Demanding the Impossible Read Online Free PDF Page A

society depends not on certain things that are debated, but on certain things that are simply accepted as unwritten rules. For example, in Europe you don’t get to see signs telling you, “Don’t spit on the floor. Don’t throw food around.” I’m not being disparaging, but I was told that they have such signs in China. But in Europe it’s automatically understood. You don’t even have to write it on the wall. This is, I think, the ethical standard of society. Not what is explicitly prohibited or allowed, but what is to such an extent accepted that you don’t even have to refer to it.
    And if you look at Europe, standards are falling terribly. In this sense, things that were considered impossible 20 or 30 years ago are today becoming more and more acceptable. For example, 20 or 30 years ago, the very idea of having the extreme right in power was unacceptable. They were considered anathema: all the small neo-fascist parties, like Jörg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. We didn’t talk with them. We are in a democratic society, so we tolerate them. But it was absolutely out of the question to have them in power. But then this fell down. You now have them in Austria and elsewhere. They all of a sudden become respectable. The way we think of fascism: until now, it was a consensus in Europe that fascism is bad. But now you have debates about it. And, as I claimed, the same will happen more and more with racism.
    The same thing happens even now apropos Egypt. I think that the West will increasingly have to abandon democracy – even if we hold on to some form of it. It will become more and more fashionable to say “Yeah, democracy. But you cannot apply it directly, some people are not mature enough.” Israel already said this openly: “We support Mubarak because Egyptians are not yet mature people for democracy.” But isn’t it ironic? Because this revolution in itself proved that they wanted democracy.
    I really think we are approaching potentially dangerously chaotic times. What I seriously see is a kind of new authoritarian society different from fascism. I don’t like what many people claim, “Oh! It’s a new fascism.” I don’t like this term, because what I claim is something new and I don’t even like their use of the term in this metaphoric way where they appear to say something precise, but all they do is betray their lack of analysis. When people describe what’s happening now in Hungary as fascism, basically they are saying: “I don’t know what is happening, it just reminds me of what was happening 60–70 years ago.” That’s not good.
    I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? What I’m afraid of is that with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism that is much more efficient and dynamic than our Western capitalism. But I don’t share the hope of my liberal friends. The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.
    The lesson of Wall Street for me is that the true utopia does not mean we can have a different society. The true utopia is the way things are, that they can go on indefinitely just like that. I claim that we are approaching some tough decisions. If we do nothing, then we are clearly approaching a new authoritarian order.

9
For They Know Not What They Do
    Even though we are approaching potentially dangerous times of chaos and confronting tough decisions, we do not know what is really going to happen. How shall we deal with this time of uncertainty, of “the unknowns”?
    SŽ: I really think we are living in very dangerous, interesting times. Everything is changing, including human nature itself, along with the prospect of biogenetics, etc. I was always absolutely fascinated by this phenomenon of directly connecting our brain and physical activity without the use of apparatus. For