Thorsten Pattberg

“ From the Eastern point of view, the distant peripheral Europe and America had the historical sense of mission to manipulate the East – the core. In physics, the core is always the most passive, most unwavering element. Passive and unwavering is how the West perceives the East. ”

“ Naturally, the pattern has never changed and the destructive, dividing-and-conquering Europeans kept coming back, and they are still keep coming back today (if not in the form of the their latest version, the war-loving, self-righteous Americans) , not with their swords and guns if not necessary, but with their pens and patents; all the same, the West is now all about the East: World History is now all about the great phenomena; World History is about the final universal “oneness”, and the key to it is kept in the East. ”

“ By the above definition, Europe and North America are understood as the active, peripheral forces revolving around whatever stable, passive and irremovable it is that occupies the core of the human universe - like the two hands molding a precious vase. ”

“ What is not a speculation is that Europe never turned enough attention to were it gets more complicated: the religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom of the East. Or better, that religious, ethical, and sociological wisdom that had been created by the East, which had not been created by the West. ”

“ This pattern of the Western nations revolving around Asia makes me think that... it is the East who is at the core, one could say: the East, roughly since 1950, has not only become (again) the world greatest phenomenon, but has also, slowly, shifted to the center of gravity of World History. ”

“ Let us make no mistake: communism and capitalism were made for scale and the masses, and scale and masses are now in Asia. So are numbers. So are the world’s greatest challenges such as food shortages, pollution, environmental destruction, population explosions, youth bulges, and terrorism, all things literally crying out for more (global) attention. ”

“ Does not the East-West relationship, after its great derailment, facing a similar dilemma too? Is it not high time for a shift of paradigm, a ‘copernican revolution’ similar to that of Galileo in the field of astronomy and that of Kant in the field of metaphysics before? For 2,500 years of the East-West dichotomy, we were tempted into the belief that the human universe consists of the West at its core with all the other cultures revolving around this core. ”

“ Thus, the 21st century is very likely to be the century of the “Chinese economist” and the “Indian computer scientists”, both countries already producing more university graduates than the United States or Europe, which, of course, themselves heavily rely on tens of thousands of Asian graduates and those priceless connections these graduates will mean for the future competitiveness of the Western societies. ”

“ Understandably, there is a most delicate degree of difference between let us say the prophet tempting the disciple or the disciple tempting the prophet.; or: the human subjectivity deluding the world’s objectivity or the world’s objectivity deluding human subjectivity. ”