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PEPE MUJICA - PRESIDENT OF URUGUAY on CONSUMERISM
The massified consumerist culture
as the central phenomenon that boosts the economy...
this use-and-throw civilization
relies on this model as a key to permanent accumulation.
And this is one of the most daring challenges.
i'm stating this thesis again...
When I buy something, I don't buy it with money
I'm buying it with the amount of time of my life
spent to get that money.
If I'm profiting from other people's work,
then I'm buying things with other people's time
spent in getting that money
but invariably, the economic resource in question
is someone's vital amount of time.
Therefore, if we acknowledge life as a supreme gift,
the catch of the consumerist society is that
it tries to rob us that valuable gift.
Let's not understand this naively
Humans need increasing material resources to improve their life.
However, this doesn't imply to embrace a squandering culture
nor to accept the planned obsolescense cycle
in which you endlessly spend, consume and work, more and more.
Hence the need for socialism
or for societies to rethink about this topics.
This is a life devouring machine
A system that seizes time of lives
This is the contemporary form of slavery
In my country, people are struggling for the six-hour day
Although not for having less working time, but for taking on two jobs.
Namely, to work more than ever before.
And that's because they have the pressing need to consume more
because every time they sit in front of a TV screen
they're being subjected, since childhood, to a storm of messages
that permamently state "consume, consume, consume"
and that human happiness is to buy more items.
We're subjected to that civilization.
To call into question that civilization is a perilous act.
Now... politics must not depart from the field of philosophy
because if it does, it becomes deprived of it's guiding principles.
Therein lies the difference.
To fight for a better world doesn't mean to pile up more cars,
nor to multiply the amount of refrigerators, no no, we're screwed up...
it means to multiply the amount of leisure time.
And what is leisure time?
It's when I have free time, at my own convenience.
For some people it may be to play soccer
For other people it may be go fishing, or maybe rest beneath a tree.
I mean, I'm free when I do with my time whatever I want.
And I'm not free in that period of time I have to spend
to afford my material needs or that of my family.
There I'm subjected to the ancient law of necessity
I could be more or less happy with my work, but that's another story
but I'm only free out of that period of time.
Therefore, to struggle for freedom
means to increase that leisure time where I can do what I want.
That's not necessarily about acquiring more goods, but gaining more time.
This line of reasoning is too intelectual given the trap we're caught in.
With this media system that is shaping our culture. Ok?
I'm not offering a panegyric of becoming a hermit
and self-flagellating each morning.
I'm not praising poverty.
I'm stating the value of sobriety
and the concept of limit...
You've got to know to set your limits in life.
(wouldn't you be accused of being authoritarian?)
Yes, surely, but limits ought to emerge from culture and free will.
If you want to commit your life to climb the Everest, that's ok.
I will look at you and will say "what a crazy nice guy!"
I won't climb there not even if I'm drunk, all right?
But that's your freedom.
And one thing is that freedom, for which I'm willing to die,
and the other is to live without free will, lacking liberty
trapped in that cycle of working 12 or 16 hours...
thats a prison, the prison of consumerism is a real prison.
That's the big dilemma of our time.
To make better societies believing that...
because I passed through that...
We thought we would have a better society when five-year-plan X
had yielded more tons of steel than so-and-so.
Nonesense!
Nonesense! We left the best down the road.
Why do I think so? I'm telling you briefly. We don't have much time.
I'm explaining it schematically to you, roughly
The Man is biologically a socialist animal
because it passed 90% of it's existence on earth in prehistoric times,
where there weren't neither "mine" nor "yours", it was all "ours"
That's the core of mankind's history on earth
just the remaining 10% consists of the other stages.
We're biologically socialists
but, we're merchantilists and capitalist as a result of history.
We carry big contradictions, we are hardwired socialists,
our history made us become capitalists.
These concepts deserve more time to be developed.
We're as if we've lost something.
We're missing something.
(Whatever it is that we consume)
It is stated in Don Quixote to the goatherds
"Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of golden...
...because they that lived in it knew not the two words 'mine' and 'thine'"
Then it was property that was setting us appart.
Then it was the concept of it that generated.
The concept, and the culture built around it, etc.
Many may feel shocked by my sayings, and they will hit me, but I don't care.
All this in the light of contemporary science and anthropology
and has to be included in the analysis.
Now, I think that man has some kind of genetic memory.
That's why it has some sense of socialism embedded.
Of course, there's a gregarious instinct on man.
Man cannot live alone, he needs society, he can't live out of it.
Well, in this trap we're caught.
Now, we latinamericans are confronting a stage in history here and now.
I think that Latin America is the laboratory of these concepts.
Of course when Evo (Morales, president of Bolivia) says
"we can't drill a well because we attack Pachamama (Mother Earth)"
or gets angry when we talk about biofuel,
of course he can't conceive life to be burnt out. He's right! Isn't he?
How do we generate a culture capable of being great enough
to the point of understanding things it doesn't share
but be comprehensive towards them.
Freedom can't be an identity in which everybody thinks the same way
and say the same things.
Freedom is a starting point, equality is a starting point.
Well, we will go through this world until the end.