Against the dominant culture of liking - a plea for active engagement

Essay by Markus Langemann //

There is a strange contradiction in our time: the world is full of voices, full of opinions, full of gestures of supposed participation - and at the same time poor in real participation.

We are witnessing an era in which commitment on both a large and small scale - acting for something beyond one's own horizon - is no longer an optional extra, but a duty of survival. A must-have in the toolbox of the alert citizen if he still wants to be counted among the living.

Those who think today often think on the defensive. They suspect that with every clearly formulated sentence, they are speaking into a world that is no longer used to a decisive tone. It prefers to filter, like and share - and thus drown its own judgment in the frothy sea of algorithms.

We have developed a dominant culture of liking, this new currency of belonging that makes you believe you have made something your own. In reality, the like is often just an automated nod, a silent swim in the warm pool of affirmation.

I remember one evening when an acquaintance proudly announced that he had "got involved now". What had happened? He had shared a picture, accompanied by an indignant sentence - two minutes of effort, zero risk. The world remained as it was.

This is the attitude of many: outrage as a pose, not as an action. People don't like in order to understand. You like to be seen. One click - and you think you've taken part, but you've only left a digital trace that proves it: I was here, I agree.

But agreement is not yet an attitude. Attitude only arises when you risk not pleasing. When you are prepared not only to lose the applause, but to speak into the silence.

Real engagement begins when you are no longer satisfied with the comfortable reply. Where you ask questions that don't get you likes. Where you don't rest in the pose of being affected, but put your own foot in the door of the action - and stop.

Commitment is not the decoration of an opinion, it is its muscle.

It can start small: Someone disagrees at the regulars' table, not loudly, but clearly. Someone speaks up at a town hall meeting even though they know that the room is against them. Someone helps a person who seems to have long been written off by society - not because it earns them sympathy points, but because it is simply the right thing to do.

The large and small forms of action - from open words at the dinner table to persistent action in the public sphere - are the last bastions of those who still think for themselves. Those who abandon them leave the stage to those who are loud, not to those who are right.

In this logic, the portals of public posturing - Facebook, Instagram, X - are less marketplaces of ideas than cult sites of affirmation. You applaud what you think anyway, or think that you think it. And confuse the feeling of approval with the effort of understanding.

It's not a conversation, it's the digital equivalent of looking in the mirror: you look at each other - and smile.

Sometimes I imagine how a visitor from another time would look at this culture of constant self-portraiture. A time traveler from 1850, for example, who sees how millions of people photograph their faces every day, put them in public and wait for others to "agree". He might ask: And that changes your world?

And we would have to admit with shame: No.

But engagement is not narcissistic. Engagement is uncomfortable empathy. It forces you to go beyond your own point of view, to enter unfamiliar territory without knowing whether you are welcome there.

It requires you to think your way into people, situations and stories that do not automatically fit into your own biography.

This also means taking your time. The logic of social media is acceleration - the next impulse is already waiting. Real participation is the opposite: slowing down, going deeper, enduring. Not just "addressing" a problem, but working on it.

We need a renaissance of this attitude - now, not later. Because the living spirits that still resist, that still doubt, that are still able to think a thought through to the end without reassurance - they are under pressure.

Those who protect them not only protect individuals, but also the climate of a society in which dissent is not seen as a disturbance, but as oxygen.

Commitment is the act in which we stop listening to ourselves and start speaking for ourselves. Not in an endless monologue about ourselves, but in dialog with a reality that demands more than our consent.

It's time to act again. Not to like. Not to pose. Not to wait.

Because the time when people believed that attitude could be delegated is over.