Hello again.
I have been asked by the organizers of this meeting to talk about the urgent need to restore the fabric of our social existence, resuscitate our communities, and resurrect them from the miserable status of decline and free fall into the hands of the oligarchs, the plutocrats, and the barons of wealth and power worldwide.
To answer this very essential and existential question, I have chosen to talk about healthcare, education, journalism, and fact-checking as human rights and democratic safeguards to protect our existence as free human beings and to revive our struggling societies, which have been under a relentless assault of neoliberalism and free markets ideology; along with its frenzy to privatise every domain of our interactions within the societal space, turning each one of them into a specialised profit making machine in the service of the wealthy and powerful global class and their tentacles; while rendering everything that cannot be priced, bought and sold within the market economies worthless, marginalised and deprived.
Several societal interaction arenas should be returned to the public sphere with public control and funding, rather than being left to private ownership. These include healthcare, education, journalism, and fact checking. This is not because of any ideological righteousness of social democracy or regulated capitalism. It is simply because these domains cannot be driven by the profit motive or the principle of profit making, regardless of any collateral damage the profit-making process may cause to human lives, nature, or other aspects of life.
Healthcare should not be left to private enterprises, shareholders, and managers who prioritize spreadsheets, costs, and gains over the meaning of providing true care and alleviating the pain and suffering of the ill and infirm. Access to an adequate healthcare and a decent level of education are basic human rights, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948.
Journalism is under attack by wealthy influential groups who can manufacture fake journalists to articulate propaganda to serve their interests. Journalism is crucial for the public to defend their rights, know the truth, and hold the powerful sectors in the society accountable. It should be fulfilled through collectively owned enterprises funded by public money, not by advertisers, shareholders, or political factions. Journalists should not have to choose between telling the truth and preserving the interests of the wealthy owners of the enterprise they work for, along with the powerful advertisers who maintain the cash flow into this enterprise.
Fact checking is especially important in the era of artificial intelligence, which has the unlimited capability to invent false facts, deep fakes, and alternative truths and spread them in the cyber space like an infectious virus through its invisible armies of bots and the like. The responsibility of fact checking should be entrusted to neutral bodies, such as teachers and university educators, who are tasked with sacred task of educating the future generations. This could be an additional job for this group funded by the public, as the educational part of their duties is diminishing exponentially with the rise of automation and AI technologies.
Democracy is in recession, and the well-being, health, and sanity of the world are declining. Anxiety, depression and other mental disorders affect about one billion people of the global population, which means that one in eight people worldwide is suffering mentally according to the “World Mental Health Report” released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2022.
The public should control certain levers to protect their present and build a dignified existence for themselves and the future generations. Otherwise, humanity is heading down a dark path that could extinguish our hopes for a better life and turn the future into a nightmarish prospect.