Pepe Mujica | Mi entrevista más sincera

BAMBÚ: How would you like to be remembered? I don’t even care. (mumble) We think we are important.

We’re not even a grain of sand in the magnitude of universe. I don’t know why we’re gonna be more important than ants. Ants have lived on Earth for millions of years.

And probably, they will be after we go. Man is a vain little bug. Because we remember… The most spectacular monuments humans have made it.

. . Trying to survive.

They love life. That monuments, as The Pyramids. 300.

000 persons working twenty years. What a great sacrifice for make a grave for a guy! What a thing!

. . .

The thing is… We love life and we want to escape from questions that haven’t got answer; the sense of life. . .

What's gonna happen after? , There will be something? We want to believe there’s something, it can’t just finish.

But why are we gonna be more important than animals? I don’t know… Do you believe in life after death? I think we come from nothing and we go to nothing.

Just are phenomenons… Life's a molecule’s adventure. But I respect a lot the religious world. As I studied some anthropology, I have seen that all human groups end up believing in something that they cannot prove.

They need to believe in something. Man needs to have faith in something. He invents things that help him to group.

And some religions are a confort that helps to die well. Because of that… I’m a friend of the Pope. But my believing is that… No.

. . But well.

. . !

The subject is open. BAMBÚ: What would you say to those who build ideological trenches and see imposible the understanding between those who think different? Sapiens are social animals.

We cannot live alone like pumas. We have around 300. 000 years.

Living in group, we have 40. 000 or 50. 000 more or less.

So much so that in all the form of ancient law after death penalty, the worst penalty was being kicked out of community. It was impossible to live alone. The community protects you defends you from society.

But if we are a group of individuals which live in society there's conflict. Because each individual is unique. And somebody has to mediate in conflicts for the survivor of society.

That’s the role of politics. So I’m agree with the Aristoteles’ definition: “Man is a political animal”. But he is, because is a social animal.

He cannot live in loneliness. Society has give us a lot. We don’t realize it.

When we are born, we receive all that barrage that civilization builts. It’s like a solidarity between generations from those who discovered the fire and the wheel to those who work in molecular biology. We receive all this stuff when we are born.

And we don’t realize. And it's a lot what society has give us. If not for you, you who lives in loneliness like pumas, you think you’d come with this gadget?

At most you’d walk with a loincloth. . .

Hopefully! You live because the others are. Because if your little truck breaks you’re gonna get a mechanic who repairs it.

And so on. We depend, we interdepend. No matter if we realize or not.

The clothes we wear, the shoes, everything! So we socially interdepend. We must take care of society.

But if we've differences because each individual… We have to learn how to tolerate. One thing is passion. And other thing is fanaticism.

Fanaticism is hate’s friend. And hate is blind, like love is. The difference is that love is a creator and hate ends up destructing you and the others.

It’s not worth wasting energy on hating. To learn how to forget is comfortable. What meaning have reconcilitation and forgiveness for you?

I’m not God to forgive. Nor am I God for judge. I’m a mere mortal, a fighter.

And if people look a lot into the past they give you crazy for settle outstanding accounts. But life is about future and it’s forward. Nature put our eyes forward.

It would have been helpful to have an eye on the back for take care of ourselves, but… Life is about affirmations. Future. Whatever happened, happened.

Use it for learning, for having wisdom. But there’s no sense in settle outstanding accounts because… You know? Because definitely… We've to think about the new ones who are coming.

So… There are things you can’t forget but in life there are accounts that can’t be settled. You have to learn. You put them in a backpack, and you learn how to walk.

And living together in a society means respecting what is different. Which doesn’t mean you have to agree. You just have to respect.

Because if you don’t, there’s no posible coexistence. To be in agreement we don’t need democracy, we put a king who directs us and that’s all. But as we don’t agree, we need to have the ability to live with differences.

And for this it’s very useful to think about the future and the fate of the new generations. Most probably people don’t think about being born is a miracle. You have 40 millions chance of any other being born.

And it was you. But life ends, it goes. The problem is: what are you doing with your lifetime?

What do you spend the miracle of have being born on? If you don’t ask this, don’t worry. The market will take over and you’ll spend all your life paying bills and buying things, blah, blah blah… Until you’re a broken old person.

And you’re not buying with money. You buy with the time of life you spend earning that money. But the time of life doesn’t recovers.

Life is an adventure. So, as everything biological, you have needs. But if you let them become in something infinite.

. . You’re gonna spend your whole life plugging holes.

And buying, buying, buying, and having a lot. And getting worried about your stuff, if somebody steals it, whatever can happen… And there’s not enough time in your life for spend it in affections. And that’s all you’re going to keep to you at the end.

At your age, love is volcanic. It needs time. Over the years love becomes a sweet habit, a fellowship.

And it also needs time. And you need human time for your friends for yourself and your relationships. Because humans need affections.

But they need time. Affections cannot be recorded. So, nowadays, you go to a modern city.

. . People lives in a block of apartments and they don’t even say hello to each others.

They suffer a lot of loneliness in the middle of the crowd. My claim is a little stoic. As Seneca said: “Poor is who needs a lot.

" Or, as Aymara say: “Poor is who hasn’t a community, who hasn’t a fellow, who hasn’t friends. " But all of this requires time. Affections require time.

People use to say: “I don’t want my son lacks anything. " I think it’s great. But finally, he lacks company because you haven’t time to spend.

And who told you that a child only needs toys and food? A child is a filled-with-love being. He needs the sensation of love, of human relationship.

Somebody who takes care of him. So… Its’s not only about wealth, it’s about happiness. Why let life only passes?

I know that I’m going against. . .

The current values of contemporary life. Succeed means becoming rich and all of that… To me, that’s crazy. You have to ensure your bread, a roof, a ‘nest’ and all of this but… What happens after?

If you. . .

You’ll go away and worms are gonna eat you. What about friendship, affections…? To cultivate human relationships all of this requires time.

Watch out: I don’t advocate poverty. I promote sobriety. To set a limits.

Because if I have a lot of things I get crazy with the quantity of all this stuff. Big house, servant… Be careful, maybe they steal you, watch out for this, for that, butler, blah, blah, blah… But for what? All that for what?

So… We live with sobriety, with what’s necessary and. . .

We live happy. We have friends everywhere and well. .

. Mmm. .

. It’s a life philosophy. In the other hand.

. . I think if humanity goes on like this… Accumulating things again, and again, and again.

. . We’ll destroy the world.

Humanity has became a geological phenomenom. Now we are influencing the weather. We are influencing the drought.

The quantity os trash we produce. . .

It’s a wasting generation, I think. We don’t throw things, we throw human time of life. And I think life… We have to work for live.

Who is not producing is living off other who worked, but life is not only to work. We must dedicate a good chapter for the madness that each one of us have. Because if you do something out of obligation you’re not free.

You are free when you spend time of your life doing things that motivate you. The things you like. For one it can be play football, for other fishing, for other to investigate a molecule, to other make art… I don't know!

We’re different. But having a cause, having a passion… It takes time. It’s a life philosophy.

Philosophy is not fashionable because it is not charged. But there’s too much unhappiness in the world. Not only poverty.

There’s poverty here. In the soul too. Feeling things requires time too.

I love nature. I was driving a tractor the other day. And there was a southern lapwing with its nest.

And the tractor was going to fall on it. It didn’t move, it was willing to die under the tractor. I stopped the tractor, turned around and respected the nest.

And I left it alone, right? It’s something wonderful. The struggle for life.

But you have to have time for see those things. BAMBÚ: What do flowers and nature means to you? Flowers… I worked on this when I was a kid.

We lived on it, my father died when I was 8. And with my mother, we grew flowers which were sold a lot. But that’s a profession that almost tends to disappear in Uruguay.

Because habits have changed. And amazing things. .

. have broken in. Artificial flowers, Chinese, flowerpots… So they put a little flowerpot that seems (mumble)… It’s a dead thing but it seems alive.

And as a market phenomenon, it has decreased a lot. Now I plant vegetables for people to eat. And alfalfa, for the horses.

After the Mongols, we are the country with the most horses per inhabitant. Through a tradition issue, as a cattle country the horses were essential for take care of the cattle and all everything else. It just was incorporated to the culture as… As the dog in other places.

Here, horses are… That’s a cultural issue, you know? And urban horses, well… They have problems from food and all that. We plant alfalfa for them.

Do you know the meaning of “alfalfa”? It’s an Arabic word. It means “the good plant.

" It’s highly proteic and… In some conditions, it improves the ground. BAMBÚ: What do you think it’s the best you’ve done and which you can be satisfied with? The best thing I've done is to love life and boost it.

Do you know what is to succeed in life? To succeed in life is to start again everytime one falls. That has to do with work, with love, with all human relationships.

Life is full of stumbles and failures. But it's beautiful. We've to live it to the maximum, with generosity.

The best achievement is that when I passed away there’s gonna be a lot of people who’ll keep fighting, dreaming for improve the world where we live. Surely. .

. We always ambition to much more than you can achieve. But it’s like little steps.

Everything that means human progress has happened because there were people who worked really hard. Who transform that cause in the cause of its life. Workers work 8 hours, yes.

. . Because in 1890 there was some people who even lost their lives fighting for having 8 hours of work, when they worked 12, 14 hours.

All the social rights we achieved, the retirement… All of this happened because there were people who fight. Well, nothing’s suddenly going to fall into our lap. I’ll settle for a group of people keeping fighting for this.

This is the best celebration and the best memory. The rest will gone with the wind. BAMBÚ: How do you think inequality and poverty can be solved?

Do you believe in access to education as a path? It’s a big component, the education is a big component. But it also has to.

. . Education has to generate.

. . And also coexistence.

. . values for work with the selfishness that we carry inside.

Which is natural. All things alive are programmed with a part of selfishness. Because nature, for all of us who are alive, records a message in our hard drive: We have to fight for our life.

And for our closer descendants’ life. But when that exacerbates to the maximum… We end up fighting to accumulate much more than we need. And with this, sometimes we are taking it away from someone.

Opportunities… This is a cultural and social fight. . .

That’s gonna last a long time. Now, thinking machines are appearing. It's wonderful.

And dangerous. Both things. I ask myself if robots.

. . Are they going to pay taxes?

Are they going to contribute with social security or not? Because machines have to serve people and not people to the machines. These are new problems that appears, right?

There’s gonna be struggle. Because until now all the technological progress was the prolongation of the hands, the prolongation of the voice, the prolongation of the view. .

. But now machines appeared that are the prolongation. .

. Of intelligence. It wasn’t existed before.

This is the challenge in time that you, the young people, have. It can be a wonder. Or it can be a nightmare.

Because the question is: who does this intelligence work for? That’s why there’s going to be battle, surely. There’s nobody at supermarket.

No cashier. No one. I dispatch by myself, I go to a machine that assists me… Great.

But who pays social security for retire the cashier who is no longer there? I ask myself that question. And it’s going to have to be fixed!

Because robots don’t go to the supermarket to buy. Right? There’s going to be conflict.

The first time I saw a robot like that was in Spain. I went to. .

. To the Santander Bank’s central and a little gadget, a robot came to me and took me to the elevator. And I thought: “Wow, we are screwed.

" "There’s no doorman here". "They have a robot. ” Ciao.

It’s what’s coming, dude. And. .

. This is going to bring problems at work and in people’s occupation, and everything else. And it’s good.

Machines are for relieve human work, but we have to split it. That’s the question. BAMBÚ: It feels like.

. . Well, compared to previous generations, technologies are making us separate from each other and the contact that I feel when I go to places with less resources, or rural zones, normally there's a more direct contact between persons, people look into each other’s eyes and there's something that nourishes a lot, isn’t there?

It’s that contact, that coexistence with people. And I feel that in our contemporary society this is something that is getting lost. It’s horrible, dude.

You see a young couple, as you sitting in a bar and they are like… Instead of being pampering themselves. They are crazy! And then you think: “No, I’m from another time, I’m misjudging it.

” But you think it’s such a ridiculous thing… So ridiculous! That they’re in a human relationship and each one is engaged in… It’s a problem. In some moments I feel the sensation that there’s an amazing technological advance but that we haven’t advanced nothing with our values.

The humanity seems like a gorilla with a machine gun: a brutal technology but it’s not up to the technology it has. A boy walks with an university on his pocket if he knows how to consult it. But he’s not up to it, he uses it for any disaster.

It’s not technology’s guilty. It’s that technology has advanced much more than we have advanced on average as humanity. So… I don’t know if we could liberate us from that.

But we cannot function with this technology with the values we have. BAMBÚ: I don’t know what happened, but when I was in school… Ethics and Philosophy were subjects they were about to take away, weren’t they? They look like two more important subjects were secondary.

Because they aren’t practical. They aren’t profitable. In lots of places, education it’s becoming into you must be an efficient worker.

Not a person who thinks or dreams. No, no, you’ve to be good for that job! Don’t bother with other things, it doesn’t give benefit.

Already, evolution of science has passed. Economy. .

. Economy was very linked to Philosophy and Politics. Adam Smith, who takes as a symbol of the liberal economy, they detract him.

They despise him. Adam Smith was an humanist. A man who.

. . A man who is translated in a concept: the market.

. . “The magic of market”.

So. . .

So economy started being economy, politics, and now it becomes econometrics; a set of formulas. If there is fiscal deficit, and this, and that… But people. .

. (laughs). People seems not to count.

You cannot dehumanize knowledge. Knowledge has sense in living it from humanism. If it makes something or nothing in people’s luck, and in solve people’s problems.

And the biggest problem is if you pass with a happiness sensation in the course of life or we pass only with obligations and anguish. And compromises. I don’t know, it’s complicated.

It’s complicated. We have a very big values crisis. And I confess that when I look at Europe seen from here, with this war that they have… I think they’re all crazy.

We know what’s happening with climate change, Germany starts to revive the coal mines, this, and that… I see that the NATO war technicians are calculating the possibility of tactical warfare with nuclear tactical weaponry. . .

They are crazy! Where are we going with this? Where are we going with this?

They have no sense of the limit. That old Greek statement: "Nothing too much. " Stop things, they have limits.

There are things that have to have limits. To have values means that too. To have a crisis… This, this is a global civilization.

But it’s managed by the market not by human intelligence. I get the impression that we are not up to the civilization we have unleashed. Now it handles us.

. . the needs from market.

There was several globalizations. The Roman Empire was a globalization in its time. But they had a direction, good or bad, but they had one.

China is the daughter of a millennial empire. It was a globalization in its time. Such a space that they covered and everything, but they had a direction.

All this phenomenon were made by the sword. Nowadays that is unthinkable. We've to have a humanity that is capable of agreements.

We generated a United Nations for that, but now we have 'undressed' it. They practically don’t call the shots, they are a just a bunch of old men who are there for the photo. But they have no clout.

And we have phenomenom that are global because no country can fix climate issue, we need global policies. And we know what to do. Science told us what to do thirty years ago.

But we don't do it. So now you've little gifts: 200. 000 hectares set on fire in Spain, a heat wave, drought in Europe… That's what you see.

. . Not to mention what’s in Africa.

I can guarantee you that there are works calculated fifty years ago that haven't been done. For example: There's a work calculated to make a river with the drain, with the ice melting of Alaska that passes through Las Rocallosas and reaches California, and dies in the desert of Mexico. A stream of fresh water that goes to the sea.

And instead of going to the sea, it serves as a river. Do you know how much it cost? The one-year US military budget.

There are proposals to make a system of canals and lakes in the Sahara. For what? To increase evotranspiration and with this, increase the rainfall rate.

Man is very much what he can do. But no. .

. We are for war. We are for other things.

. . And we spend on armaments, on rockets.

. . Not that there are no means.

What we are doing is waste them. That’s what makes you most angry. Because we humans did a lot of terrible things in our history.

Here in Latin America, hundreds of large animal genera must have disappeared. Because the man being who hunted killed the first ones, but the man didn't know. Now the disgrace is that we know what we are doing.

We know the disasters it brings, and we keep going. And so. .

. It’s a very strong challenge ahead of us. The only hope is you young people.

You've to kick the world to change this. In Europe there are strong. A lot of young people realize that.

What makes different Uruguay from other countries so that someone with its characteristic way of thinking can become president? Uruguay is a little country which is guilty for being in a very important corner. Uruguay is.

. . A piece of Argentina.

We composed the same unity, the same viceroyalty of Spain. But in the independence wars there was lot of trouble, and it always was ambitioned by Portugal. They invaded Uruguay twice, occupied it.

. . through Brazil.

And in those contradictions. . .

There were circumstances. The problem was a ports struggle: Montevideo is a better port than Buenos Aires. It hurt the interests of Buenos Aires.

And when the colonial world collapses, the only income the nascent states have is customs taxes. And the one who collected the customs had money to form an army and beat the other. Then customs were very important.

A federal movement emerged which wanted every province to be governed and have a central government for international politics. But after they had it, that was called federalism. A Uruguayan, Artigas, had the idea of an organization like the one that occurred in the United States in the seven colonies when independence arose.

That clashed with the interests of Buenos Aires. And that produced huge conflicts and the last Portuguese invasion was propitiated by those who ruled Buenos Aires because they couldn't with Artigas. A result of this, England took advantage and came out as a guarantee for us to were an independent country.

Because, looking away. . .

England couldn't, which was the power of the time, reconcile that the entire Atlantic coast was in the hands of two countries. It was the guarantee of our independence in 1928. And that’s where Uruguay booted.

We had almost eighty years of internecine, civil wars, it doesn't mind. . .

But from 1904 we had two successive governments that could be called social-democratic governments for their time. Notice that, in 1910. .

. The government gives the divorce to the woman. .

. You have to settle in 1910. It gives the divorce to the woman by its own will.

The president wrote God with tiny letters, separated the church from the state. He joined a woman who had three children. Do you know what it was in that world?

He founded a women’s faculty to encourage families to send daughters to study because families were so conservative that sending a girl to study was like a degrading thing. You have to place yourself in the 1910 mentality, the prejudice that existed. There is a speech by the poet from homeland, Zorrilla de San Martín, here in parliament.

. . Which he opposed women’s teaching because they were going to lose the sweet customs of the home.

That was Uruguay. He turned that around, he did it. He established things like these: the poor man’s lawyer’s union.

Were given the vote to the woman "early," etc. . .

But all in the framework of a struggle. Or things like these: recognizing prostitution. And organizing it in terms of health and everything else.

He didn’t think about ban alcohol. You know what he did? Alcohol, at that time, was interspersed with wood alcohol which is cheaper, which is a poison.

So, alcohol was manufactured by the state, charged a little more expensive and that subsidized public health. I’m talking about 1910, 1915; very, very early. And we learned a lesson, which I don’t like.

But still happens. With your grandfather, but living is worse. You have to organize it to make it as little worse as possible.

That gave us a feature of open country, with social rights. Already in the forties we had wage councils. And a set of social rights that didn't exist in other countries of America.

Education is free. . .

I don’t know, maybe 150 years ago. The state’s main university is free. It means that society pays for it with taxes.

These characteristics that Uruguay has, also has made us. If we were born elsewhere maybe we would be different but. .

. We owe that to the history of Uruguay. It doesn’t mean we’re bucolic.

Perfect? No, we have every barbaric mistake. .

. and everything else. But if you compare into the context of Latin America, we were always a country that divided richness better.

Not the richest, the one that divided richness better. A gently, undulating country. Not an extreme country: either way.

A centrist-middle country. The right-wing of this country is ludicrous comparing with other places’ right-wing. So is the left-wing.

It's much more moderated. I can tell you this because I was in prison and I felt that Argentine officers came and said to the Uruguayan officers: "Ah, these in Argentina would be under water. " And we are similar, but we are children of a different culture.

I hope Europe shakes off this stage of. . .

I am very hurt by what happens in Europe. Not only Putin is crazy, they’re all crazy, huh? And it’s contagious madness.

And people are going to suffer a lot. . .

Because that’s a question: when you are well, or relatively well in a society and it falls suddenly, you suffer much more than you are accustomed to being against the ground. Some message to share with future generations? Make life a priority.

Life is a miracle. Probably there’s more life in the inmensity of the universe… But here where we are. .

. What was given to this planet and what is called life, all forms of life must be looked after. Life is beautiful.

You know why? Because life. .

. Life is about feelings. Life allows you to feel things.

Don’t think that feeling is a human peculiarity. Animals have feelings. Beautiful feelings they have, too.

Stones have no feelings. Wood has no feelings. Minerals have no feelings.

All what have feelings are alive things. Even the plants have. For example, it has been discovered that plants, if you are in a greenhouse, they can change their electrical relations if unknown people enter.

It's amazing! The living nature is amazing. We have to take care of life.

Of course human life. Is a noble cause. I would say, almost miraculous.

Because the dimensions of the inert world. . .

You realize that the little speck of life is like a little blur in there, giving it a different category. And so. .

. to love and live with intensity. Enjoy life.

Enjoy colors, feelings. . .

Hope. . .

Suffer frustration. Hurt. Love and cry.

Shake the skin, feel nerve. Hunger, cold. Hope.

It’s the difference to the inert. People who commit suicide can’t get it. And much less the young people who commit suicide.

It’s something that hurts me. There are very few animals that commit suicide. And some that commit suicide is to save others.

The only one who commits that barbarity is the human. But well. .

. When that old woman who that takes us comes. .

. I’d like to say: "Please, ma'am, serve another round". If you liked the content, I invite you to suscribe to this channel.

Thank you, thank you so much, and good luck on the way.