he is growing up in teaches him how to deal with the opportunities he is given. Even if aggressiveness or malice are part of his makeup the history of civilisation has already produced enough examples that the wolf in him can be adequately tamed.

It seems that only a fundamental break in the continuity of violent human relationships, which is what one must also sadly call our history, will lead to peaceful coexistence on both a small and a large scale. Indeed the development of technology has had the effect that war, at least between developed democratic states, is no longer on the minds of the ruling heads as a political concept. But the dangers stemming from the immeasurable potential for destruction have not yet been truly banished. This potential exists today as it did before and is even being continuously updated and replaced by "new generations". (The belief is: if we do not join in we could be blackmailed.) And as regards human behaviour it is still marked to a high degree by fear and violence. The decisive hurdle is not merely the disarmament of states - as meaningful as this could be in certain political constellations - but above all the disarmament of individuals so as to arrive at a general renunciation of weapons. Expressed in a clich one could say that as long as there are guns there will also be ABC weapons.
The media only appear to unite the world into one ambit of civilisation. But it is the atom bomb which produces humanity's real unification, for it cripples war which seeks to subordinate humanity to one power. And the bomb can only disappear when its "security" is no longer needed anywhere in the world.
When we try to understand the situation of today's world we are confronted by Death, Death as an enormously inflated option. It holds in check a species which has lived by and for war. The multitude of cultural products which glorify war and its heroes from every epoch and race bear witness to this. We choose to suppress how the world which surrounds us is drenched in Death because at the moment we are not under the threat of any war. But we cannot relax, for the actual step of an open, active association with this Death is still before us. How will he appear?



Initiation (7)

We could die soon, not a normal death from illness, accident, murder or old age, but a collective death. This will not expunge the individuality of death for each person. In such a case my life with all its thoughts and hopes would end abruptly and undesired. And this threat has not disappeared with the end of the Cold War. Quite the opposite, the more surely I live according to conventional standards, the more this Death stands before me, the more it involves me, because its enormity is the reverse of my security, the one creates the other. Peace has become peace beneath a sword of Damocles, which does not disappear just because the thread which it is hanging on has been strengthened for the moment. This peace creates the duty, but also the freedom, to devote oneself to Death as the outstanding cultural factor of our epoch.
What does it signify when a culture uses a large part of its intelligence, its economic and inventive powers, its organisational ability, etc., to create an immeasurable destructive and annihilative potential and to arm the whole world with weapon stores and poison arsenals? What does it signify when an explosive conflict which endangers the common property of the world arises from the immense capacities of civilisation and the egotistical needs of people?

Death as a possible culmination of this development offers the opportunity to locate this barely comprehensible process, to make it apparent personally. I will die soon! ... that doesn't mean that there will be a funeral soon. I will die soon! ... that means that I place myself before this Death and take the bull by the horns, that I make the nearness of Death in this culture my business, not pro forma, not as stylisation, but real. Perhaps as real as the initiation rituals of traditional peoples were real, who sent their young into the wilderness, so that in the face of the threat of Death they could become independent mature personalities in regard to both material and especially spiritual things. (There were North American Indian tribes who refused to treat Europeans as adults.)
To know that Death is before every one of us, albeit not directly, but still in reality, as a result of the civilised state of the world, to take this fact and process it in individual solitude in this fashion an initiation can occur which allows us to return to the world changed.

If we want to become free of the spirits which we have called up, and scrap all the weaponry together with the production plants, then we must recognise Death as the decisive part of our present existence. We can do this if we separate it from its historical conditioning and form, and learn to comprehend it with new eyes as a new task. The way to overcome Death, without really dying, is the initiation.
This Death, which, as we are trapped in this world culture, affects all of us whether we want it or not, this Death leads back to that unimaginability, which overshadows the concept of the unity of all people. For the unending struggle, the inexhaustible bellicosity of the inhabitants of this earth, which has innumerable reasons, are an important basis of this Death. In order to reach into the future, in order to make a new perspective visible, we must go through this Death as through a tunnel - through the darkness of ignorance and the unimaginable.
But one can only do this for oneself, as overcoming Death is an individual thing, which no one can take away from me, although even here it is not just the death of the individual but rather the death of the entire species.
"I will die soon!" ... not because I have done with life, but to complete a ritual, which frees me for a moment from the constraints of life, which releases me for a moment from every community and allows me to encounter the full force of the state of the world. Because as long as I am bound to the pressures of the reality of life, I remain biased in my separateness, or as long as I still hide myself behind my group membership, I shove responsibility for the future onto the collective. But collectives are not able to solve this undeceivable Death problem of our civilisation, as they are too dependent on its reasons for origin and as they cannot simply and effectively function individually.

For many cultures and religions Death, or ways of dealing with Death, are an integral element of their view of the world. But none of these cultures consider the death of the entire species brought about by itself. This radicalism was inconceivable before our time. The concept of a political humanity, STRING is drawn into the depths by the Death fixation of our future, which allows it to outgrow the political. If humanity finds the way to become a community by organising an event for this purpose, giving itself a name and celebrating with a baptism, then it would also succeed, because many people anticipate experiencing the break with all their life- relationsships through an initiation. When one returns from that, then many truths which were previously valid have become relative. Not everyone living today will absorb this encounter with the black hole within himself, not everyone will mature in this way, but the community of humanity will be a community of individual personalities. From that it will be able to take its greatness and its independence of fixed rules.
To mature into a personality and support this community must be the decisive motivation which causes people to absorb the difficulties and dangers which are part of such an initiation. It is the purpose of this human event to provide radiating strength for such a goal. This is a further example of the mutual dependence of the individual and the collective momentum in the concept of STRING.
STRING links the spiritual authority of the community of all humans with the individual task of encountering the fact of Death freely. Its goal is not least to make individual people the guarantors of civilisedness and peaceableness, which until now the state has guaranteed by its monopoly of violence. This goal has no longer anything to do with a naive vision of a idyllic world.

From this arises that the duality of Death, which was discussed above, expands into a trinity - the individual, humanity and Death. But at stake here is not the normal, banal death, which ends life and appears as a notice in the papers, but Death as a cultural potential, as initiation, indeed as culture itself, as far as culture also always contains a little bit of Death in the sense of overcoming nature. Reduced to a formula one could say that there would be no community of humanity without participation by individual humans. There will be no survival of humanity without transcending our civilisation which is pregnant with Death. We individual people will not exist unless we can change the dynamic of our present collectivity and learn to use it in a meaningful way. And there will be no more Death when there is no more life.



STRING (8)

Apparently these considerations are far removed from daily events in politics, war and destruction. But that is not relevant, as the philosophy here being developed arises from the intensive - even burning - interest, actively to intervene in the run of things. One of the fundamental realisations which led to the concept of STRING, consists in the fact that at the moment there is nobody, no institution, no person who has sufficient influence or power to intervene fundamentally, i.e. so as to alter the entire world situation. Thus for example a court order to punish an evil-doer falls into the void, if the extent of what he has done exceeds every measure on account of today's civilised-technical potential (e.g. oil pollution in the sea). The goal of the philosophical and political action described here is therefore first actually to achieve the position of an acting subject and their basis for action for world politics, and thereby to create the opportunity to master the overflowing complexity, the explosivity and the internal contradictions of this world civilisation. For this, a precisely defined step into the future is necessary, because existing developments cannot be stopped or altered immediately, and in particular because people distinguish themselves by the greatest stubbornness. As a unit of individual and communal action STRING should produce the requirements for this new politics. Precisely put it is a kind of moral code which enables people to integrate into their lives the changes brought about by the modern age which shatter their entire existence. In principle they already have the material ability for this.

Political humanity is here called STRING. This is not to deprive it of its right to name itself, but as a working title. In this sense, STRING is the name as a concept, which will open up the political future and above all a perspective for humanity. The image with which this concept is sketched here, should be taken as the whole. Although the future is a top and cannot be foreseen - maybe there is a less spectacular way to a stable life situation on the earth - it is the aim, to say the right thing on the given theme, but in the sense of philosphical truth. Except for the fact that philosophy is never exhaustive, never comes to an end, its truth cannot force anyone and it is not generally accepted in the sense of a physical theory, for example. On the contrary, exactly the radicalism of having to deal with Death in a concrete fashion, which is the inevitable consequence of my reflections, can only be taken on or undertaken of one's own free will in an individual spiritual action. It is part religiosity, as it were.
The revolutions of modern times which from the beginning were pregnant with this radicalism, show all too clearly that they could not realise their visions in a social mechanism such as a state. Whether one takes the Jacobins or Stalin, it always comes to perversion of all positive beginnings and a catastrophic collapse. The only form, in which the collective can still play a part in the scale of politically unified humanity, is the community event. Naturally STRING will not be able to dispense with a more or less centralised organisation on the way to its realisation. But because it ties people structurally for only a limited time, only represents a limited collective institution, it avoids the danger of enduringly having to achieve perfect humans in order to exist. The world event releases from the historical pressure to subordinate the world under one power. No longer the rulers or the elites but every individual human bears responsibility. STRING wants to lead and encourage toward this responsibility which is become radically and necessarily world- embracing. But it also decisively involves to faciliate the living conditions and access to individuality so that every human can bear this responsibility.

The initiation as an individual step towards spiritual and political self-reliance, which enables this responsibility, and the great human event STRING have to take place separately as to time, as not all people can carry out such a far-reaching process of personality development at the same time, for which a decisive requirement is not least that each is the right age. There can also be no communally set ritual for an initiatory encounter with Death, everyone must find his own time, his way there, and the depth of his experience himself, at best supported by examples. In spite of that, both moments, world event and individual initiation are two sides of the same coin and need each other. The individuality of human community at the moment of the event and the individuality of the separate human at the moment of his initiation are in nature one and the same. Collective institutions and individual status set their limits. The historical opposition of forces between community and individual should thereby come to their highest development of strength and become the Archimedes' point for the creation of a new culture. The view turns on the future, perhaps two or three generations on, when most humans can master such an innovative encounter with Death. But now is the time to make a start, and form the community of all humans as an event. This event is the eye of the needle, which the world must pass through in order to find its identity. STRING is the nature of humanity.

By publishing the manifesto together with the political program "STRING - The Individual and World Politics" in WWW they are made directly accessible to all interested people. The Internet as basic democratic medium represents the intentions of STRING, which is addressed to all humans as politically responsible beings, whether they have an official function or not.