Rather, the entire ideology that currently dominates the political agenda is passive aggressive at its core. And that doesn’t just mean that a political agenda is being imposed from above. Rather, passive aggression is an essential component of this way of thinking itself.

This is because it is a world view that has elevated the unwillingness to engage in discourse to its own foundation. It is characterised by the conviction that the sole truth is the political right. Politics is not understood as a process in the course of which different interests, motives, convictions or world views are moderated and harmonised, but rather as a project to enforce the truth. For this ideology, communication has strategic value at best.

Particularly in the left-liberal political milieu, which considers itself enlightened, politics is no longer seen as a field of discussion, debate and democratic decision-making, but as a kind of scientific procedure. Regardless of whether it is climate policy, coronavirus or the war in Ukraine, people imagine that they are proceeding in a strictly logical and rational manner and can therefore make decisions that can claim to be objectively correct. The socio-political debate then naturally does not serve to find a common compromise, but rather to pedagogically convey the sole truth.

Publicist and philosopher Carolin Emcke provided a brief but profound insight into this way of thinking at the Re:publica digital trade fair in Berlin at the end of May. Emcke said that we are constantly being led to believe that there are equally reasonable, contradictory positions on all issues. But that is bullshit.

That may be partly true in terms of epistemology. But politics and epistemology have little to do with each other. After all, the aim of socio-political debates is not maximum scientific rigour or rationality. Rather, the aim of democratic processes is to reconcile a multitude of irrational attitudes characterised by fears, hopes and worries. You could also say that politics is the organisation of the irrational.