Franz Nahrada
To introduce myself, I just want to put ahead these Kind words of my friend Kim H. Veltman (+2020):
"Franz is a paradox. He is fascinated by big ideas but found no-one at university who could address them. So, after the M.A., he became an amateur in the 18th century English sense of the term. Had he been a Frenchmen of that era he would have had a salon. He is self-taught, with immensely wide-ranging interests .... I call him a practical visionary, because he is not content with the temptations of becoming an armchair philosopher. Like Karl Marx, he wants to change the world. He thinks that too much energy has become concentrated in big cities and that there is a need to return to villages. But this no simple 21st century call for a return to Nature, a return to the Bucolics of Theocritus and Virgil. Rather it is a vision, where the village is an eco-village, a village in McLuhan’s sense, as a global village, remaining rural but interconnected to the world with the latest technologies."
"Franz is a people person... a connector of people, who have big ideas. He has organized several important conferences, beginning with a Global Village Conference, a CULTH Conference and a magical conference at Melk Monastery. .... His practical visions always retain something impractical. He is not an idle dreamer, even if he has more dreams than he can translate into real projects. Even so the world is better place with such a generator of dreams, who generates hope for a better future. He is an inspiration."
So this quote is really telling quite a lot about myself. Like some others, I find the greatest comfort in the transpersonal sphere, not in a personal dream. When I was 17 I started to write a book that was deeply inspired by visions of a transpersonal harmony - facilitated by some kind of social technology. My deep experience was that basically nice people can be narrowminded and inconsiderate, that "we can create hell for each other" like in Sartres Drama "No Exit".(more). I had rich study material as the son of a restaurant - keeper, basically learning about the miseries of many of our clients that brought them to the pub just to escape their private hells. My own family was a house divided under one roof, and from my childhood I oscillated between perceptions and parties. When I started to think about my future profession and role in life, it became increasingly clear to me that society is basically sick and needs some kind of healing. You cannot treat this sickness at the individual level, put at the points of interaction or rather at the point of perception. That led me to become a sociologist.
Coming back to that book, I struggled with the dilemma that such harmony should not be established at the lowest common denominator, like in Huxley's "Brave New World" or the 68 counterculture where some drugs do the job of making people convivial. Nor could it be an external manipulator performing mind control techniques - I always stressed the fact that such a manipulator would pay the high price of being excluded from the play he enacts and that each external domination would at some point conflict with the intrinsic desires of humans to be in control. It was clear to me on the other hand that it should take very little to achieve happiness - that the world is full of examples that happiness and harmony is not a function of material wealth.
Franz' forthcoming book based on his radio show here:
http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FranzNahrada/BuchprojektGlobaleDoerfer/SynopsisStreifzuege/Englisch
Metadata
Econaut: Franz Nahrada
AlphabeticalOrder: Nahrada, Franz
DeepestValue: Optimal interconnection.
InvestigatoryQuestion: How can we reformulate our positive visions so they reach people caught in a prisoner's dilemma?
RelationshipWithTruth: Truth as a work of thought, linking perceptions to concepts, yielding a transmittable image.
Commitment: M + W