Collecting mushrooms

February 3, 2007 on 12:00 pm | In Philosophy |

No, this isn’t a Hobbit’s tale, it’s a real world tale.

I have a dear friend named Genox. He is not necessarily the most standard, streamlined and conventional guy you can imagine, but he is the type you would trust with feeding your cat while you’re on a vaccation.

For quite a while he has been in a feud with Herr Zumstein who seemingly has problems to get over a discerning and sarcastic comment Genox once made in his blog. AFAIK Genox never crossed any legal limits or what I would call “good taste” and he has also taken offline the “offensive” post.

Herr Zumstein is an internationally qualified journalist and owner of the SAMUZMedia company. His enterprise is dedicated to fairness, tolerance and solidarity. According to the statements on his website, he treasures encounters between human beings as one of the most valuable aspects of life. Furthermore, the corporate culture of SAMUZMedia is directed towards an open and violence-free dialogue.

I am glad people still stand up and expose themselves for values like these, yet I have a bad feeling about this. I have never met Herr Zumstein in private or talked to him directly, but looking at his website makes me feel uneasy.

Herr Zumstein’s webdesign neglects some of the most basic rules in webdesign. Sure, it’s not necessary to comply with a uniform standard and the artist is free to choose form and content, but there are factors that increase the readability of a site and those that don’t.
Half of Herr Zumstein’s links are not actual links but just pasted text. His reports mix text quoted from other sources with his own prose without a clear distinction between the two. The link featuring the website’s general terms and conditions also contains the author’s CV. The business ethics are shortly summed up in a two sentences PDF while they are largely described on the webpage itself. Again, form and content are not optimally chosen and leave a chaotic impression on the reader. Last, but not least, he seems to take the word “screenshot” a little too literally.

What makes me worry the most are his accusations that read like conspiracy theories while he is fighting back with the proclamation of idealistic core values. Furthermore, he has called the Swiss Media Council and seemingly filed a lawsuit against Genox. Although I can’t be sure, I believe this lawsuit won’t have a long life in the hands of the legal authorities.

Now I don’t have the right to judge Herr Zumstein, especially since we have never met. However, I can’t just go back to my daily routine either. It gives me the impression that Herr Zumstein isn’t exactly the highly successful journalist the world has been waiting for. Instead, he probably feels misunderstood and perceives a huge gap between the world as he sees it and the ideals he sticks to. Probably he also feels treated unfairly by others. However, how do we react in such a case?

Throughout my life I have heard of and experienced people in the vicinity who are easily irritated and engage in pointless fights for the sake of some higher good or ideal. Maybe they have been treated unfairly, maybe they haven’t, but the point is not what starts it all, but what makes this downward spiral spin. I think it’s ignorance. These people make other people feel uncomfortable, so we generally ignore them whenever possible. However, ignorance causes frustration and frustration is a dangerous item, as Switzerland was unfortunate to find out. Please note that I am not implying this case and the one in Zug are the same, but I worry about potential parallels.

The point of this blog entry is that we don’t have the luxury of ignorance. Instead we have to take everyone for serious, even if we have a hard time to dive into that persons train of thought. Now the next question is what to do once ignorance has been ruled out.