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Philosophy
The diversity of people is their richness. Not all human beings are equal, but all human beings are equally valuable. It is not the making of human beings equal that is their destiny, but the development of their greatest possible diversity:
Billions of different individuals are the condition for the possibility of realising humane conditions.
Not being equal, but being different means: „I am interested in you as different“.
People with this consciousness exist all over the world.
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People will only be people when they are able to organise their life together without exercising power.
As long as power structures are in place among people, a few have almost all the treasures of the earth – most have almost nothing.
The few use their power to get infinitely more – most consider their powerlessness a law of nature.
The abuse of power – violent maintenance of the inhumane condition under the cloak of legality – finds its mirror image in the abuse of powerlessness: violent attacks against the unjust condition under the cloak of religion or ideology, both are equally unjustifiable. Both are mutually dependent, both pass the balls to each other, both provide each other with pretexts. Both grow proportionally: this is how civilisation works towards its downfall.
Among animals, it’s the law of the jungle – among humans, it manifests itself as power: It is not the right of the strongest that applies, but the duty of the strongest.
But humans still use the means of science and technology, created by and for humans, to cement the animal „right“ of the strongest. In doing so, they abolish limits that still apply even among animals: to accumulate only as much stock as one needs.
The first condition for a humane society is power-free understanding. This only works if no one wants to dominate others or impose their world view on them.
The second condition for a society according to these criteria is profitless production. This only works if no one wants to have more than they need and if no one wants to live off other people’s work.
As long as power structures and profit thinking determine the societies of this world, there will be no end to the prevailing chaos. They are responsible for wars, misery and despair. There is no justification for power and profit.
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Animals need leaders. Humans do not need leaders – to the extent that they still follow them shows how little they have moved away from being animals.
The caravan is the possibility to live together without leaders over a long period of time and to exchange ideas, to produce results. In this respect it is a model for the world.
The Caravan is designed in such a way that it would not work with a guide.
The people participating in it agreed that they would either find something that had not existed between people in this way before, the highest thing that could be reached for: the end of the rule of people over people – or fail.
The thought: „the individual is the group“ is expanded to: „the individual is everyone“. The structure of the group as a model of the structure for all people.
It is not a question of whether one has the same attitude, stance or not, but whether one agrees on it.
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People have to take their history into their own hands: The Caravan is a step towards this.
It enables the organisation of communication, but does not determine its content. It asks the questions but does not provide the answers. It is the condition of possibility – it can be the beginning of its realisation.
Everyone determines their own actions – and is responsible for all.
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The Caravan is a think tank of utopia. It is about the material conditions of a utopian society. (Utopian because its „place“ cannot be found in the existing one).
Utopia devised by one or more is necessarily totalitarian because one idea overrides the ideas of others.
Utopia can only be realised by all people together – this requires the definition of the material conditions necessary for this realisation.
It is to be proved on a small scale that it is possible on a large scale.
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Supreme principle of production: every thing that is produced must last as long as possible according to the highest standards of science and technology.
If people gave each other their products and everything else remained as it is now, everyone would get their money’s worth – except for bankers, shareholders and stock market investors.
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Artists are animators and mediators of the imagination.
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When the participants of the Caravan reflect on existential things of (super)life, they themselves have to live in an existential situation. They experience it as an example, they themselves are provided with the bare necessities, but in this way they learn about the conditions under which the majority of people have to struggle for survival every day. The question of true needs can only be elicited under such living conditions. This is another reason why they experience the conditions of life in the desert, because it is there that they experience the importance of drinking water most deeply.
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The Caravan is the deconstruction of the Tower of Babel.
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Interest is the cancer of money: money does not work, cannot work.
Shares are the cancers of society, stock exchanges are the cancers of civilisation-.
If nobody wants to profit, nobody has to be oppressed.
Profit thinking destroys human coexistence. It is not part of human nature, as the profiteers in particular suggest. That’s why addictions exist: so that billions of people play along and the profiteers gain billions of currency units.
The billions of surpluses people earn without doing anything for it are stolen goods that have to be returned.
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Advertising is incapacitating psycho-terror which drastically restricts people’s self-determination.
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As if the only alternative to the profit economy is the planned economy and not self-organisation. Councils as described by Hannah Arendt would be more possible today than ever with the help of the internet.
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The dictatorship of profit works down to the most personal level: people only meet when they want something from each other, they need a pot, they need information, they need help – otherwise they live next to each other and hear nothing from each other.
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The first goal of the caravan is to get the governments of all the countries in the world to introduce a one-year interregnum of drinking water
Comments
His Excellency AHMED GAAFAR ABDELKARIM, Ambassador of the Republic of Sudan on 23-1-2002 at the Goethe-Institut, Berlin:
Thank you very much for this initiative.
I am sure you are doing something that will make history and be remembered by later generations.
Sudan has been a place of cultural work and intercultural exchange for several thousand years. I think your work is nothing less than that: it is part of that.
The selection principle of the Caravan is the lot. There is a pre-selection according to rough criteria so that no racists, spies or rapists can participate, the rest is decided by lot.
The aim of the Caravan is that the initiators become superfluous, no leadership, no power: independence of the philosophy and its realisation.
The task of the organisers is only to set up the organisation of the communication – once this is in place, the participants determine everything else themselves: Starting with the food, which is made for everyone by associations of people from different cultures, alternating across the world,
to artistic exchanges, such as chat rooms.
to democratic forms: if someone suggests that something should be done differently, they can put it up for discussion and everyone can respond.
The opposite of leadership. There are no guidelines. There can’t be any.
There is an attitude.
The initiative organisational apparatus is built in such a way that it makes itself superfluous; a concept of self-dissolution of initiative structures, of transition to collective ones: „All together“, and 100%.
Only when these new forms of living together have been found and become independent will this continue and expand beyond the Caravan.
If some people from all over the world manage to organise themselves without power, everyone else will too.
Food
The central point of communication is the food, its preparation, its enjoyment, its communicative digestion.
Via the food chanel, all those who want to share what they could cook, when, for how many people, and for how long; the results are used to compile the areas in which they will cook, which must be roughly planned well in advance so that the basic ingredients are all available. The dishes of the day are online, so everyone can pick and choose from everything or even plan ahead.
Food chemists have to be there
Activities
Comparative films on how certain everyday activities are handled in different cultures.
– For example, tea: stirring in our country – pouring in Mali. Counter-cut with text.
– Luggage storage: in Mali giving the suitcase to someone to look after – in Europe throwing the suitcase into a chute that swallows it, plus electronic image display.
– Eating: in Mali, people eating in public ask everyone passing by to „come and eat with us“ – in Europe, you see people eating everywhere.
Documentations of already existing models in which equal structures.
Documentations of initiatives that are more limited in content but generally of the same objective.
The participating artists develop individual and collective poetry, prose, theatre, dance, videos, paintings and sculptures in international groups, informing and influencing each other about their different cultures.
Publication
There are 20 channels of 10 stations each, so that each working group has one station together with nine others.
The productions are sorted and released for broadcast according to the date of receipt and via a schedule in which all free broadcasting slots are named.
You can sign up; if it’s all full, you have to wait until a slot is free (or automatically, with so-and-so many in the queue, another channel develops itself, pre-programmed) or get pushed into free slots elsewhere – all digitally pre-planned so that everyone, individuals and intercultural co-productions alike, have equal opportunities to get their prodution(s) on the air.
There is a table of contents of who produced what where and when, so that everyone has the opportunity to decide what they want to see.
There is no pre-selection, no priorities, no predetermination.
The ratings are made public so that everyone can see what was watched the most.
When the productions are broadcast worldwide, there is no advertising and no station logos in the picture. All companies that have donated are allowed to advertise with it, e.g. „we are an official sponsor of the Caravan, etc.“ They will be listed on the Caravan website.