The problem with lying is that you cannot directly confront someone. As soon as even the slightest implication appears in a direct conversation that you perceive the other person as a liar, the chances of a good understanding are slim.

One person does not feel that he is a liar, how could he? He simply believes in something because he wants to believe in it. That is why I openly admit that I have deliberately chosen to follow a certain view of this world, which I agree with more than another view. I say, for example, that I am neither factually right nor do I need to cite any evidence. But my counterpart insists on the reference to evidence and to facts, and he is indirectly telling me that he does not trust himself or me.

Our government, which justified the initial lockdown on the grounds that there would probably be millions of deaths and that this measure was intended to prevent overloading the health systems (hospitals first and foremost), is now faced with the fact that the hospitals are all empty. And that the millions of deaths are absent.

This reasoning, which is now said to be no longer effective, is still hanging in the air because it is considered to be successful. And so it remains with the imposed regulations, because one is putting oneself in a state which continues to perceive the new norms which have been introduced as responsible for ensuring that the health system remains "stable".

So this system, which is supposed to be protected from overburdening, will remain "stable" in the long run, a paradox. It looks as if this will now be rigorously enforced. The government has not promised an end to the state of emergency, but it has implied it through personal remarks by the Chancellor, who said, "We can't be safe until a vaccine is found."

The new norm is trying to become the usual norm and in the permanent assertion that the first step was the right one and everything based on it confirms this correctness, everything else can only be wrong. The normality that people so desperately desire, and which I too wish for, is like a missing person whom one hopes to meet day after day after his disappearance, like a constant pain and disbelief that the missing person must reappear eventually. Until you give up, because at some point you have to declare the missing person dead.

I suspect that the people who create a daily routine that is to remain unaffected by these conscious considerations have already inwardly recognized this very clearly and accept it in an advanced hurried obedience.

I alone, that is how it feels for me, insist on my and my fellow men's dignity and it is still open for me to what extent I will have the strength to live this faith and not to despair of it.

The decision to show obedience in advance is not stupidity, but rather seems to me to be a form of historical consciousness, in which we all remember too well what happens to people who want to resist (where the question lingers, if forgetting is not also an option). In an effort not to attract attention and not to expose himself to the assumed danger of isolation, which seems to be quite justified, the one who wants to organize his everyday life away from such considerations chooses to belong. Even if this means that belonging to the assumed many means betraying one's dignity and one's potentially ever-present compassion. People have a hard time with it, when they finally lie on their deathbed, as long as they are still sane and won't die sedated.