Most sickness has symptoms, often minor and barely inconveniencing for a while until later stages .
The author is making observations about symptoms.
As a German, it is evident that we have caught a serious disease that started more than a decade ago. We sniffed free Russian Gas and ingested free Chinese manufacturing and got really high and felt great for a while but failed to invest into the future.
Now as both drugs are no longer cheap and their side effects are playing out, we will go through a serious withdrawal phase while having to invest for the future - a future that requires strong digital infrastructure we failed to build and a large part of the population rejects even digital learning devices in school based on a romanticized view of the olden times.
a future that requires more energy than in the past with even fewer options (In before the nuclear people jump in an hijack the narrative about that, it’s tangentially related but a drop in the bucket),
a future that needs us to make bold moves when an increasingly aging population is squabbling about every minor sacrifice, every wind-turbines location, every powerline of 5G cell tower and parties are locked to solely serve their constituents.
a future that requires leadership and vision to drive adaptation when the Manager of the country got his power by .. doing nothing and letting all other candidates destroy themselves. A “leader” who learned from 16 years of Merkel that all Germans want is no change while keeping prosperity and that doing nothing as long as possible is the best way to achieve it.
We lost our leaders as it always happens and are now run solely by managers, people who know how to get elected but not how to lead. Who know the game of thrones well enough to succeed but are mediocre at best, amateurs usually and corrupt at worst when given responsibility, afraid to touch the delicate balance of party loyalty and incentives that got them elected - vapid empty vessels not unlike those every day engaged playing the game of professionalism on LinkedIn while abdicating their responsibility to lead.
Even if leaders arise, they will be cut down and dulled enough by the managers and the population that fears change, they cannot move it anymore, this old old society.
A future that sees increasingly Europe, the engine of our growth being destabilized by our own and other forces, an act so stupid, it would reduce us to vassals in a global power conflict.
A future that requires military commitments to NATO and EU when the population is a third ex USSR, a third peace movement and a third alt-right (overlapping thirds)
A future were the economic engine of the country, the car, preferably driven without speed limit on the fictional Autobahn that has no speed limits and peasants, blaring Wohlstand with its powerful internal combustion engine, has to change for us to survive and the change is driven by China - but we really would like to stick to Kübelwagen GTI
The country had end stage Wohlstand disease where lack of growth means inability to run away from hard choices at a time when hard choices will get you voted out and consensus building had been destroyed by social media and hyper-scaled media conglomerates.
We are sick alright and quite late stage, as it so often is when you ignore the smaller symptoms. The nazis, openly fabulating about banning disabled children from schools and shooting migrants, and those who see no other option for their pent up desire for change approach the size of our large parties now. In the country that learned from but didn’t learn to avoid history repeating, the major opposition party leader talks about collaborating with the nazis, unable to instead offer viable alternatives as those would offend his base.
And now we look into a future where the robots have arrived for the jobs of the knowledge worker as the machines created havoc in the 1910s and 1920s. We bargain and hope that our lack of digital infrastructure will slow the progress. And get more afraid every day.
We see the symptoms but start preferring narratives that absolve us from the actions that brought us here.
We like to blame migrants for our problems as if migrants were the reasons. We blame “the greens” for the loss of nuclear power when the greens never had that power, never ruled, when a conservative chancellor and a socialist chancellor sold us out to Russia instead because it was easier to take cheap Gas than to reason with the nuclear fears in broad parts of society.
We are not special here, not unique. Most developed countries reach this stage eventually. Most systems of governance and society do. Our neighbors are sick too, the French, the British sneezed themselves away from Europe into decline.
The present can be comfortable and, if you don’t look to closely, appear healthy and wealthy, but the symptoms are far too numerous, the rot and decay and calcification far too obvious even beyond demographic effects to ignore without being willful - or selling narratives of national economic glory of the past as easy prescriptions, Brexit style.