What kind of spring are we longing for?

This made me realize that winter had begun. Spring was back, namely as an expectation. Now the last light has dripped from the trees, the orange of the late cherries, the yellow of the birches. The landscape is becoming accustomed to black and white, to the empty fields over which winter lies clammy and gray.

This is not just the moment when I start longing for spring.

The blossoming of course, not just our own, in warmer air, but that of "nature", the anemones and violets, the roadsides with their flowers and the buzzing of insects. Butterflies even! The longing for spring is a longing for my own ability to be, for being given to myself just as all the abundance of other beings is given to me.

This longing still rises up in me with reliability when the winter gets darker. But its object is lost. The flowers that show themselves to us as gifts because they cannot be otherwise, that used to greet us in spring as the blossoming expression of self-determination, in the field margins and roadsides, along the woodland and by the stream, are less and less to be expected. In industrial agriculture, such self-expression is undesirable.

He will be destroyed.

Spring is no longer flowering, but a deadline: Sowing, which follows the scheduled showering of the soil with a total herbicide.

Last spring, I was near Bremen for a report on an organic farmer who earns his money by growing fine vegetables for upmarket restaurants. Along the way, there were empty landscapes to the left and right. Substrate that bore crumpled corn plants that were recovering from the anti-grass poison shower like patients from chemotherapy (corn is itself a grass). Mown verges, no flowers, no birds, no butterflies, no bumblebees. The windshield remained clean. The air was empty. The crumb was dead. The land like painted concrete, brown, green, colorless.

This is a landscape in which living beings are denied the ability to exist in the name of economic rationality.

But to do otherwise would mean economic ruin for the farmer. The economic leeway is too narrow and the European guidelines are too agro-industry friendly.

The agro-industrial world is a place where the longing for spring no longer has a place, because this would have to be the silent hope for glyphosate.

If the longing for spring is the longing for my own ability to be, then I know in the agricultural landscape of the present that I am not allowed to be. It is eternal winter.

But we all want to be. We all have a deep need to show ourselves in all our individuality, as a living, breathing, feeling being, in our own truth and to be seen in it. This is the experience of happiness, namely connectedness, in which I can be myself. A world in which this ability to be is denied is therefore a world in which our death is desired, not explicitly, but implicitly, as a subtext. Psychologists call this a double-bind message: it subliminally conveys the exact opposite of what its words say. Like I love you spoken with hate in your eyes, for example.

Double bind messages trigger mental disorders.

A child that grows up with such statements from its parents cannot develop its identity: It cannot be. A farmer who wants to earn his living by manufacturing his own death and constructing a landscape that stages this deadness cannot come alive in it. It is interesting that our culture has found a figure for what it means to be neither dead nor alive: it is the zombie. We hope for a longing for spring. We find ourselves in zombie landscapes.

Another manifestation of the zombie is the fascist.

A fascist promises intensity and liveliness. He promises connectedness to those people who feel disconnected. The solution to achieving this intensity is always violence, i.e. separation and death. Double binds breed fascism. You could almost say that the double bind is the hallmark of fascism: smilingly lying, indignantly proclaiming your innocence, while everyone knows who did it.

So we could say that the topography of nothingness into which we allow our landscapes to be transformed by farmers desperate to make a living is itself fascist. Fascism means that he who is responsible for death poses as the savior of life. Like a landscape that produces food for the body by starving my soul.

The economist and historian Karl Polanyi saw this connection in the 1940s. Polanyi recognized that European fascism sprouted in a situation in which ever larger circles were denied a sense of being alive. Fewer and fewer were allowed to experience themselves as themselves in continuity and solidarity. Even then, this was a consequence of efficiency and the pressure to generate returns. In the first phase of globalization, as Polanyi shows, the "gold standard" of the time played the role that is played today by the protectors of total market freedom such as the IMF and the World Bank.

In order to prevent fascism, we must therefore enable vitality.

Allowing ourselves to be. Creating spaces in which we can all, humans, animals, plants, allow each other to be. Because otherwise someone will come along who will turn the latent fascism of the landscape, which produces food through death, into an explicit political program. Who promises people life and produces death for people.

To prevent fascism, we have to allow ourselves to be true. This starts with the longing for spring. I want to share it with the butterflies, with all beings who allow themselves to be. If only no one would deny them life in the name of a better life.