How does the shown object point to a better world?

Ever since I can remem­ber, I found — way before the Inter­net and smart­phones — in books the world’s vari­ety and point­ers to oth­er lives and pos­sible bet­ter lives which I needed in the nar­row small-town envir­on­ment in which I grew up like air for breath­ing and becom­ing.
In the mean­time, books have been mater­i­ally deval­ued so much that they can be passed on in small ‘free lib­rar­ies’ which I regard, at the same time, as lovely small sprouts of an ‘eco­nomy of free shar­ing’ – though I still keep some spe­cial treas­ures, which I would like to touch and read again, for the time being. That is also, things can get mean­ings which can­not be meas­ured by money.
This spe­cial book which I first read in a Ger­man trans­la­tion (title: Der Plan­et der Habenichtse) rep­res­ents even more to me: In my early twen­ties, I had read a lot of sci­ence fic­tion and fantasy which I see in ret­ro­spect as a kind of train­ing in the ’sense of pos­sib­il­it­ies’, a phrase which Robert Musil (in: ‘The Man Without Qual­it­ies’) coined for me, mean­ing: we need not only the sense of real­ity, but also the sense of pos­sib­il­it­ies. This book and this thought have planted in me the con­vic­tion that a bet­ter world will nev­er be fin­ished, let alone can be designed in a final way. Sense of pos­sib­il­it­ies — that is, the basic assump­tion and ima­gin­a­tion in which things could still be dif­fer­ent and bet­ter (instead of cling­ing to the status quo for fear of change) — is, thus, for me an essen­tial com­pon­ent of a bet­ter world.

This is how I imagine a better world:

In con­tours:
No exploit­a­tion — neither of oth­er people’s labor nor of nature. Instead, cooper­a­tion between peers as well as sus­tain­ab­il­ity and respect for oth­er beings (which excludes dis­crim­in­a­tion against any­one already); and lov­ing care for all who need it: chil­dren and the eld­erly, people in mourn­ing or with oth­er spe­cial needs; sick anim­als, thirsty plants, our won­drously alive little plan­et in the big uni­verse…
Exam­in­a­tion of the world in all forms of art at eye level with and in pro­duct­ive exchange with sci­en­tific­ally guided research as well as civic engage­ment and lively, con­struct­ive debates at eye level about what, how and where is not going so well or could go even bet­ter.
No viol­ence as ostens­ible means of ’solv­ing’ con­flicts — although I con­fess that I kill ants in my kit­chen as well as annoy­ing flies and mos­qui­toes when I can get them. Alas, yes, there is always still some­thing left to work on…
In ima­ging an uto­pi­an life for myself, Marx did once inspire me: Going fish­ing in the morn­ing or work­ing in the garden or sup­port­ing my sick neigh­bor; cook­ing and enjoy­ing din­ner with loved ones and/or guests in the even­ing, laugh­ing and ‘philo­soph­iz­ing’, e.g. think­ing and dis­cuss­ing about pos­sib­il­it­ies for a bet­ter life, or watch­ing a new film or going to the theat­er in the neigh­bor­hood; and in between work­ing in my cooper­at­ive or on a new pub­lic mosa­ic or or … while my exist­en­tial needs would be taken care of as much as those of every­one else.

This text was translated by machine. See original text.

Katharina, Chicago, IL