This is the second of three kick-off posts on my blog, which are meant to reflect on the events leading up to its launch and on my departure from Fate and Challenge (FCA). In my farewell post there (Wayback Machine) I wrote of two main reasons: a lack of coordination within the team and disagreements about the kind of political activism our organization should engage in. The farewell text can also be found here on my website.
I think I've written enough about the ability and willingness to reach and maintain agreements: the same decisions had to be renegotiated again and again, and even written arrangements were only treated as loose recommendations by some. Not least my veto against the hastily written letter, which showed quite publicly how much they disregarded their own board structure (or me personally). With these conditions, I hadn't been doing well in the FCA team for some time. Until the fall of 2022, I still had the illusion that this might somehow be resolved amicably soon. But things weren't moving forward and so I stopped running into this wall and turned the corner to continue on my own path instead.
During the same period, the relation to “Mascha” (from the GSA forum) also changed. In 2016-19, we became friends and have done some promising joint educational work. But later her behavior became so toxic that I made a final attempt at mediation with the board members of FCA present. When that didn't lead to any insight on her side either, there was nothing left but to terminate my long-standing friendship and cooperation with her. (I won't go into details, as I expect the same from Mascha) This only had a limited connection with my departure from FCA, but her strong influence on the team is one of the factors that have led to its unbearable condition in my opinion.
As for political activism, I wrote about “divergent views”. I have received feedback that my farewell message was unclear on this point. So I'll go into more detail here.
According to my observations, our discrimination has slowly but steadily decreased somewhat until 2016/17, but then this trend reversed. Until now the situation of paedophiles and their supporters has gotten a lot worse, especially in terms of freedom of speech. This causes helplessness, fear and anger in many people affected by this. For me too. What could be more obvious than doing something about it? To demand a change in unfair conditions?
It is understandable that requests were made to FCA as an association to use our position for concrete demands on politicians. As a respectable organization within the community and the oldest project of its kind, FCA has simply become THE place to go for German-speakers.
Around the beginning of November 2022, the association was informed at very short notice of an upcoming conference of the state ministers of justice, at which criticism of the recent tightening of criminal law was to be discussed. As a reminder: earlier the German government had passed laws against “sex dolls with a childlike appearance”, the definition of “child pornographic content” had been drastically expanded and the penalties for these and related offenses had been significantly increased. All against the advice of specialists that had been brought in specifically for consultations regarding these laws. There was a suggestion to write to the ministries to put forward some arguments, and Caspar immediately jumped at the chance. Together with NewMan, two board members hastily drafted a letter with concrete demands and sent it in the name of the association to the justice ministers of the German federal states.
Caspar went through with it like there was no tomorrow. Leon and I found ourselves publicly discredited and treated like air. When he was “responsive” again, I discussed it with NewMan and him in detail. (NewMan had apparently overlooked my veto and Caspar left him under the impression that everything was fine) It became clear that they like a few more members of the forum and association saw it as the task of the Fate and Challenge Association to intervene more directly in politics than before. I disagree. Why?
My view of the political system is shaped by my faith. That's a big reason why I parted ways with the FCA team: I cannot reconcile the expansion of our work in a political direction with my Christian beliefs. Jesus said that his servants should “not be a part of the world” and he himself focussed his life's work on just one single task (preaching the “good news”), although he certainly would have been more than qualified to address many other social issues of his time. I understand this along with other details from the New Testament as a call not to interfere in political matters beyond activities similar to education.
Admittedly, however, this is only relevant to me personally.
For FCA as an organization, I also see substantial secular reasons to give clear priority to the path of support and education over further political engagement. When I thought about the nature of these reasons in November 2022, the phrase “the journey is the destination” came to mind and I began to write a narrative about it. The difference I see between direct support work and working on the political-legal situation: one approach brings positive results right from the very first step, the other only later and possibly not at all. You can find this tale here under the title “Flowers along the way” .
Democracy and the Rule of Law are undoubtedly valuable assets in our society. But politics is also notoriously dishonest, corrupt, slow and conflicted. At FCA, too, we had begun to leave team meetings with only a minimal consensus and the uneasy feeling that we were producing far more compromises than genuine cooperation.
The endeavor to improve politics in a deliberate manner works in a fundamentally different way to self-help and (in my opinion) wears out even extremely committed people, often leaving them burnt out or disillusioned. It takes a lot of work, there is a lot of potential to fall out, you often work with frustrating, sometimes bad compromises and it is unclear whether you will achieve success for yourself and others or even get nothing worthwhile in return.
In short: a lot of effort and frustration for unlikely maybe-successes.
The core objectives of Fate and Challenge have always included self-help, education and destigmatization. I have wanted to drastically expand on these for around 10 years and operate them more professionally in the future. I thought that expanding the team and founding the forum would simplify and streamline the day-to-day business of counseling and thus create the capacity to do more: Develop educational offers and proactively approach disseminators and institutions. These plans were apparently shared by the team and later by the association, but today I'm not so sure anymore: for years I saw words but no ambitions from the team. The everyday administration of the forum, the attacks of 2018, users who pushed our team to its limits, internal disagreements – that fully occupied us much of the time. And then you bring in an additional energy guzzler (politics)? Or put new uncoordinated personal endeavors above this expansion of FCA's core objectives?
These “core objectives” are so important to FCA's work, as they are something where we can reach people directly and definitely make a difference. They are largely independent of most legal changes, even if such changes can of course make it easier or more difficult to work in this area. A person who gains an important insight through peer-support – no legislation in the world can ever take it away from them! Although such a commitment is challenging, it also gives back a lot of energy and encouragement.
In short: worthwhile efforts and definite successes.
(I have published more detailed thoughts on the comparison of self-help and political work at Kinder im Herzen already in summer 2023. I may revise this article for M2C at a later date based on the feedback I received there).
Given the choice of following a path where a reward may be waiting at the end, or one where the path itself is the goal and rewards both me and others, I clearly choose the second option. To plant flowers along the way already.
For these reasons and even more, it would have been important for me to leave direct political endeavors to other organizations (or to the private efforts of my team mates), but to clearly focus the work of FCA on self-help and education in accordance with the saying “A cobbler should stick to his last” and further expand our activities in this area.
I hope this makes my position and my decisions of the past 2-3 years a little clearer.