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.
At the request of FCA, I have taken a few posts offline in part or in full for the time being. Their team has voiced strong criticism and I want to take a fair look at it and revise my texts accordingly where it seems appropriate. This may well take a few weeks. (23.3.2025)
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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.
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.
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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 to operate them more professionally in the future: developing educational material/workshops and proactively approaching disseminators and institutions. I thought that the addition of a forum and more team members would distribute the workload and thus create the capacity to do more. But the everyday administration of the forum, dealing with attackers and organisational tasks pushed still kept us all fully occupied. In that situation, would it be wise to bring in politics as an additional energy guzzler?
I view these “core objectives” as so important, 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.