constructeur maison moderne landes

for me, the most important question today is how to sit together and to discuss, not one or two persons, but to see if it’s possible for all of us on this planet to start to raise the questions about what’s important. for me, what’s important… are you bending the truth of climate change? why are african states less developed than western states?

what is the proper balance between jewish values and other values in a democracy? why do they dislike americans? how does an individual relate to the group in the 21st century? this place has a lot of history. in this place, as you know, they used to burn books of people who speak things that other people don’t like to know.

and maybe that’s why we come here to august-bebelplatz in the middle of berlin, where books got burned. the thoughts got burned. the freedom of speech got burned here! it’s wonderful to see all the beautiful faces around this table. we have a long day ahead of us, so we’re going to go right into the program.

today, we ask and we begin to discover answers to 100 questions chosen from thousands, donated by people from all around the world. we will ask them all over the course of the next nine hours… ok, so turn the camera a bit straight... thank you. not so much. a little bit… there! thank you.

together we come together, as one, to celebrate our diversity and to gather a multiplicity of viewpoints. thank you for being here with us at the table of free voices. question one from anonymous, usa. what is today’s most important unreported story? you can start with your answer.

what ought to be reported today and definitely does not is how much life costs... the price of life on this planet. we are going from crisis to crisis and we only report a portion of the story. when the guns of battle are silenced, we then forget about that country, that region that has suffered conflict,

and we go to report a different story. well, i would begin with darfur, the annihilation of populations just because they have another religion or are of another race. and the world is not interested in them because they have no resources.

no oil. for me, the most unreported story of today is the truth behind the global terrorism. we have no idea, really no idea, what is the truth behind it. who is alive? who is dead? who is advancing it? who is pioneering it? who is making use of it in "his" or "their" favor.

the children who has been slaved human traffics. the millions and millions of people crossing borders illegally in search for a better life. i think today’s most important unreported story is the story of the young girl who died ten minutes ago of malaria.

she died needlessly, because the drugs that would be able to kill the malaria parasite exist and are cheap. but she didn’t get those drugs. and she died, and just now another child died, and this story goes unreported. i don’t think there is

today’s one most important unreported story. there are many unreported stories throughout the world. it’s the good things that are happening in the world. we don’t hear about the good things that are happening. there are such wonderful things happening out there. all we ever hear about it is the bad news: the death, the destruction,â wars, killing, murder, rapes.

problems. if you squeeze a newspaper, it seems like it bleeds. thank you question twelve from judy twedt, 24, denver, usa… should we have the right to choose where we live? now, that’s an interesting question. i like it!

we are just born. we're just born somewhere on planet earth and if we don’t want to stay there we go somewhere else. but then, when we go somewhere else, we're discriminated against. i arrived two days ago and on the 11th i must leave again because my visa lasts for only four days.

as a colombian, as a citizen of the world, i have no right to enter this paradise, the paradise of the first world, except for four days. well, i believe, of course, we should have the right to choose where we live. i mean, we live in a world where capital can move, where goods can move,

and i don’t understand why there is so much hysteria about people moving. for example, one time i wanted to go to dubai but, because i have a 1951 geneva convention passport, i was not allowed. and the reason for this, they told me, was because i didn’t belong anyway. everybody wishes to live in a place that is free of war. everybody wishes to live a harmonious existence

but some people can buy that and others cannot. some people can lay claim to that right and others are just not in a position to do so. yes, we all of us should have the right to live wherever we want, but all of us should be able to afford to do so. sometimes you have to move to be able to support your family now, if you’re crossing borders and you are not recognized by their state, does that mean you’re illegal?

by definitions of the state. but i don’t think that, as humans, we can really say another human is illegal. and the people who are moving are mostly doing so because they are desperate. they’re taking enormous risks look at the people who are arriving in the canary islands every week in makeshift boats, and they’re arriving on the beach by the hundreds. these people are absolutely desperate. otherwise they would not have left.

that’s not a fair choice. that’s not saying i’m going to choose where i’m going to live. you’re not going to choose to risk nine chances out of ten of drowning or being killed before you actually arrive. thatâ´s not a choice! you could also ask the question, shouldn’t we have the right to remain where we are? this is a very urgent question

for many, many people on this earth. like tibetan people, like myself as a tibetan, we don’t have this right. yes, we can live in our country but we can’t necessarily do what we want to. the day the law has effectively realized the possibility of granting this right without restriction to all people, on that day humanity will have done more

than pass over a boundary. it will have attained a degree of evolution fully to be desired by all cultures and nations. it’s important we can live where we want to. and everyone, i think, it’s important their nests. even the birds need their nests. human beings need their homes. question nineteen, from claire mackintosh,

25, brisbane, australia… what are the basic dignities that each human being deserves and why do we let so many people go without them? the basic dignity is human dignity, their pride, so they can have their head up, not head down. they don’t have to be scared of anything! maybe they are living in a remote village in some part of a developing country. so what? they should be standing straight...

we let so many people go without them so we can let other people do what they do. take lands. drop bombs. take water. control minds. all for ourselves and nothing for other people seems to have been, in every age of the world, the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.’

all for ourselves and nothing for other people. it’s adam smith who said that, adam smith, the father of capitalism. he knew that that was the tendency. all for ourselves and nothing for other people! indeed, i think that the universal declaration of human rights is what should be available for people throughout the world. we should not accept that anyone is denied those basic human rights,

the basic human right to live a decent life, to have access to food, shelter and education. it is inacceptable that in today’s world there are children who are dying of hunger. there are children who have no shelter… to prepare myself for this question, i went onto the internet, wikipedia, and i re-read the united nations universal declaration of human rights

and it made me cry. i just wept. it is so beautiful. let’s put it in every passport! my father was exterminated at the age of 37, my mother at the same age. my sisters were exterminated at the age of twelve and sixteen. i survived, and life has become very precious for me and i assume that it is also precious for every human being on this on this planet.

and yet it is often taken away, for wrong reasons… we teach our children that our lives are worth more than other people’s lives, outsiders, people... with a different color skin than ours, people that have less than we do, people that don’t speak the language that we do. people... the other. the other people.

what happens oftentimes is that those people are really seen as them and not us, and there’s not much attention paid to or much concern for the basic rights and dignities of those people. but i think you have to think about what ‘we’ means in this question. who are ‘we’ and who are ‘they’? a baby, when they cry, you cannot distinguish if it’s a boy, a girl, what nationality,

what religion is the religion of the mother? it’s only one voice. don’t forget this! it’s only one sound. we must remember this. i guess if people really saw each other as their brother and really could imagine that each person out there was their child or their relative, it would be really different, if we could really open our hearts that wide. everyone can gain human dignity for themselves.

before this, though, one must leave behind the self-imposed oppression of politics, ideology, religion and nationalistic narrow-mindedness. i come… i come from the jungle where i lived for the most part of my life with tribes and where the question of freedom

is much more meaningful than it is here. i have never known more free beings than them, the indigenous people. no, i never have. do you believe this project can move something? i knew it from the moment that this murmur first began, and this babble. it sent a shiver down my spine

and i realized that something will come of this, that it's helping. i was reminded a little of 'wings of desire'. there are these angels hearing all these voices. there's this similar kind of murmur the whole time. and then this murmur was here, only it was real. all these people really were thinking aloud. oh, hey! did you see bianca? i think she’s over there.

there she is! i think she showed up late. if you can do me a big favor? don’t move it when i’m talking because that immediately… you know, if you can do it before or after or when i stop talking, because if you do it when i do, my concentration… i do it when i get the notes from the others… question twenty-eight from andrew,

22, frankfurt, germany… what if all chinese people want a car? this question is a bit racist. why not? everybody needs a car. why do you talk only about the chinese and when you go to america, there every family has more than three cars? why chinese? everybody wants a car. everybody.

i mean, there are a lot of italian, french and german people who don’t have a car and they want a car. what if all indians want a car? what if all africans want a car? if all chinese people want to have a car, assuming that they would want to drive the most powerful, the biggest and the fastest cars, then the skies above us would darken. not enough roads, many accidents,

not enough car parking space, too much pollution. then all german people must be turned into automobile workers to produce cars for the chinese until all the germans are exhausted. it's an impossible story. the car of today in the wealthy world utilizes 2-3% of the energy in the gas tank

to actually move the driver. the rest is lost in moving the weight of the frame and the weight of the engine, lost in heat and friction. we’ve devised an enormously sophisticated set of very badly designed vehicles just to move one person from one place to another. petroleum prices will continue their sharp upward movement

and economic chaos in the west at the most or, at the very least, the grim, inevitable realization that something has to be done about the excess consumption of these fossil fuels in the united states of america and other western countries is going to be impressed upon people’s consciousness. china, for a long time, was a nation of bicycles.

i’m encouraged that chinese automakers are looking at the ecological impacts of the cars and working very hard and thinking about electric cars. china has a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility to industrialize in a way that works for its people and for its environment and for the world.

it’s clear that what is behind the question is not so much the chinese people, but a metaphor for a situation in which it’s unsustainable, clearly. we cannot ask of them what we’re not prepared to do ourselves! and what we need to do is we should learn from our mistakes, from the way we have lived,

from the irrational and the irresponsible way in which we have lived our life. the problem is not how many people want a car but that the door to human desires has been opened interminably. how can we close the door again after opening it to our infinite, possessive desires? everything ok? it’s ok. it’s ok…

how you doing? ah good. a little bit exhausted. hey. wow! ow! ow! that’s too much? yeah! this is just so cool to be here doing this. is it? yeah, this is where the nazis burned the books. oh, now i get it. that stack of books is there because of that. jesus, i didn’t realize that…

willem. hey! hey, how many questions do you have now? after all these! you want to know…? so many questions… i'm speaking… i'm speaking so much about all the problems. i'm setting it all on fire! am i doing ok? question thirty-three is from

the new york-based novelist, siri hustvedt, who asks… i’m very curious to know, to find out how consumer culture actually influences the personalities, the ways people live, the way they think, inside themselves, in a given culture… how it becomes part of us, and what it means to be able to resist that visual and verbal culture....

it seems to me, is alway reducing and simplifying reality into something that can be easily bought and sold? i think... consumer...consumer culture... it functions to keep creating a desire in the society, in the community, that here is something new, here is something better, here is something more…

man needs nothing. he needs only himself. he needs love. there are enough coffee pots in the world. there are enough gadgets surrounding us. there are enough chairs! use one of the many hundreds that are already there and then put your extra energy into developing those things that really matter.

all this forms part of a culture of prostitution. our values have become prostituted and humanity itself just a big prostitution machine. we created monsters… monsters of agricultural development. mcdonald’s cows are killed and there’s no ceremony of killing the animal. there’s no honoring, thanking the animal for providing the food for us.

so when there’s no ceremony, the food we eat becomes bad. and guess what? where mcdonald’s is eaten, people become sick. what did you expect? there’s no ceremony! the most powerful people on the face of the planet are the ones who can affect the most minds, who can influence human behavior and social movements, and the way in which societies view themselves, see themselves,

the way they walk, the way they talk, things they eat, they drink and such like. and it’s all a matter of economics. it's a model that is destroying us. it's a model that is consuming us. what we really need to look at is the free market itself and see how we can really bring in the whole aspect of ethics.

wealth in order to share, to care, and to live happily with oneself and others. and the deepest, the best wealth is how to serve others. question thirty-seven is from tom henze, 30, berlin, germany… does our wealth depend on the third world being poor? the expression 'third world' is truly an arrogant claim. it is not a third world but it is also a world that has developed in a different way

or that has stood back from development. but it is not the third world. what then would the first world be? what is that definition of the third world anyway? is there a first world, a second world and a third world? not really. one world? not doing so well? humans fucking it up? i mean, if our wealth depends on the third world being poor,

then we’re in trouble, we’re in trouble… they started first by taking the gold away. but gold for indigenous people didn’t have the same value as it did for capitalists. africa has been the cradle of mankind and i stand very clearly and say that africa is also going to be the deathbed of capitalism. oh plundered africa…

africa, terrible africa. it's impossible to talk about africa without feeling… without feeling our hearts twinge. those who are well fed never understand what it feels like to be hungry. a nigerian chief once said: ‘if you will not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you.’ so if you want global peace we have to talk about

equitable distribution. we also have to understand that all of the resources are shared by all and they are first of all for those in need. real property is property by need. it comes about through need. when i need a glass of water, then it is mine by right of need.

fair! ‘fair’ is not a word that you hear in economics too much. there is a connection that we have to make as to the poverty of the people, the wealth of the land, and be observant as to where this wealth is going. what i believe globalization is really about is forming global family, moving out of what i call a juvenile species mode of hostile competition

and into a more mature mode of cooperation. this has happened to many species all through evolution and it’s our turn now as humans to do this. i make it very simple. one is... joining in the generosity of the divine, which is a power of giving. all life is given to us. and those who do that are ‘for giving’. and then, if your life is centered around getting, then you’re joining in the culture of ‘for getting'.

so the choice is to be part of ‘for getting’ and being forgotten or part of ‘for giving’ and being forgiven. i like that! that’s great. he said it for me, my neighbor - repeat. repeat. yes. can you come and sit in my seat and say it for me? i would like it if we had more interaction in this process. i’m enlivened by sharing with somebody. my brain doesn’t, my brain doesn’t…â 

i mean, this! talking to you… talking to you! hi sweetheart. hi! how are you? are you having fun, baby? are you having fun? - yeah. because you’re so smart. you’re such a genius. answers just roll off your tongue. i don’t know, i don’t know, i don’t know! i guess we’re part of a big experiment.

you know, it’s not about the questions. this is about us. they’re doing something to us here. go ahead. while you were giving your answers to that last question, i was walking through the circle and i was able to see all your faces, hear your voices, see your expressions. and it was deeply moving for me to see everything that i saw as i walked through the circle.

it’s such a diverse group that we have here. we’re our own united nations! i saw people from africa, from asia, australia, from europe and the americas. and it’s beautiful that we’re all together here investing in the future. question forty-one from adrienn meszaros, 30, budapest, hungary… is there a modern version of colonialism?

yes. yes, there is a modern version of colonialism, and it’s got a name. it’s called debt. it is called debt, followed by the structural adjustment policies imposed by the world bank and the international monetary fund. a lot of this money coming to developing countries is actually used to control the sovereignty of our own governments, of our own people…

the bank and the fund move in and they say, ‘ok, if you’re going to pay back your debt and you must pay back your debt', then you have to put interest rates way, way up... that makes it harder for businesses to borrow and to employ people. you’ve got to privatize everything in sight, so that gives big opportunities to foreign companies and local elites

to buy up all of the previously public companies. the united states of america was itself built on the decimation of an entire people. europe has been built on sucking out the congo, on sucking out the gold and diamonds of south africa. slavery was about the exploitation of raw materials. today it's about oil. today it's about diamonds. today it's about all the minerals and primary resources.

the countries… the latin american countries continue to suffer exploitation, the exploitation of their resources. all of these policies have been very beneficial to a tiny minority of the people in these countries. just like vampires. they are vampires! they use the energy, the strength and the lives of others for their own economic prosperity.

it’s modern economic colonialism based on globalization, but its structure is almost exactly the same as it has been for four or five hundred years. it’s better than colonialism because it doesn’t need an army. it doesn’t need an administration. it doesn’t cost you anything as the person intervening, the state, the powers intervening… 'we are children of a world that has enough for everyone.

but so many remain hungry while so few are well fed. one will eat, the other suffer. this is how it's always been. other nations must be poor so that rich ones can be rich.' and this is a really ideal system because it isn’t even very visible. colonialism is visible. people think this is rotten. there’s pictures taken. but debt is invisible,

and it works just as well, even more efficiently. i don’t like to be sitting here as an american talking about this, but this is the underbelly of the real world that we live in. it’s very real. it has caused enormous misery, and we have to know what’s going on in our world in order to change it. there must be some democratic forms of life and forms of organization that can sidestep all imperial

and colonial forms of subjugation. that’s the great question of the 21st century! question forty-five from katharina, 24, germany… why do we still believe more in nationality than in humanity? it is by the conditioning of mind that we are trained, trained, trained all the time, that we are part of a national identity. that is how we see it. and, within a nation, again it gets down

to smaller and smaller and smaller identities… and so we’re fearful. we have been put into a framework to protect ourselves. we’re so insecure. we do not know who is for us and who is not for us and that has destroyed humanity. let me give you an example. in iraq now my country iraq,

most people cling to and trust only their own people or their neighbors or others from their city. before, we did not ask who a person was, where they came from, from which city, from which tribe or family. we would be friendly, that's all.

it is security, psychological security, that enables people to feel an expanded sense of self, that enables them to respect difference. it is when people feel frightened, scared, cut off, that intolerance grows, and in the nation states today people are being manipulated through the mass media to learn to hate the other whom they have never met. we live in a world where we have been conditioned to be tribal,

to be nativist, to be nationalist. of course, it’s important to understand that nationalism is really fanaticism. i believe that within each of us there is a racist dictator. i’m convinced of this. because to us the family is closer than the clan,

the clan is closer than the tribe, the tribe is closer than the nation, the nation is closer than humanity. i, for one, don’t believe in nationality at all and i think more and more of us in the 21st century, children of the world of possibility, children of the future tense perhaps, live in the passageways between nations, between cultures and between categories

outside the traditional definitions, and our affiliations are not to nations or to the traditional order but to something beyond that. i believe that, to a certain extent, the concept of nationality is beginning to erode as we turn into a kind of genuinely transnational people. sometimes the worst enemy is our own perception. question forty-eight from glen, cape town, south africa...

how do we stop our governments from going to war? i come from the land where there has never been any war, so i do not know anything about war but i do know the suffering you people have experienced. me? i come from the land of peace, where nothing but peace has been in existence, where no one is fearing being shot, where no one is aiming at you, where no one fights for the land.

we go to war: you, me, us. governments don’t go to war. governments send us to war. we pay the price, and the price that we pay is not only physical. the price that we pay is psychic. we lose our moral groundedness. we lose ourselves. it’s really a shame.

the big powers should be ashamed of what they are doing with the civilization. killing them? i’m a survivor of war in bosnia and, for three and a half years of my childhood, millions of bombs exploded in my city. and to hear a bomb explode is an experience that can’t be explained or described because you feel it in your body.

i remember, just my whole body reacting to such loudness and destruction, and my heart would jump every time, millions of times, and there were times when it felt like my heart could no longer take it and it would just burst into millions of pieces. …we human beings are nothing but collateral damage. we’re not talking about numbers. we’re not talking about lives destroyed.

we’re not talking about families destroyed, but we’re basically talking about collateral damage. it’s just numbing. because we’re not seeing a face. it is distant! the political process has lost touch with the reality, the fact that war is only about economics. it is incomprehensible how, day after day, the world powers can spend so much money on death.

we’ve lost our connection to our responsibility for what our governments do. and we get lost in our powerlessness, and we think we can change it in a few moments. you know, people marched against the war and it didn’t work and so everyone goes home and starts to live their lives again, while what they were in the streets about originally has become a greater nightmare than they could have ever imagined. but why was it horrible when they first entered the streets

and not so horrible now that no one’s in the streets? how you stop the government is a very difficult question. the only way, i think, one could do it is by overthrowing that government, by a revolution! but then, of course, the notion of revolution in our time is so archaic, so dã©passã©. we don’t think in those terms anymore, but that is the only way we stop a government.

the most important step that all the women of the world can take is not to give their children away to be turned into soldiers, to be turned into killers. i come from a region where we all started to hate each other and to kill each other savagely as if the others were no longer human.

we have these disasters in which, in a very short period of time, a massive amount of destructive power can be brought to bear. the governments doing this must be replaced. the leaders individually responsible for these actions must be held to justice. we’ve seen a wonderful trend in the past twenty years with general pinochet and a number of others whose actions led to genocide,

led to disappearances, led to death, being brought before world courts of justice. so we must move to a world in which every leader is held accountable in the same way, with the feeling that their actions will be judged. as a human being, i feel that, what is today’s war? we are killing each other and it’s something that is taking peace away from a lot of people.

question fifty-six from moise marabout, 23, agadez, niger… why is there no peace in the middle east yet? this question is extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely close to my heart as an israeli. i can only say that, the way i see it, there's no peace in the middle east because of the vanity of israel. as long as justice is not addressed,

we will not have peace. peace is not a moment between conflicts but a continuous state one lives and strives for. the only peace now is false peace, peace based upon lack of trust. oil. well, i believe the main reason is because of fanatics on both sides.

on both sides. you can't ignore the fact that we are deeply scarred as a people, but instead of trying to heal ourselves by recognizing that we simply must use compassion, love and forgiveness, and engage in dialogue eye to eye, we keep hiding behind our supposed righteousness but there is no such thing.

and we feel like we're allowed to do anything because of what was done to us. i believe the palestinian and the israeli would like to be able to coexist together. the whole argument that we were here first and they were here first is totally irrelevant. we are all visitors on this planet. we are all strangers walking on borrowed land. once the palestinian and the israeli will live equally

with self-respect, with respect to each other and solidarity, it will echo to the entire world! it will stop these stupid battles that the state decides of the culture between the west and the muslims. it's such a bullshit thing! in israel and palestine we can prove that this together can be the most beautiful culture one can have.

i know i sound like a dreamer… in my country, in my community, we normally say… …which means, ‘where two bulls fight, normally the grass is the one that suffers.’ question sixty-one from wolfgang jost, 23, berlin, germany… why is an iranian nuclear bomb supposed to be more dangerous than an american, israeli or french?

let us not ask this question in america or france or in israel! but let us ask this question in algeria or in iraq or in lebanon or in palestine… or even japan! august 7, 1945: america dropped a bomb on hiroshima. some hundred thousand people have been killed, children in school, primary school, civilians, and the killing went on for years

because of the atomic consequences. who has been using really those bombs, practically? until now, just usa. iran pledges, promises, to destroy israel. and there is no doubt that if iran were to have a nuclear bomb, it would keep its promise. israel? israel’s bombs? where do they come from? we make those.

we sell them to israel. the american, israeli, and french bombs should be eliminated. france and the united states have a legal obligation to do so under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and israel has a security interest in resolving the conflicts in its region through non-violent means. because eventually, as long as some have nuclear weapons, others will want them. as long as they want them, at some point they will get them.

and as long as they exist, it's inevitable that, either through accident or design, they will be used. any use is catastrophic. therefore they must be universally abolished. why do we have to have a nuclear bomb? if we were to start all over again, no one would say that it was a good idea to build nuclear bombs. insane! who would we be

if we didn’t live in the shadow of the atomic bomb? i think we would be very different people. would we live in this sense of fear that is manipulated by external powers so easily? would we still be allowing the level of violence that we allow? i don’t think so. i think we could have found some wonderful ways to deal with conflict that wasn’t violence. and i do think that who we are in the 21st century has

deeply been affected by technological advances in weaponry. and i don’t think we fully understand what that’s done to our humanity, what it’s done even just to american citizens to have used the atomic bomb. i think that contributes to how violent our own inner nature is. it has contributed to the level of depression, the level of addictions,

the disconnect and denial… yeah, i think it would be a very different world, a very different world, certainly one more caring and generous and compassionate and wise. question sixty-two is from the writer and activist arundhati roy… between non-violent resistance and armed struggle, where do we go?

what is effective? what is the right thing to do? do we need a biodiversity of resistance? arundhati, if you could sit here and hear this murmur and see all these faces… i like the name ‘biodiversity of resistance’. this is a great question and i’m not sure that we are the ones to answer. yeah, i would prefer to say i prefer a non-violent resistance.

yeah, i wish this resistance would make it. but we are not the ones to choose the resistance of the oppressed. we certainly need a variety of forms of resistance. armed struggle must be the last resort. it must be something that we are very, very mindful of and oftentimes suspicious of, and yet there are conditions under which armed struggle becomes necessary.

for the most part, we must deploy all forms of non-violent resistance and struggle, understanding non-violence as something active, as something that’s vital and vibrant, something that requires our sacrifice, our suffering, something that allows us to accent the best in ourselves and the best in others. the struggle for change in every single place where struggle has been successful

has employed what you term a 'biodiversity' of tactics, from non-violent resistance to political organizing, to speechmaking to armed struggle: legitimate armed struggle based on the principles laid down by, among others, the african national congress and che guevara, to distinguish between mere terrorism, violence for its own sake with unnecessary casualties,

and armed struggle that is undertaken to mobilize and protect an oppressed majority. as someone who is an organizer, whatever decision i make and whatever movement i am engaged with, i always have to ask myself: can i live with the impact of the tactic that i am going to use? it never happens when change is taking place that it does not affect others.

always, there are victims of change. ask yourself, how much are you willing to give? how convinced are you of your goal? and then you can choose the weapons. it could be a pen, could be a gun, could be a camera, could be a piece of paper, could be a knife, could be your life. i think that we can accomplish a lot with non-violent resistance, but are there times when armed struggles are justified?

are revolutions justified? i think, concentrating on resistance, there’s something wrong with that. we’re not just concentrating on resistance. we have to create attractance. we have to create a new paradigm, which is attractive to go to. if everyone is blooming in their own beauty... imagine that!

everyone sitting here in the circle at the table blooming their own beauty. yes, arundhati, we need a biodiversity on earth. it’s everyone’s language, everyone’s culture, everyone’s spiritual understanding. at this very moment, you can see around me a circle that represents a global community where, clearly, there is diversity, diversity of thought,

diversity of ideas, diversity of concepts. is anyone there listening to us? at some other time? it might be catapulted into the world like a discus. super. yes? sounds good? that's it? beautiful.

can you take your head off, so you can really feel what’s going on around you, you can really sense what’s going on around you? or are you still in your mind, thinking? our friend the camera. guys, whatever you hear from me, if there is one smart thing, take it and the rest please erase it… you also went to the center. how was the center?

it was really good. it’s amazing because you can click onto the different… any camera you can go. question seventy-five from sara francis, 35, dublin, ireland… what does courage mean now? courage is something i appreciate about a person so much. i mean, people...i salute the people who have courage! courage is something to make you continue to live day to day life.

courage is somethingâ€¦â  step by step, you go up! it takes courage to be a human being. it takes courage to be! solitude is courage. hermetics. total neutrality. to be unsure of yourself is courage.

courage is so many things. courage is the courage of aung san suu kyi, who is being kept incommunicado under house arrest. courage is the courage of the young students in tiananmen square. we risk our lives in different ways… well, i’ve never really risked mine so i can’t say. i’ve never lived in truly dangerous situations the way so many people around this table have done.

to put it quite simply, i am willing to die. yes, i’m willing to die. i have the courage really to take the risk to die to defend who i am and what i’m doing. well, i mean, we're sitting in a square where the adventure of nazism took over this beautiful country of germany, and distorted the laws of justice in a most gross and horrific fashion.

imagine the courage of people that broke the laws of the state to honor the higher law of caring for human life. you don't know that chinese prison labor camps are similar to soviet gulags or german concentration camps. about 40 or 50 million people have lost their lives there. i was there for 19 years

before i made it to america. i didn’t want to talk about this but finally i have because we have only one lifetime. what would argentina have been without the courage of the mothers of the plaza de mayo, who stood up to the dictatorships and terrorism of the generals videla, massera and agosti who 'disappeared' thousands of people

by throwing them into the sea. what would have become of us without the lesson in courage taught by these mothers who stood before the casa de gobierno every thursday with the portraits of their disappeared sons? courage means to understand that these powers are not invincible,

as is being demonstrated by people in the world who, with courage and indignation, have managed to expel transnationals from their countries, have managed to overthrow and topple governments. courage has everything to do with looking the future into the face, always acknowledging an element of the unknown, but believing that if one sacrifices,

if one suffers, if one takes a risk and allows oneself to be vulnerable, that one can still make a difference. we should keep this in mind and it should make us all the more radical and motivated as we don't risk our lives, but just a little boredom sometimes, a little ostracism, a little of our well-being.

courage is also not just about changing this world. it is really also about ensuring that the present day world does not change me. question seventy-eight from nancy clemons, 57, cameron, missouri, usa… what can i do, and tell others to do, to stop global warming? please begin. this is a big question! quite simply,

future generations will not be able to understand our delirium of destruction. there’s nothing you and i, we, can do to stop the global warming. the ice is going to carry on melting away. and now the matter is: who will live? who will live with a life worth living? we know that many will perish. we know that many more will barely survive with no life. few will have a life worthy of living.

i pray to the great one and ask him again and pray again that you and me will be able to have a life worthy of living. because, no matter what you and i do today, there’s no way of returning. the ice will carry on melting until it has ceased to exist. actually, we can’t stop global warming any more. as an evolution biologist i firmly believe that we cannot stop it any more. however, we can slow it down.

global warming is not about science. it’s about experience. science will give us the facts. it will give us the data and it may move us to act. but, ultimately, how we move each other to act is a question more of the heart than it is of the head. well, i guess we are all part of the problem, but we all can be part of the solution. i could make a contribution if i stop driving my car.

transitions to biofuels and even large-scale wind and solar would probably not be able to be sufficient to sustain an industrial system at the present scale... so the answer is powering down. right now, hundreds of communities are starting to take these steps. they are engaged in what is called ‘power down’. they are looking at how they

as communities can take steps right now to localize their economies. they realize that, if oil prices shoot up or if there’s scarcity, they may find the supermarket shelves empty. they may find that they won't be able to heat their homes, that they won't be able to travel… we must talk about how to control our cheap desire. i think something we can all do worldwide

is to shame and ridicule the people who are polluting. there won't be any state of emergency. we have been for thousands of years in a state of emergency. we delude ourselves into thinking that these problems are the creation of our nation, government, religion or race, but this is not so. the problem lies within

each individual's consciousness. i don’t believe in humankind! no, i don’t. i tell you i’m embarrassed to belong to that race. and at the same time, i’m fascinated by it. la belle et la bestia. question eighty-three is from the photographer sebastiã£o salgado of aimorã©s, minas gerais, brazil… can a person be perceptive enough to see our planet

in a way that tells them that they too are part of nature? we all start seeing clearer and clearer the damage done. we see it at our doorsteps! we see and feel the climate changes, the droughts and the flooding, the storms and the heat. we breathe the bad air. we suffer from allergies. we miss the taste in food.

we watch the forest die, the animals and plants endangered and disappearing. and more and more of us understand that the planet does not belong to us but that we belong to the earth. since the 20th century, when man was able to escape gravity and move into space, we’ve had pictures, beautiful pictures of our planet, that little blueish globe floating through the universe.

and, as you look at those pictures, you become almost sentimental and think: i live on this planet, i am part of this planet. go out in a field and lie down at night and look down into the stars. pretend that gravity has you glued to the bottom of the planet because how do you know which way is up? the reason why little children love animals is because we have co-evolved with the rest of creation.

we have lived close to nature for almost all our evolution. this little blip of modern life cut off from the earth, cut off from other animals and cut off from one another has only happened because we've also become cut off from ourselves, from our own hearts, from our own bodies… nature makes the most sophisticated materials on the planet out of carbohydrates. we too can learn how to do that.

but we have thought ourselves to be superior to nature. we haven’t looked at her four and a half billion years of experience in incredible technologies. take a wasps’ nest! it’s a building that hangs from a single thread made of material so light that it can hold three hundred times its own weight in inhabitants. can we learn to make buildings like that? can we grow skyscrapers from the bottom up

the way a reed grows, by building new cells at the bottom of it and pushing itself upward? we have so much to learn from nature. it is by our own free choice, by our personal efforts, that we will achieve balance with nature and so become like all of nature. then we will feel the eternity, perfection and harmony

that is everywhere in nature except within our own. everything we eat, everything we wear, all our houses, all our objects come from the living earth, so learning how to live from that earth in a way that is sustainable is not utopian, is not a dream. what stands between us and that possibility is the idea that it can't be done, the idea that they are too powerful,

that corporations can't change, the idea that people don't want change, the idea that all of this comes from innate human greed, that it comes from overpopulation. the planet is too crowded, therefore it's not possible to provide for people. all of these are myths that need to be reassessed, assumptions that need to be rethought. so, question ninety-six comes from miraj khaled, 30, from dhaka, bangladesh…

‘what is god’s religion?’, he asks. what is god’s religion? please begin. i loved that question when i saw it because i think this is very perceptive! which god? which religion? what god? whose god? whichever way we want to take it, we must respect how others see this word ‘god’.

god is a way of defining certain archetypes, certain expectations and objectives. god is is-ness. god is spirit! god is not religion. god doesn’t have a religion. god doesn't exist. the religion of my goddess

is reflected in every corner of the world, in every leaf, in every speck of dirt, in every flower. no, i don’t believe that god has a religion. i think that religion is a profoundly human phenomenon. and when we talk about god having a religion, you can rest assured that we’re talking about some human construction, some human creation… what we project onto him.

i am of love. i am of the universe. i am god in action. there is no god. god is a symbol for something that we can't express in words and that's also why there's no god's religion. god, we have to imagine, is something that is not only unknown to us

but is also beyond our knowledge, that has no quality of being known. it's like when we ask the question, what is the color of a circle? is it red, green or blue? no, it's neither blue nor red nor green. it's also not colorless. the question about the color of the circle is absurd because a circle knows no color.

many people are unwilling to see this. they take a pen out of their pocket, draw a circle on a piece of paper and say, 'look, this circle is blue.' yes, the circle drawn by them is blue but the color comes from a pen and not from the circle. the color of the pen is the religion with which we express the divinity,

but we cannot draw the circle ourselves. it is something that has nothing to do with colors and there are as many religions as there are colors with which i can draw a circle. i really like that one! i'm someone that believes in god, but all i know about god is, there is a god and it isn't me. that's all i've been able to figure out so far. don’t you think god is in you as well?

oh absolutely. absolutely. most of my whole thing with spirituality is i'm a recovering heroin addict. i haven’t met god yet. if i meet him one day, then i will ask him the questions. thank you, too. last one! question…

one hundred! i didn't think we'd make it! …from keith dierkx, 48, piedmont, california, usa… what are the myths that we need to create to change the world for the better? creation stories are part of every culture in human history and they were usually told by some kind of a priesthood. but now science tells the creation story. it has been elevated to that status of priesthood

that gets to tell the big story to the culture. what story is it telling us? that we live in a non-living, purposeless universe running down by entropy. oh! how cheery is that for a creation story! and then we add in that evolution on this planet is about the survival of the fittest, about an endless competition in scarcity, and that you have to get what you can while you can

and beat the other guy to it. now, this is a totally depressing creation story, a universe running down meaninglessly, you’re caught in it, you’re stuck in an endless struggle in scarcity. this is a terrible story to be telling people and it does not fit the scientific facts! we know that every force in nature has an opposite. if there’s entropy, there has to be syntropy.

we know that in evolution there’s a tremendous amount of cooperation. in fact, i’d say there’s a great story in the maturation cycle of evolving species where they first are young and grabby and multiply as fast as they can, take all the territory they can, bump off their competitors, act like capitalists! and then they discover, bit by bit, the advantages of cooperation. and, as they do so,

they build bigger and bigger cooperative enterprises and find out that their economies are cheaper, more effective, more efficient, work for everybody and you get the evolution of rainforests and human bodies made of a hundred trillion cells, working in complete cooperation even though they’re so very diverse. this is a story we need to tell in the world, a great new story

of the human species growing up into global family, doing win-win economics and making a better world for all. human beings are appreciators, not just observers but appreciators, participants, even co-creators of the cosmic process. the whole world is deeply entangled, all the living organisms, all the parts of the universe.

in fact, the whole universe is living, including the electrons and the protons and everything. they are all organisms! they all have a history and they are all entangled so deeply, intimately interconnected that you cannot separate them. and, at any moment, this entangled universe is creating and recreating itself anew. that i think is the evolution of the cosmos,

the evolution of all things in it from atoms to humans to galaxies. that is the objective. that is the ambition. that is the ultimate aim of divine creativity. that’s as far as we can come as human beings to understand it. i believe in a measure of humility and in a measure of humanity and in an avowal of beauty as an antidote to all the brutality

and cruelty of the world. that the sacred lives in nature, not only in the supernatural but also in the beauty of nature. that human beings are metaphysical animals and always will be because of their mortality. the human is the only animal that knows it must die. this is the source of the mystery, of the unending mystery of human existence.

it would have to do with the marrying of the mind, the soul, and this corporeal little covering that is supposed to be the body. the marriage of all those, if it indeed be that, can only be powered by positivity. and if the positivity then manages to give birth to that marriage…? that all the troubles of the earth will be done if the human mind has got the space in which

to breathe, to live, to pulse, to flow… who is going to ever listen to all of this? because we’re one hundred and twelve, there’s a hundred questions. that’s eleven thousand two hundred. let’s say… only two minutes each time. that’s twenty-two thousand minutes. you know what that is? that’s three hundred days!