Such a configuration brings with it conflicts and problems of distribution. The fourth chapter deals with them. Time has become the subject of politics. Urgent questions about the distribution of work and of time within a society in which the former became the prerequisite for the latter break with unquestioned conventions and shake the established distinctions between work and free time. The complex and increasing significance which time has gained for people today in their different situations in life and phases of life finds its expression in equally different time-preferences. There thus arises a conflict-laden coexistence, having many associations, of time-cultures and desires for better coordination and synchronization, for fairer patterns of distribution in an everyday life in which private time and public time are vaguely mixed.
What new patterns of distribution could look like, what social uchronias arise from the unsolved problems and what solutions there may be, are summarized in the final chapter. It is about action in time, about people playing with time. People create time through their cooperation and their coexistence, their diachronic interconnections beyond time and through their synchronic relations in time. The time of action always contains elements of decision; it is confronted with the uncertainty of the outcome. Trust presupposes expectations of a longer-lasting relationship, it is based on expected durability. Short-term interactions negate time, and where time is neglected, responsibility also dwindles. The separate development of every human being is codetermined by that point at which he or she joins the stream of social development; self-awareness, tools of thought, concepts and perceptions are marked by a stamp of historicity specific to one's generation. But this is equally true of the coming generations to whom a world is bequeathed which they have not yet been able to shape. Is more thinking necessary in intergenerational categories, in view of the momentum which is produced by human intervention in the natural environment? What scope for action in time is there for timely action?
Introduction
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