Julio. Well, that opens a whole new chapter here. I remember since my early days in school, I had a compelling call to go for justice and not to be indifferent to what was happening in the world. I remember from early ages that I had this compelling thing about freedom, justice, and maybe that came from the fact that I lived in little towns in Chile where I was directly in touch with poverty, misery at different levels, lack of education, alcoholism, etc. Also, there was a constant message from my father, even when it wasn’t articulated as a message from him but rather came from his presence. He came from Spain to Chile as a refugee after the civil war in Spain. So, my father’s presence was a statement of persecution and lack of freedom. My father never talked too much about the war, but when he did refer to the war, I remember him saying, “I hope that you never have in your life anything like that.”
So, he was a refugee, and I became a refugee a little later in my life. The fact that we had this common experience, for sure, is in the background of this driving force for change. But I think there’s another issue that lies behind my historical circumstances. This is the fact that modernity has exhausted its ways. Humankind is facing three or four major crises today, and I want to point to them briefly. One is the loss of biodiversity and another is the change of climate. Today there’s no question about that. There may be discussion about how it’s produced, but little discussion concerning its existence.
The other one is the energy crisis. It’s well known that we are now using the second half of the endowment of oil on this planet. China is coming into the market to buy; the prices of oil are going up. Our economies, our transportation, our agriculture, our pharmaceutical industry, all are based on oil. So, there’s no question we are heading into trouble.
The other crisis is the monetary crisis. The USA today has an external debt as it has never had before. The trade deficit is huge. We are also facing a complete lack of savings in this country. Day by day, we are facing the fall of the dollar against any other currency on the planet. Clearly, we are facing an issue manifesting in the economy here with the crisis of real estate, but this is only one manifestation, and I think we are going to see more of it.
We are also dealing with other crises. In most countries on earth, we have a healthcare crisis. We are also experiencing in most countries a serious and profound educational crisis. So, no matter where we look, we are attending to the limits of what modernity can offer. There’s no doubt that modernity offers a lot to humankind, but as has happened over and over in human history, you arrive at a point where that doesn’t give you the resources for what is next. We need to now revise the fundamental dispositions of modernity in every single aspect to live after modernity. And if we don’t do the job–and here I have a lot of very well-renowned people with me-we are going to face enormous pain for the species as a species.
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