Switzerland slowly going mad? - an Update

At the end of one of my most-viewed posts on this Blog on Switzerland, I had asked: how soon will Swiss culture degenerate to the condition of Africa or India?

It appears to me to be degenerating quite fast:

1. When I first started living in Switzerland, some 19 years ago, graffiti used to be confined to only one street: Langstrasse in Zurich. Now, graffiti can be found, from Zurich, along the train lines (well, at least at stations) all the way to Frauenfeld to the east in Switzerland, and all the way to Geneva in the West. I don't often travel the other lines, so I can't say about the rest of Switzerland; perhaps some readers can help me with information on that?

2. Physical debris never used to litter the streets, whether in the big cities or in the smallest villages. Now, as far as my observations go, debris is still hardly ever found in the small villages, but it is in all the big cities, and even in the small town where I live (population: 10,000).

3. Yesterday, returning by train from Zurich to "my" small town, I discover the first case of vandalism here: someone had smashed the toughened dark glass which formed the wall at the Railway Station's toilets - was it because he was impatient that someone was in the toilet for too long? Or because he wanted to get at someone in the toilet? Or just because he was frustrated or angered by something? Oh, I guess I shouldn't be sexist: it could have been a woman of course.

In any case, Swiss people have now started physically destroying their own country....

Communist Party rising in Switzerland?

For the first time in the 18 years that I have lived in Switzerland, I have seen a Communist slogan and symbol in graffiti in Zurich.

I guess, as the income differential in Switzerland grows, the rise of the Communists is inevitable.

Which is, in some ways, sad - a Direct Democracy (such as Switzterland is) should be able to find better ways of addressing the issues in the national economy as well as in the global monetary, financial, economic and business systems.

The ways to do so are certainly clear.

So why don't the majority of Swiss do something about it?

Is it that too many Swiss are too busy sticking to their comfortable life to even think about such matters?

Should one abandon Switzerland or struggle for the right framework and values?

An acquaintance of mine, with whom I had not been in touch for a couple of years, writes to me today as follows:

"I am not living in Switzerland any longer.

"I found the framework deteriorating very fast what I have never seen before".

He means that he is so alarmed at the rapid deterioration of the infrastructure and ambience/culture/values in Switzerland that he decided to abandon the country.

Whether he is finding it any better where he is, I doubt.

But I guess he doesn't feel the burden of responsibility for the situation there, as he would if he was still living in Switzerland.

Of course, it would have been much better for him to engage in the struggle to embed new values here. The US Professor Dale Kuehne puts it as follows:

The whole of the world has gone from Kuehne calls the tWorld (the world of traditional values), to the current deterioration due to the coming into being throughout the world of the iWorld (the world of egoism and of the information age).

Kuehne says there is no way back to the tWorld, much as my friend and many others (including myself) may hanker for it. The only thing is to struggle to create a new and attractive new world, which Kuehne calls the rWorld.

By rWorld, Kuehne means a world in which relationships (rather than money) are prioritized.

Interestingly, there is increasing interest in this possibility, and I am organizing a series of small group discussions on The Jubilee Roadmap which charts the journey towards the rWorld.

If this is of interest to you, please get in touch.