José Mujica: "Political impotence is a consequence of a lack of commitment"

José Mujica, former president of Uruguay, during his participation in the forum 'The social challenge of Latin America' in Santiago de Chile, this Friday.Cristobal Venegas

Friends, one more conference in the distance.

There are many conferences.

In reality, we have a Latin America full of resources, with a gigantic social debt.

There are things that we have known for a long time, but nothing will change substantially if we humans do not have the ability to organize ourselves and fight for a greater good.

This is of an elementary nature, but the history of our future depends on the militant and committed attitude assumed by at least a significant handful of people who care about that future.

In reality, we humans have the option, after being born like any living subject, to give our existence a purpose, to have a cause to live or to live for the sole fact of being born.

If we can't get people to commit to trying for a better world than the one we were born into and that we are complementing, let's not blame the world, but rather take responsibility for our inaction.

Our civilization is marvelous, it has achieved miracles, but the bulk of these boys are not up to the technological leap we have made and, therefore, use it in any way.

Technology and science advanced much more than the set of values ​​that illuminate the path of life, because the central cause of the path of life has become buying new things and confusing being with having, and as such, there are a matter of moral commitment to existence.

Then,

Therefore, the challenge facing our America and the world is the model of life that it has assumed and the loss of elementary values ​​that it has left along the way.

I think that this conference is of notable importance if it becomes a torrent of people fighting and, if not, it is an intellectual presentation that later settles for passivity.

I know that what I am saying is very hard, but it is a curious thing, sometimes I have the feeling that the technological and scientific progress of our time weakens us, makes us lose quotas of primitivism and we have a tremendous weakness to face the great commitments .

We are capable of a bit of hubbub, of many conferences, but we are incapable of committing long stages and commitment of our existence for a social cause that seeks a change of substantive character.

After the moment of rebellion and analysis, we return to passively accompany the path of existence in which we are vegetating.

Therefore, the social debt of the compatriots of our Latin America does not depend on the diagnoses that we can make, because the diagnoses are clear to us, it depends on the attitude that we are capable of building and what the construction of collective beings that politically can act to change reality.

It's not going to change by spontaneous generation, it's going to change if there's a long line of people committed to that.

More clear,

You can be angry and angry about a circumstance and you can express anger substantively, you can make important intellectual analyzes full of a set of reasons and statistics that can clarify our ability to understand and even the ability to say, but none of that goes to resolve the substantive fact that if we do not put the passion of our existence behind what we think, there will be no substantive change, because man never had as much as he has today.

He never had so many chances.

Never in the existence of the history of the sapien above the Earth, never, have we known more clearly where our ills come from, our limitations and, nevertheless, we contemplate them, they multiply, they worsen.

We have on the horizon the prospect of an ecological holocaust.

For more than 40 years we have known what to do and we don't do it, because we have political impotence.

Political impotence is a consequence of the lack of commitment, of hosts that fight for political change, of the fumes that we see that we resolve the issues with some demonstration, some conference or some particular date where we get together, put up signs and say, and in reality only if an important part of the new generations is committed and committed to the point of cornering political decisions and the time in which we live, can there be change.

Otherwise, it will be very difficult and humanity will have to pay the consequences.

I salute the intellectuals and the gravitating people who appear at this event and many similar events, I ask you to please shake the souls of young people, and very particularly of the university world, because if the young people of this world do not face the legacy negative that we are denying the oldest with our impotence in the contemporary world, the human species is going to pay a miserable price towards the future at the time of greatest scientific and technological boom paradoxically.

It is as if modernity were leading us towards an unfathomable abyss, given all the possibilities, that it is exactly the opposite.

We are not in a time of change, we are in a change of time.

A change of era because until today the last 300 years meant the expansion of the possibility of hands,

Over the next 50 years, this is going to bring changes to such an extent that today's young people, when they are my age, won't even be able to recognize the world of their grandchildren because of the phenomenal changes that are going to take hold.

The big question is this, the ethics, the commitment, the meaning of life of those generations, what is it? What will it be?

To confuse being with having and to believe that the future is to be condemned, to confuse happiness with paying comfortable monthly installments while we exist or life has a different meaning.

In reality, the wonderful technological and scientific leap makes us ask if the machines and the world of machines that think are there to serve humanity and life, or humanity and life are only going to serve the owners of the machines, and the frustrations of thousands will be cumulatively postponed,

of millions of people.

We are going to a world of two speeds.

A hyper-developed world and an irrelevant world that is not even useful to be exploited, we go to the world of being or the world of nothing, are philosophical questions that fit in the attitude that each one of us can assume.

I make a vow for this conference so that they look inside, not only in a diagnosis, but that looking inside they have the courage not to be accomplices by passivity with the subjugating challenges of the time in which we live.

I am nothing more than an old man who grumbles, aware that I am leaving and I love life, and I belong to a time that is leaving naturally, but I am aware that when we are born we receive a torrent that falls on us from what is called civilization, which It is intergenerational solidarity.

If life has a meaning and a promise, it is the concern that the world to come is freer than the world in which we were born, and as such, that people have a step higher than the one in which we were born, but this it does not cease to be a feeling, to be a thanks to life,

a conviction of the importance of life and that curiously the sapien is in a situation that at times seems condemned to life or threaten life, of existence, in the existence of this little boat called Earth.

You can live because you were born, like any bug, like a lettuce, like a beetle, but it just so happens that we were born with the format of sapien and they gave us consciousness.

In a certain sense, our life can be given a direction, we can influence the direction of our life, and that is a conscious decision or not.

If you don't, the market is going to make sure that we grow old, we pay quotas and that we live confusing happiness with having.

Otherwise, it may be to give our existence a course with the intent of a commitment that helps to overcome the difficulties of our society.

If there are so many poor people in Latin America, if there are so many shortages, if there is so much ignorance despite the means we have, and those who have had the opportunity to dream, to think, to know, to have a slightly more refined vision of the history of the sapien above the Earth, have not made the necessary effort to transmit and become a current towards the hope of those who have no hope, or we are supportive and our life is transformed into a message of solidarity with others, or we are barely, just a testimony that will remain as a phrase on a blackboard.

Therefore, dear friends and colleagues, do not remain calm and passive.

Do not digest the defeats, do not get used to a concern passivity.

Commit to the causes, summon the people and try, above all,

to build collective beings because we sapiens are gregarious, not snipers and we essentially need, if we want to change things, to engage with real life.

A conference can be very important if it leads to doing.

Otherwise, it may just be an intellectual tournament.

Until always and forever.

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