I currently work for a company where 99% of my colleagues come from a walk of life that is completely different from mine.

Their alphabet soup of existence seems to be cooked from a big chunk of work, several liters of alcohol, different flavours of online gaming, a good few inches of plasma tv, and a pinch of porn. With all my believes, pass times and things I care about, I sometimes feel I stick out like a broken nose.

I hear Africans have no use for education but what they really need and want is just being fed by the West. They let you know that the European Union is bad, bad, bad because of the poor farmers in Carinthia. It is argued that something can't be pornographic simply because similar things are on display on advertisements all over the metro. Damage to environment comes from huge oil carriers but not from taking a plastic bag five times a week when shopping the two to three lunch items. They believe that sexism is the funnier the cheaper it comes, and as they munch they tell the male colleague who made a cake for them that men do not bake. They think that women have better peripheral vision – with »it really is true« being the only scientific evidence they can produce. When you want to do it right, I am told, a meal should not see you eating for more than 20 minutes – the reason behind this is of course »common knowledge«. They just know that a word from Austrian dialect can never, under no circumstances share its root with a standard German word. Why not? Because of the sheer impossibility, how could I miss it. When I tried to share my linguistic and etymological expertise with them, telling them of suffixes, roots and prefixes, they fire back that »language just is not logical fullstop« backed by a randomly googled Husserl quote (what difference does it make that it really is Frege writing to Husserl?); terminating the discussion with »well, you certainly can talk anything to death«.

An hour long lecture series on colonial history or the food chain that requires African and South American farming to feed the animals that in turn feed us, on the system of wars that ensures we get our commodities cheap, on EU farm subsidies, on sexism, feminism, patriarchy, etymology, logic and what else have you is not an option: I want to keep my job for now and nobody would care anyway.

All that aside, they honestly are the nicest, friendliest and most helpful people and I really like them. But since the etymological incident it slowly dawns on me, why I fail relating to them through means other than small talk or connect on a more profound level: They already seem to know how the world works. Anything that questions this knowledge, anything that remotely paints the necessity of change (how could, by the way, Obama win an election with »Change«?) is dangerous and unwanted. They are not interested in questioning the way things work, and get aggressive at the mere possibility of challenging the world as they know it – which must come pretty convenient for good ol' capitalism.