Based on the realisation that the paths we are taking today are leading to ever more devastating catastrophes, both economic and social, but above all ecological, we want to show politicians, who make their decisions leashed to the economy and disseminate this as having no alternative, how the impending disaster can be prevented. First and foremost, however, we want to make a different, better world understandable to its citizens. Although people see that the current system does not work, they are extremely sceptical of any new concept. For most, change is only conceivable within the existing system.

However, we are not dealing with flaws in the system, but with a flawed system. we have to make a radical U-turn and get to the root causes of its fatally flawed development. But this is only possible if we mentally detach ourselves from the existing system. We must, therefore, present the new as a complex entity in order to gain people’s acceptance.

Whereas evolution moved in units of millions of years and – when things were moving fast – millennia, always advancing very cautiously, we are stepping on the gas, bringing changes every hour. “Global acceleration crisis” is what the astrophysicist Peter Kafka called this phenomenon: we have no time to check the success, to test the effects of an intervention. All new developments have to be deployed as quickly and globally as possible to recoup the investment.

We unhinge the world, although we are not able to then keep it in balance; so it will come crashing down on us and bury us. But since there were many who leveraged at different points, no one will feel responsible, no one will be held accountable – but we will all have to bear the consequences. This is what the alleged homo economicus does with his environment: first he spends a lot of money to destroy it, then he invests vast sums to save it.

The role of humanity in the continuation of life on this earth is as crucial as the work of a restorer for a damaged work of art. If we use the right materials and see our work as a service to the original, it will be saved. If, on the other hand, we think we can implement better ideas than the author of the work with means we have developed ourselves, the existing remnant will still be destroyed.

After the dissolution of the USSR and German reunification, it was considered definitively proven that capitalism was the only economic and social system that worked because it was successful. Voices that warned that communism was dead but that capitalism was terminally ill and therefore had no reason to rejoice, were dismissed as unqualified. Only since the fever on the financial markets rose to such threatening heights that more and more the entire monetary system and with it the real economy threatened to collapse, with dramatic consequences for democracy, has it become permissible to think aloud about the downside of our economic order.

Criticism of capitalism has become a good thing. However, it is limited to the “excesses” and accordingly the demands are aimed at a “taming of predatory capitalism” and a “return to the social market economy”. The latter is presented as the good form of capitalism; its ingredients consist of a mixture of state imperatives and personal morality-based self-restraint. But the big question remains: why do we want to domesticate a predator that has unruliness and expansionism in its blood to the point of self-destruction? Is there really no alternative to capitalism other than socialism/communism?

Equilibrismus e.V., based in Munich, promotes a completely new concept and claims that capitalism and communism have more in common than what separates them, including above all the compulsion to ruthlessly exploit natural and human resources.

“The concept of Equilibrism strives for a balance between ecology, economy, politics, society and culture. At a time when exclusively economic thinking is rampant and economics is becoming omnipotent on a global scale, this goal is more urgent than ever.” – With these words, Sir Peter Ustinov supported the efforts of Equilibrism in his foreword to the book of the same name shortly before his death.

What distinguishes Equilibrism from all other concepts is above all its biocentric orientation instead of the anthropocentric view usually seen. As long as humanity feels itself to be above nature and thus separate from it, it contributes with its activities to destabilisation and imbalances. This leads to the fact that for large parts of humanity (but also of all other living beings) the living situation remains precarious and endangered.

In order to bring the ideas of Equilibrism to a wider audience than a non-fiction book can do, the future novel The Tahiti Project (German Science Fiction Prize 2009) was written with the well-known German journalist and science fiction author Dirk C. Fleck, and from it the Maeva Trilogy followed. On the one hand, The Tahiti Project contains all the ingredients of a thoroughbred “eco-thriller”, but at the same time it shows how ecological, economic and political alternatives can lead to real progress if they are coordinated in an overall system. No “back to nature” in the sense of loss of prosperity is propagated, but rather an enriched, happier and sustainable life. The next two books in the Maeva Trilogy show how a new consciousness is stirring and asserting itself in a collapsing world.

The Trilogy is not science fiction at all – the fiction is only that a society begins to think and act in a sustainable way, using the given possibilities. We are sure that our literary extrapolation will be made into a film, because reality is gradually catching up with it …

But the theoretical concept in the non-fiction book and its entertaining illustration in the novels are only steps towards the actual goal that Equilibrism strives for. True to the theme: a model experiment based on the equilibrist concept is to be initiated in a region of the world. Nothing is more convincing than a working practical example.