Hofreiter or Nietzsche?

Aren't we all justice fanatics? Don't we all want to be good? I do. I want to be a just and good person. But am I always good and is that even worth striving for? Perhaps a certain Nietzsche was right when he called for us to be "beyond good and evil". And perhaps Anton Hofreiter's statement "We are the good guys" conceals a dangerous hubris. I am trying to approach the subject. Am I doing it fairly? Probably not. 

There are gender and language officers, there are equality and inclusion officers. There are now officers for everything. There are also dozens of  Ethics councils and moral commissions. These are people who are paid to turn over every stone in order to find injustices and ensure more justice. All these people are on a mission for good. Large sections of the media are also on a mission for good. If, for example, Georg Restle is on the lookout for right-wing radicalism and crawls across a green meadow with a magnifying glass in his hand, he will unerringly find the brown blades of grass. You can be sure of that. He is doing something good in his eyes. I believe him. But when you are crawling across a green meadow, are you still able to see the brown forest in which the meadow is located? Why does the world feel more and more unjust to me and many other people every day when more and more justice commissioners are on the move? I find this question fascinating.

Again, I find the first answers in banal soccer. Video evidence has been around for a few years now. There is the VAR, the video assistant referee, the justice commissioner for the round leather. A few injustices have indeed been abolished. Calibrated lines now show that the player was 7.4 centimetres offside, so that an incorrectly scored goal can be reversed. Hooray. The soccer world has become fairer as a result. However, video evidence is regularly applied to absolutely identical fouls, sometimes and sometimes not. This is, of course, unfair. What exactly is the reason for this? In theory, the video referee should only intervene in the case of clearly wrong decisions. But what is "clearly wrong" and what is "still debatable"? That is in the subjective eye of the beholder. The term "clearly" could not be more ambiguous. So week after week there are angry Monday discussions about "Why did the VAR intervene here and not there?". Video evidence has therefore eradicated injustices, but created new injustices instead. What's more, whereas people used to be spontaneously annoyed or delighted when a goal was scored, they now wait to see whether the justice police in the DFB cellar will intervene or not and, if so, what the outcome of this fifth interruption to the debate during a match will be. It hasn't made watching soccer any nicer. At least fairer? That's a matter of opinion. I say no. Nietzsche would say "All seeing is perspective seeing". 

So back to Nietzsche, Hofreiter and commissioners. Give me a job as a commissioner for a good cause. From tomorrow I'll be the hygiene officer in my family. Surely that's a good thing, isn't it? My job is to look for dirt and grime in the home around the clock, discuss the problem with the family immediately and punish the culprit. I'm sure I'll find something if I keep looking for it. What will my world and that of my family look like in a week's time? Perhaps a little cleaner here and there, but above all there will be discord. What has changed is my view, my perception, because everything in me was fixated on dirt. It's not much different for the gender equality commissioners, the language police and the racism seekers. They look for it and find it. In social structures, in everyday language, in literature, in art, in street names, in clothing, everywhere. After all, it's your job to find it. That's what they get paid for. Have the problems become bigger? No. Only the sometimes very creative perception of what can be interpreted as unfair, xenophobic or misogynistic has increased. Incidentally, this works for many topics and is a human phenomenon. I maintain the following: If I pay someone for a year from today to research and look for alcoholism in their city, in 12 months they will have the feeling that every third person in their city is an alcoholic.

A second phenomenon is human. "He who fights with monsters may see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And if you look into an abyss for a long time, the abyss will also look into you." Yes, that's what old Nietzsche said. How much hatred, how much evil, how much intolerance do the noble knights of goodness carry within themselves? How blind have they become? The desire for justice, which I buy from most people, quickly turns into self-righteousness. I admit to myself that this has unfortunately happened to me more than once in my life. And I confess how difficult it was for me to admit mistakes, to look for the fault in myself in the first place.

What does old Hofreiter say? "We are the good guys. No tolerance of intolerance." That reads well. But what is the subtext of such a statement? The subtext is the devaluation of those who think differently. The subtext says "Since I am good, I define what is to be considered evil. I define what should not be tolerated in the name of tolerance." I think that's dangerous. An inquisitor was also an agent who fought against evil and claimed to represent good. I would consider it good and just if some commissioners had the wisdom to abolish their own jobs.